Mishegos in Minneapolis

As a social worker, I’ve been taught to look for the backstory; for the nucleus behind the behavior... the inception of the symptom that everyone else most easily identifies. I’ve worked hard these past ten years at seeking the root cause beyond the face value, to weigh instinct and perception against prejudice and cultural perspective, and challenging those intrinsic feelings while looking deeper. I still personalize and project and that’s a skill I continue to refine; but recognizing it is part of the progression within the lesson. 

 

Intention and perception is often at war with one another. It’s something that comes up daily. Most recently, a male teacher confided in me that he proposed a male-focus group to identify challenges teenage men face, particularly with regard to sexuality and self-expression. He figured it would be a group to identify feelings and redirect intrinsic behaviors in a safe space where education and validation could be enriched. The group he proposed it to “triggered” the young women and painted this well-intended teacher as chauvinistic and neglectful of the those who have been sexualized in these trying times. The teacher argued it was about holding young men accountable for their actions through education. My 14-year old son heard the idea and said the group should be called “Accounta-Balls.” (He seizes any opportunity to include the word ‘balls’ into his witty repartee.) As a young man with Asperger’s, his ability to “read the room” is impaired and I fear his intentions may get him into more trouble than he could process. His ‘disability’ to read emotion and assimilate has made me more empathic towards others like him who say stupid things to be included.  My daughter said the idea read like a pro-rape club for boys. Needless to say, the idea didn’t take off. Perhaps the positive intentions of this club simply lost its meaning in poor translation. We have so few clubs that infuse integrity into vulnerable people. What a shame.

 

Sometimes, things have to get personal in order to understand the lesson. I used to think it was an attribute that I didn’t notice someone’s race as the first identifying feature of a person I would meet. I would roll my eyes and think I was progressive that everyone else was still “stuck on race.” Before the BLM movement, I felt the idea of “all lives” mattering and “being equal” was the solution to “residual racism” that was on the way out. I figured we ‘basically’ solved the crises from the days of slavery. I identified as a race whose ancestors were persecuted since ‘B.C’. due to religion. Same thing, right? I thought discrimination against the Jews was done, too. I even sent my kid to a Jew school and didn’t realize my overweight Arian-looking child wouldn’t fit in with Sephardim. Wait, there is discrimination even among your own people? Impossible!

 

I was so wrong.

 

In fact, by disregarding race, I was refuting an entire backstory. I was erasing the cultural journey that shaped a person’s experiences and subsequent viewpoint. I was disregarding years of pain and struggle for equality- not just ancestral, but present-day. Becoming a mother, wildly protective of my children, helped shape some of this. However, grad school really challenged me the most and helped me to be a global advocate on a “macro level” and not just for those I immediately served. It became a responsibility to fight for people’s rights, even if it was just to educate misinformed people or rally friends to a cause they weren’t aware existed.

 

A major flaw of mine is being an empath. I intrinsically gravitate towards death, hurt and pain and absorb it like a sponge. I shared with a friend recently about how I got into Thanatology and how early memories of being exposed to death without proper education and attentiveness had a tremendous impact on who I became. The fear bred curiosity and encouraged me to salve the wound by diving into it and pulling it apart until it felt natural. I became the palliative care social worker who attended every crises, every death, and every post-mortem viewing, surgery, funeral, still birth…. Pieces of each experience are patches woven into my crest that grows thicker and more elaborate every day. In my field, I get to experience some of life’s greatest tragedies and poignant triumphs. I’m simultaneously exhausted and filled with gratitude.

 

The verdict of the George Floyd murder case yesterday impacted me in ways I wasn’t sure how to explain. Some people on Facebook posted pictures of fists in the air, “Black Lives Matter” flags, memes, pictures of devastated crowds, and relieved family members. Some people politicized it and spoke of injustice versus integrity. I felt the need to process my feelings for a day to identify why I felt overwhelmed and if I was pleased with the outcome or angry or sad or what…and why? I felt unsettled. 

I sought hard to identify with Chauvin and to be impartial. I added a back story of an abusive father and mirroring behaviors of what he had been taught as a youth, perhaps. I added anger issues and behavioral concerns that had gone undiagnosed and untreated. I imagined that what if I was the therapist who had been assigned to him after this heinous act and attempted to rehabilitate him in some way. I personalized it and remembered times I had been too harsh on someone I loved or spanked a kid too hard in a moment of anger, exhaustion, and exasperation. I poured over the case and sought some sparkle of remorse for the outcome of this act, rather than just selfish sadness about the possible incarceration he faced or what his intentions were or weren’t. I didn’t see it. I couldn’t attach to him.

