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We Are Wasting Time...

When a newly minted tragic event happens today people do not react in the same way humanity might’ve, even a few decades ago.

Before I dig into this issue today, I want to say that I do not mean this, at all, as a personal indictment of any singular person / individual. This is absolutely in no way shape or form, a personal issue, which will be the point of this topic. That said, it may also make people feel uncomfortable, because we are unused to accepting responsibility for our actions, even when we truly thought that we were right – and yet were still doing the wrong thing.

So before you tap into this essay, please know that this is not ABOUT you, but perhaps it may be AT you, and that is okay. It’s healthy to reflect, and work on any changes we need to make in ourselves as we journey toward a better future for everyone.

With respect – J

THE LIE

It’s May 25, 2020 and the American world is about to be rocked, murder on primetime television.

The conversation around race relations in the US has been growing for the last ten years in a way that was becoming unavoidable at most dinner tables and office cubicles across the landscape. Tensions are high, people are contained, and the world is all a bit shaky under this thing called a Pandemic. Attention spans go from a feature length film 90 minutes, to quick and satiating 3 minutes in less than 6 months, and then… then, “We come to you live from Minneapolis, where the scene of something truly difficult to understand has taken place.” Says the pretty blond news anchor as she pivots to a camera on the scene where something seems to be brewing in real time.

Then, it all hits and it’s the most electrifyingly horrific and viscerally devastating footage you’ve ever seen. Perhaps because for some people that was the first time they’d encountered real murder – not the made for movie kind of murder, but a real live one.

There seems to be footage from every angle, and there is no sense of propriety with the news world, or with the social media world; everyone is sharing the last moments of George Floyds life, like it was trading cards, with chemical hits for the neurons like ketamine for the masses.

No sense of the true real horror of what we are witnessing. No deep acknowledgement that we are watching the life be slowly, painfully, and brutally taken from a black man in America, and the world… just recorded it.

The riots of 2020 were perhaps some of the most emotional that I have ever witnessed. These were not your ‘scheduled appropriately with the local township to get the right permit and approved horse riding policemen’ protests – no, these were the “you heard what they did? Everyone is going down to Washington and Davies with the church,” protests.

Community wasn’t so much activated, as they were galvanized. The fragile reality that had never been dealt with appropriately came to a head in one night.

Racism has not ended and will not ever be over in America, because rather than be accountable, feel shame and work on it, we are made to watch the cruel outcome of this reality via 20 angles in 4k, on every screen across the world to a regular man in Minneapolis; while we comfortingly tell ourselves it’s real progress that there are black and brown business owners, and models, and superstars, and billionaires.

I have a vague thought somewhere in that first week, that it reminded me a bit of NASCAR. When Dale Earnhardt Sr. died. We watched that car crash at least 200 times before the ambulance pulled his broken body from the wreckage.

The spectacle then wasn’t lost on me, and I was a child… now, it isn’t lost on me how more rapt people are, and much less effected.

A man was murdered, and people watched, and no one did anything. Is a reality you have to contend with when you sit with yourself in the aftermath of the murder of Mr. Floyd. Oh, yes, people will say “But it was an officer!” or “What could we have done anyway?” or “At least they recorded! That way he wont get away with it.” Or “At least Floyd will get justice.”

And suddenly you have to sit with the knowledge that people do not feel that jolt in them, the feeling when your muscles tense and you are a caged lion in that moment? The only difference between you and them is the fact that you cannot understand the passivity of discussing the reality TV spectacle we’ve made of a mans murder.

It only gets worse from there. It seems that no matter what trends happen for your algorithm, there is enough tragedy happening all over the US and the world, that you are always coming across some new heartbreaking scene – and you’re being told, “You just need to bear witness. Share! Share! Make sure people SEE this!” And you do all you can to spread the word, to share the brutal reality of the world, and hope that there are more people that feel the way you do.

Sharing the footage doesn’t really make you feel all that useful but you are being told repeatedly that there is simply nothing else that could be done. All we can do when we see these horrific moments is to simply make sure we hit RECORD and get the best angle, and that all we have do is to make bearing witness somehow feel less like Netflix and chill.

