EP29 - The World DOESN'T NEED MORE LOVE #BlackLivesMatter

I've seen in so many places regarding #BlackLiuvesMatter that the world needs more love, a large group hug. I disagree, and although it would be nice to have a little more love in the world that is not what is going to sort out the current problems.

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Topic: EP29 - The World Doesn't Need More Love And Here's Why

Host and Presenter: Steven Webb

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Hey, this is Stillness in the Storms and I'm Steven Webb and, oh boy, isn't the world in a storm at the moment? 2020, who would have ever predicted 2020? If anybody had predicted 2020 last year, or even in January, they would have been taken away. I'm sure they would have been put in a straight jacket. It's one of those years where whenever we take a moment and we look backward, we can see how it happened, but we just cannot see what's going to happen next; we have no idea whatsoever what's going to happen next. And I see everywhere that the world needs more love, the world needs a group hug, the world needs this wonderful love, energy. Well, I call BS, I'm sorry. 

I've got a big open heart, I think and I give the world love and I try to hold space for people so they can, but I don't think love is what the world needs or not in the same way that in the spiritual sense of love; we need the practical sense of love. And let me tell you the difference in today's podcast. You know, I meditate to understand myself. I sit quietly to observe my feelings, observe my emotions, my thoughts, to observe the feeling in my thumb, what's going on in my thumb, and my fingers and my toes. It seems a bit odd. Well, I cannot feel my body because I'm paralyzed just below the neck, but I still do it anyway because it's still attached to me and it still has an influence on me. 

And I think it's important to know what's going on, to know where our thoughts are coming from, where our feelings are coming from. And when we understand ourselves, when we understand what's going on within, we can have some kind of peace. We can deal with the problems that our body's telling us. We can deal with that poorly knee months before it actually gets beyond repairable. We can deal with the emotion when it's arising before he gets too bad. 

So does the world need love? No. It is as much as having a baby. When we have a baby, we would go, well, it just needs love. It needs its nappy changed. It needs food. It needs looking after. And to do that, you need to understand the cry. You need to understand what's wrong with the child. You take someone that's looked after a child for two years and suddenly, somebody else walks in and looks after the child for a week, they don't know what that child needs. Yes, we know it needs food and we know it needs a clean nappy, and we know it needs dressing and washing, but we don't know the whims. We don't know what the child likes, what the child needs to be nourished. We don't know how the child feels comfortable. 

And that's what the world needs. The world needs that kind of love. And to give that kind of love what you need? You need understanding. You need to understand what's going on, or at least the best way you possibly can. And to understand anything that's going on, you've got to look at it from more than one angle. You can't just look at it from one angle and then go, "Oh, I know, Black Lives Matter." Yes, of course, all lives matter, of course, ants matter, bees matter, trees matter. And I really get really tired of hearing every time Black Lives Matter comes up, you've got a whole wave of people all lives matter.

And I'm not going to go into the metaphor, the burning building, and the broken leg, you've seen them all everywhere on the internet. In short, it's like, there's one house burning - I'm going into it now, I know - one house burning, the fire brigade comes up and he starts spraying the house that's not burning. Okay, technically they do do that to stop the spread of the fire but that's as long as they're putting the fire out as well. But in general, you need to deal with the problem at hand and I know you're not dismissing it by going All Lives Matter, but you are lessening the problem because when someone looks up and says Black Lives Matter, they're not saying white lives don't matter.

You know, the only way I can relate to walking out of a shop, putting money in my wallet, and a policeman saying, "Where did you get that money?" Or been pulled over...well, I cannot relate to fearing to lose my life being pulled over by the police because I just don't. I don't fear a policeman. I don't live in a place where I have to. I haven't got that colored skin that has connotations that go with it, unfortunately. But who I am? I'm disabled and I've loads of meetings with social services. And I can remember going into those meetings, really feeling like a second class citizen, because I'm disabled, my life doesn't matter. My life is not as important as somebody else's.

 And with this COVID-19 at the moment, you know, everybody's well, my freedom and my liberties, I want to go out, I want to do all these things. No, we're currently trying to look after the vulnerable and the elderly that cannot fight this virus. We should have had the hashtags: Old Lives Matter, Disabled Lives Matter. And then this isn't lessening the Black Lives Matter because I personally think the Black Lives Matter should be the biggest hashtag right now, along with Old Lives Matter regarding the other COVID-19. And this is what understanding does, it puts it in context. 

You know, we're seeing this year, nothing's ever black and white. The protests happened not just because of George Floyd, George Floyd is the catalyst. It's been happening. People have felt that their lives haven't mattered for a very, very long time and it just happened to coincide with a couple of months of lockdown where people have been locked down for this COVID-19 and now they're suddenly coming out. And/or even if they're not allowed out, they're kindly coming out for the simple fact that they've had enough. 

Then you suddenly hit them with one of their own, dying in such a horrible way. A horrible video, one of our own, I think now he's one of us, but I certainly feel he's one of us. 'I cannot breathe." The right to breathe surely is the first fundamental right of anything. Nobody owns the oxygen. Nobody owns the right to breathe. And those words just echo so much. So you add all of that together and we're coming out of a lockdown, the world is slowing down and now suddenly speeding up. The weather getting warmer, people wanting to be out, people wanting to feel, make a difference. People wanting to find connections again and they felt that connections over this. And then you get the protest.

Now, then, the world's biggest protest; 2003, 36 million people estimated taking part across the world, 3000 different antiwar protests across the world. Just let that sink in. That's 36 million people in the world protested. What happened? We have more war. It doesn't make a difference and I really don't advocate violence in any way and I want to make that point really clear. I don't think violence is ever the answer, but if you've tried everything else you possibly know, what else is there left?  If a guy comes up to my daughter or me, and he threatened me and I said, "No, go away or else, I'm going to punch you."