 

When they read his sentence and I watched his eyes frantically move about over his masked face in fear. I imagined him as a little boy and it made me sad. I heard about what happens to dirty cops in prison. I initially chuckled at the banter at what his fate would be when even the worst criminals would now determine how easy of a time he would have it in his final resting place. Even the worst prisoners don’t tolerate pedophiles or cops. I felt angry that I believe his penalty was only in part to a flawed system that allowed so many of these instances to occur previously and that he took the penalty of the culmination of many lost lives who’s perpetrators were not brought to justice. 

I felt angry at all of the cases before him where perpetrators were not caught on camera and who were dismissed, labeled an accident, were merely on leave or terminated from a job they hated anyway, or cases that put the blame on the victim for not being a stellar community member. I felt angry that perhaps they threw the book at Chauvin just to avoid riots and not because of real reform. And I know... this small victory could perhaps set the precedent for future incidents. But, this didn’t leave me feeling relieved in the way I had hoped it would. 

What am I feeling?

 

Grief.

 

I am feeling grief. I am feeling like the mother who sought the mercy of the justice system who wasn't heard using her voice alone. I feel like the mother who was called to fight to make a change that establishes the value of life; something that should be a no-brainer. I feel like the mother that fought to disallow aggressive cops from harming and killing and justifying it with the victim being an addict. I feel the grief of a mother that can drop the flags and signs and year-long gathered evidence and just feel the absence of her son. I feel like the mother who can finally have the quiet space to grieve. And you don’t have to be a mother to feel the pain of a mother. And you don't have to experience child loss to feel loss. 

I was told early on in my career that if you have to imagine that a patient or a person in need is your grandmother or father or child in order to establish empathy, you’re in the wrong business. Sheesh, you’re on the wrong planet.

 

It’s hard to explain what happens to an empath when witnessing trauma, but I will try….

 

I’ve collected these little pieces of experiences, whether my own or someone else’s and they create an emotional and physical response. When my kid shows me a skinned knee, I feel a thousand razor blades going through my body. When someone is gagging, I feel nauseous.

 

When I was younger, I had this irrational fear of getting my eyes wet. It felt like what I imagine waterboarding would feel like. I would feel like I was drowning and not getting enough air and it absolutely paralyzed me. When I became a nanny, I poured some water over the toddler’s head during a bath and she inhaled a little water and gasped. I felt her panic and I couldn’t catch my breath for several minutes. I remembered that feeling of not being able to breathe in the water and it was triggering. She didn't flinch after. My heart pounded for several minutes. 

 

When I was a toddler at day school, I ate a pickle at lunch and part of it got caught in my throat. I was choking and some of the other kids were laughing and the teachers were ignoring me. I couldn’t breathe. I put my hand in the back of my mouth and pulled it out, myself. Years and years later, as a nanny, during my first week, the baby I was watching found a little piece of plastic wrap on the floor and put it in her mouth. I saw it happen from across the room while I was encouraging her to crawl to me. I watched her choke and gasp for air, her little eyes filling up with tears and her face becoming bright red. I sprinted across the room to sweep the back of her throat and pull it out. I have chest pains even recalling it. The feeling of not breathing from water running over my head and choking on that pickle  came rushing over me.

 

When I started at Jackson Hospital years ago, I became besties with a male nurse who had three daughters. The eldest daughter choked at a restaurant on an inhaled a piece of chicken that had bone in it. She was down for 11 minutes before EMT arrived. She had irreversible brain damage. After many months in a coma in the hospital, she eventually died. He was the father I wish I had. Watching him grieve was one of the hardest things I’ve ever encountered. I became hyper-vigilant in restaurants and with my own children.

 

I went to a drag show brunch years later and someone was choking on their food and the drag queen stopped her routine and performed the Heimlich maneuver and I was traumatized for the rest of the morning. In that moment, I envisioned the countless people I witnessed die of lung cancer and drowning in their own fluids, water submersing me, choking on a pickle and Phil’s daughter: in every second, every piece of fear and pain of those eleven minutes before oxygen was able to pass into her system.

