We cannot hope to create a viable community by allowing our least healthy beliefs to drive our behaviors. For example, one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, succumbed to the temptations that were to infect the entire national organism. He could have chosen differently, but back then (as today) he was in a community where the dominant narrative dictated his beliefs, attitudes and values. It would have been asking a great deal to expect him to swim against the dominant current of fear and greed as the new nation was choosing its narrative. However, it is time to acknowledge the Truth of what happened no matter how painful that admission might be for Americans today. Failing in that, we betray the essence of who we truly are and block the path to a sustainable future.
To heal our very souls we must all find the courage to face the reality of the present and the past as Caroline Williams did when she wrote: “I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes [the collective identity] of the Old South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing through my veins. My great grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named.”[i]
It was taboo as late as 1972 to bring up the following subject by all but the most courageous scholars: “Did Thomas Jefferson widowed at thirty-nine, take as a mistress Sally Hemings, the beautiful quadroon half-sister of his late wife?”[ii] The worldview of the Confederate South condoned rape, incest and adultery but not without catastrophic damage to the psyche of that community, which is still trying to vomit up that poison today.
Jefferson anticipated another source of self-destruction inherent in the belief that enslaved Africans were the other. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”[iii] Fear of the other, although clearly an illusion, is the source of much of the violence in the Global Village today.
“If, for example, Thomas Jefferson could not support emancipation despite seeing the basic injustice of slavery, it was in part because of self-interest, in part because of fear (‘We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.’) and in part because he couldn’t imagine black people as members of the polity on account of their experience as slaves. It marked them as inferior and, in some sense, fundamentally unfree. ‘This unfortunate difference in color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people,’ Jefferson notoriously wrote in his 1785 book, ‘Notes on the State of Virginia.’”[iv]
In the year 2020 virtually no progress has been made in creating consciousness and compassion among our species, despite the fact that any person with an open heart can see that all human beings are, in every fundamental respect, exactly like every other human being.
“President Trump has both encouraged anti-lockdown protestors–using language of liberation to do so–and issued an executive order bringing meatpacking facilities under the purview of the Defense Production Act, which would allow him to force meatpacking workers–again, a disproportionately black and brown work force–back on the job despite the threat of infection, illness and death.”[v]
Continuing to deny Reality, substituting lies for the Truth and keeping self-destructive behaviors an open secret, creates an unimaginable amount of pain and suffering in our families, neighborhoods and nations. As long as we choose duality as the basis for our narrative rather than Oneness, then unfortunately peace of mind, true happiness and joy will remain out of reach.
“And in the particular context of a deadly pandemic, the demand to be free of mutual obligations is, in essence, a demand to be free to die and threaten those around you with illness and death.”[vi]
Needless to say, such a community is not sustainable.
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Supplemental Reading: Denial, Lies and Secrets, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#11 Rape-Colored Skin
[i] Williams, Caroline Randall. “My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” The New York Times. June 28, 2020, p. 4.
[ii] Brodie, Fawn. “The Great Jefferson Taboo.” American Heritage. June 1972, p. 49.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Bouie, Jamelle. “A Twisted Conception of Liberty.” The New York Times. May 10,
2020, p. 9.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
