You tagged Casey Roberts

Long conversation late last night with a friend on the East Coast trying to get a grip on controversies that orbit recent events in the news. The violence. The repetition of unimaginable crimes. The confusion. The subjects… the topics…

It’s not possible to simply discuss what we said, thought, saw… but we got past some barriers that have long stymied us, and were able to notice some paths forward… some of them too radical to recommend or even outline…

Part of what we saw was that the well-entrenched frameworks we are habituated to apply … are abjectly insufficient to encompass or change the phenomenon that concern us. New narratives, new focuses, new ways of thinking and relating… must emerge.

One simple thing we saw, that I want to record, is this:

When human beings reduce each other to »categories for the sake of denigration, disaster ensues. This inclination, which can be intentionally catalyzed and fueled by various culprits, including the media, inculcates violence and hatred in those in whom it takes root.

At the same time, there are (positive) aspects of categorization that can be a desirable ingredient in our understandings of and relations with the diversity natural to all people.

There’s a process at play in our cultures that is as invasive as it is contagious, and it’s a game where people are encouraged to project deleterious qualities onto »populations. The corporations that own the media profit from this, ‘advertisers’ profit from this. Politicians use it to incite war and factionation in our population. The resulting divisions can be opportunistically parlayed into a wide array of ‘benefits’ for those who foment them.

And when we fail to form collectives that value the intrinsic sanctity and diversity of human life, when we fail to »form collectives at all, but instead subscribe to things that mimic them while actually breeding various diseases that masquerade as cultures… then something malignant arises in the void where our mutuality and active awareness would have instead nourished our unity.

We all become victims of the result. And, at least indirectly, complicit in the tragedies that therefrom ensue.

And so I know a simple thing: that disease-ridden void that seethes in the place that our humane, intelligent, compassionate agreement to enact societies worthy of the title might otherwise thrive…

… must be evicted. Forever.