 

Watching the nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of that cop pressing his knee on top of George Floyd’s neck had a paralyzing effect on me. I read about the incident and the backstory before I saw the video. When I finally allowed myself to see it, a montage of drowning in water, choking on the pickle, the baby choking, Phil’s daughter struggling for 11 minutes combined with Emma Gonzalez’s silence for six minutes and twenty seconds, having to sing while watching the news of the elementary shooting with a first grader at home, the first pediatric patient I ever saw die while her mother screamed, combined with every scraped knee and every heart break and rejection and injustice and loss and fear and plead and scream up to G-d.

 

I heard the boys wrestling and heard my own child saying “I can’t breathe!” and I screamed at my eldest son who retreated in panic: “we were only playing…” I watched people pleading for him to stop, to let him get up, let him breathe.

 

I watched a grown man calling for his momma and my chest pounded and my breasts ached and I wanted to run to him. 

Was she there? Was she coming to save him and escort him to the place where she ascended to? 

I watched him struggle and plead for air, for his momma… In that moment, I didn’t care anymore what color he was, what ancestral journey he came from, what drugs he ingested and why he needed drugs to feel good. I didn’t need to identify with the times I did drugs or how easy it would have been to use the fake $100 bill I was tipped in a grocery store or how I could have helped or hindered or treated… In that moment, he wasn’t a patient. He wasn’t in a scenario I could have been in a thousand times. It wasn’t race or status or judgment or variances or similarities or good cop or bad guy… He was a little boy in pain and scared and I was a momma. I wanted to hold him like his momma did when he was in the middle of a party and felt comfortable enough to fall asleep on her chest and she glowed with that feeling you get when your energetic toddler finally gets tired and chooses you as his safe spot. I wanted to swoop in and save him.

They scooped him up and laid him out on the stretcher and he looked like the Michael Clark Duncan character in the Green Mile. 

The news thereafter showed the little girl he left behind.

She reminded me of “Nikki Bell”, Copperhead’s daughter in Kill Bill, after a long fight between her mom and Beatrix Kiddo. Yeah, maybe Copperhead had a crazy past, but she was a mom now and had a little girl, and at the end: there was a dead parent. And there she was in little sneakers crunching over glass and blood and innocently wondering why her momma was gone. 

Crap comparison, sure… but that’s who she reminded me of. She was a mixture of innocence, shock and grief in an expressionless still motion. She was left in the proverbial  pool of what was left of her father and with a whole nation who assured her their grief and anger rivaled her own. She is left fatherless and with the expectation to avenge his death. She was told to think of him as a hero... or an addict. She has to share her grief with the nation who asserts judgment on his life's value. So, yeah, I felt a sense of justice had been served when Chauvin had the book thrown at him, but what about his little girl? Ok, we won… But he’s still gone. We traded one life for another. 

Did we win?

 

Well, now, maybe cops will be a little more fearful about getting caught while using their powers to aimlessly impact the lives of others: because retribution for these acts is a bit more supported. Does it reverse their racism? Does it come from a place of a rehabilitative mindset or just fear of paying personal restitution? Have we reset the years of intolerance and retrained with sensitivity/cultural appropriation lessons?

 

Not yet.

 

I heard this great podcast with Sarah Silverman where she spoke about the concept of slowly transforming culture. She spoke about changing terms we use that were put in place during times of slavery. She gave an amusing anecdote and suggested saying “main bedroom” instead of “master bedroom.” She recognized the probability of 'messing up' and repeating old sayings and belief systems---- until we have been educated. It is the arrogance and unwillingness to change upon realizing the harm of these archaic terms and beliefs that keeps our society in a permanent state of regression.

 

Silverman elaborated about the fears associated with retraining the cops and suggested we change the phrase “defund the police” to something more palatable that gives us the opportunity to retrain the police. And not all at once. No one wants no cops paroling for our community safety, but perhaps retraining in small pieces: the way a major highway repaves and expands a road without shutting down the whole system… One piece at a time, a little rerouting as one section repairs towards improvement….

People reject change because it’s scary, but without it, there is no evolution, we have no progress, and we continue to choose retribution over rehabilitation.

 

So, yeah… I’m glad Chauvin’s butt is going to be a semen suppository while he has the remainder of his life to think about who he was and who he can choose to become while in his new digs… But what I’m mostly left with is grief.

 

And maybe a little sparkle of hope…

 

In brief: Be kind. Don’t rewind.