 He carried on. And I said, "Go away, otherwise, I will have to punch you."

 And I give him so many warnings, what do I do at some point? Okay, it's a metaphor for me because my punches wouldn't do anything to anybody.

But the point I'm making, at some point they took to the knee and they were ridiculed. They protested and they were ridiculed. We had nearly a million people protest Brexit. They didn't listen, they didn't care. Two days later, it's not even on the news. I believe we had 750,000 people protest against privatizing parts of the NHS. What happened? The government carried on as usual. Peaceful protest rarely works and that's really unfortunate, really unfortunate. And I blame the people that don't listen to the peaceful protests. There are people out there crying out to be understood and we're not understanding them. We're not listening. That's what the world needs. 

The world needs to be listened to a little more. We need to feel the pain they are feeling and not just in some beneficial BS way, "Oh yeah, I understand your plight, but really is not the time to do it."

I'm tired of hearing, "Now's not the time to talk about it."

 Well, when is the damn time to talk about people dying when they don't need to die? You know, if peaceful protest worked, why didn't the US and UK government sit on the border with Saddam Hussein and go, "Hey Saddam, we've got placards here." See, governments know that peaceful protests don't work. That's why they wanted a peaceful protest. But they also know peaceful protest makes them look bad. So they also want a protest to turn violent very quickly, because if it turns violent, then they can sort them out and then they can say, "There you go, they're the bad people."

 They're not bad people, they're unheard people. The people that are fed up, tired of yelling the same message and people not getting it. Why did we elect Trump? Or why did the US elect Trump? Because there was a huge wave of people that were not listened to and they were fed up. Think about how many times in your lives, when you're not listened to either by a partner or by other people. Yeah. At some point, you come out fighting. 

And we've also got to understand the piece that not all police are racist, terrible, bad people. I don't believe anybody's bad people. I believe bad people have experiences in life that turn them doing actions that are not so great. And some actions that are outright terrible and horrible, and we need to have justice for them. Yes. But then you have the police that have to do the government's work, they don't want to be doing that, I'm sure. You notice like the soldiers, when they go to war, they don't really want to go to war. There may be a few that do, but I just don't think they do. And I'm kind of answering for them now and I realize I can't because I'm not a soldier.

 So I just think we need to understand all sides a little more. We were battling with ourselves and we're battling with the wrong people. On my timeline, at the moment, it looks like a squabbling fest on Facebook. I'm pointing out my side, they're pointing out their side and we're both right.  Not one person has replied to one of my posts that has been totally wrong. And I posted a post the other day and it was about a racist comment and several people called me out on it and I read it back and it wasn't racist, or it might have been racist, but there wasn't enough information in the post to come to the conclusion it was racist. So, therefore, it should not have been used. And I replied to each one of those people and said thank you for enlightening me on this. And I let them read my comments back and I deleted that today. 

 I'm wrong a lot of the time, which is good because it means I learned something. But we need more understanding. We need to be able to see their perspective. We need to weep just as Jeremy Putnam, Reverend Jeremy Putnam. I asked him the other day, what would Jesus do if he was here now? I think he would weep. But then I think the next phase he would ask us to understand, to listen. Love is to listen. We can band around all the lovely phrases of the world needs more love, but love has a different side. It has an action to it. And if you love your child, you make it comfortable, you understand what it needs at that moment. 

If you love your partner, if you love your parents or someone else in life, you listen to them and you try to create the comfort and security that they deserve in life. That's what the action of love is. So that's what we need to do. If you want to advocate for more love for the black lives, we need to understand them, we need to create a world in which they do not fear a policeman. Somebody that's causing criminal damage, somebody that's committing a crime needs to fear a policeman, not because of the color of their skin. And we all know that.

 There isn't one person listening to this podcast now that doesn't know that. And I'm sorry if it's as if I'm preaching here but we need to wake up. And waking up is understanding, it's not disconnecting. It's not some kind of Utopian wonderful, beautiful life. Waking up is understanding ourselves first, what's going on inside of me? How am I feeling about this? And then, waking up is the wider picture is seeing things from whole perspectives. I don't think that policeman wanted to kill George Floyd that day, I really don't. But I do believe in my heart that the way he sees the world, the experiences he's had in life, created a situation that could have been prevented and should be prevented and should not happen and justice needs to be done. 

But just coming back with the world needs love, or all lives matter, that's not going to affect shit. You know, this is a bit of a heavy podcast for me but I just wanted to address that. I just want to adjust the fact that I don't like the fact that peaceful protests don't work, but they very rarely do work. And I don't know the answers. It's easy to sit and point out the problems, I can do that all day. I don't have the answers, but I do know that, yes, all lives matter. Right now, we need to sort the shit out where Blacks feel that their lives don't matter. That's what we're working on right now. Last year, we worked on the "Me Too Movement."  It didn't mean that many people that didn't have the "Me Too Movement" or weren't involved in any kind of events that were part of the "Me Too Movement." It doesn't mean that we were dismissing those people that weren't suffering from it. No, we didn't have a hashtag: Me, Me, Me Too.

 I'm Steven Webb, and this is Stillness In The Storms and you'd really helped me if you could become a patron. That would help me to spread this word a little more, help build the podcast, build the listener base and get this message out to the world. Because yes, the world needs love, but above love, it needs understanding, and it needs us to open our hearts and see it from their perspective and not just ours. That's a really important perspective. How do they feel about it? Not, how do you feel about it? Thank you. You can go to stevenwebb.com. There's a link at the top to become a patron of my podcast and support the work I do. Take care. Love you guys. More understanding. Thank you. 

#ICan'tBreathe.