NO FURTHER ACTION NEEDED!

No, just the appropriate amount of rage, staring at your screen, and every eighth angle, there is a video of a pretty stream in Thailand, or a cute bookstore you want to go to, or a new restaurant that is up the street, and you are able to calm down. After all, you are there and that was over somewhere – so it’s okay… you shared it. Surely that’s enough.

Your blood pressure comes down, and you sit with an idle anger, a passive anger, brewing and then being conditioned anger. Repeatedly, your heartbreak, your rage, your response is reduced, reshaped, and softened.

It’s October 8^, 2023 and the world is waking up to utter catastrophe brewing unlike anything the global soul has seen at once. Genocide, witnessed, consumed, traded, and talked over, watch, watch, watch, share, RECORD, share, share… share.

We allowed ourselves to make content of a genocide. Billions of people the world over, know what is and has been happening in Palestine for more than two years – and nothing good has come of our knowing.

In fact, something more cruel than this occurs. We have become acclimated to death. It no longer breaks us – we are used to the feeling of drowning, that we no longer feel the difference the weight of our tears makes.

Bombs dropping, blood everywhere, broken bones, bodies, babies. So many babies. We are made to witness through the screen, what many have been murdered living through.

At some point it no longer feels jarring – it is just a simmering anger that is an ever present buzzing in the back of your mind. You always wonder if this is normal. If the feeling of being a caged prowling lion, always a little angry, a little heartbroken, a little distracted becomes the norm for everyone. When it seems so many others were rather in some way content with their own anger?

It’s weird, right, that we’ve done this? That we’ve commodified tragedy.

It is weird, right?

Right?

THE TRUTH

It’s January 11, 2026. The American zeitgeist is inundated once again with murder on the primetime cable news networks, and every phone screen within a 2000 mile radius.

First the original angle, the original truth – the shock, the awe, the spectacle, the horror. How numb we all are, when we realize that even the murderer had his own angle and it doesn’t further enrage us to action.

It begins a civil and state battle, a skirmish in the overall war that is brewing the nation over. People in cities, towns, neighborhoods all over the US are watching their own backyard, as much as what is happening on the streets in Minneapolis.

It does not shock me, perhaps as much as I wish it did, that there is a much more controlled response to the blatant murder of Goode, and how radically different it was to the uncontrolled response at the blatant murder of Floyd. I am not blustering when I speak of ‘controlled anger.’

I can’t help but fear they are watching Minneapolis the same way they’ve spent the last 2 years watching Gaza… the commodified, snack eating, fifteen minutes on break at work, doom scrolling in the bathroom, witnessing that has made us complacent audience goers to a world fracturing for free in the palm of our hands.

It’s January 24^th, 2026 and my partner tells me they’ve killed another person. I very brokenly look it up as I am still exhausted from traveling, and I see the paused video on my feed, and I realize, I don’t need to see it.

I don’t need to see all the angles, all the different ways a mans heartbreaking last moments sounded, or the way that the murderers will likely lack the fortitude to understand the weight of taking yet one more life.

I don’t need to watch it, in order to know how obvious the narratives are crafted coming from the podium somewhere in DC. I don’t need to bear witness to another murder, holding my breath, and wishing that I wasn’t so used to this feeling of unbearable agony and impotency.

I don’t need to see it because the visual changes none of our reality. If bearing witness doesn’t galvanize you, doesn’t change you, doesn’t alter you. If watching does nothing but bring you a vague since of anger – then you’ve already lost.

I will not be made to commodify the death of others.

Be the voice, spread the word, speak with your family, have the conversations. Get offline, and remove the media from your social. Be in the people, and if someone doesn’t know what is happening, then share the word – but do not make farce and frivolity of fascism.

Do not allow yourselves to become the content creators for the dictators that would seek to have you satisfied with being observers in an audience, rather than participants in the fight for your life and the lives of countless others.

We are better than this, we have merely been conditioned, trained, and made complacent in the wake of this world that has been crafted, curated, and contrived.

Wake up.

The work is upon us.

May The Wellspring truly be Just – I beg forgiveness, and yet I am so ashamed of what we’ve become. - Ameen

-J