The Passion of George Floyd

George Floyd 

Have you ever wondered why the events of this week are known as the Passion of Jesus Christ?   I always thought the word referred to the strong emotions Jesus felt during the last days of his life. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word originates in Christian Theology, and its primary meaning is “the suffering of pain.. the fact of being acted upon.”

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Most of us think of our lives as what we do. But what is done to us is probably a greater factor — all the ways we are acted upon at work or school, by the government and the media, medicine and the law, other people, the police.

Those of us with comfortable lives occasionally have a chance to act for ourselves — to do what we want, or tell others to do what we want. But for poor and marginalized people — the homeless, dispossessed, people with disabilities, those in prison — - what is done to them is nearly all of life.

The great African-American theologian Howard Thurman saw Jesus in these people — the masses who live “with their backs against the wall.” He called them the Disinherited.

Jesus was a poor, disinherited Jew — lacking status or even citizenship in the Roman Empire. His people, Israel, were surrounded and oppressed by a dominant, controlling state. Their only freedom was how they would respond.

Some — like the Temple authorities — chose the way of accommodation. They accepted Roman supremacy, and tried to live with it. Others — the Zealots — wanted to fight to restore Israel’s glory.

Jesus rejected both ways. Instead he preached a radical change in the inner attitude of people. He told his disciples to follow him, and not be afraid… of persecution, torture, even death. “Blessed are you when people revile and persecute you … for your reward is great in heaven.”

In 1949, Thurman wrote that Jesus knew: “anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny… It is a man’s reaction to things that determines the ability of others to exercise power over him ..”

Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane is the turning point from action to passion. After years of speaking truth to power, he is handed over to his enemies. Things are no longer done by him, but to him. He is tried and convicted, flogged, mocked, crowned with thorns, spat on, stripped and nailed to cross to die. This is his passion, and in his passion he fulfills his vocation — he drinks his cup.

Fast forward to our own time — to the murder of George Floyd, and the legions of disinherited people whose lives have been squandered in prison, or snuffed out by official violence. The Passion of Jesus Christ represents our power over the rulers of this world — our freedom to react and respond, as individuals and communities. Today we see the face of George Floyd painted larger than life on city walls that define the lives of the disinherited. 

That face — like the image of Christ — has become an icon.  It has the power to change the quality of our inner lives -- to transform humiliation and death into liberation and new life.

Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

 

Gaga at Breezy Point

9/11 Memorial --Breezy Point 

This summer, amid the national uproar over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a long list of others, I spent a Saturday visiting a friend in the beach resort of Breezy Point, Queens. Wrapped around the western tip of the Rockaway peninsula, this is an enclave of middle-class homes on sandy pedestrian paths, festooned with American flags and sprinkled with Trump signs -- a summer haven for New York City police and firefighters, heavily Irish, overwhelmingly Catholic, 100 percent white.  It was organized as a co-op in the 1960s, with rules that keep it a closed society, a gated community.  

I took a walk by the bay, watching children play in the sand and trading wary nods and glances with the adults.  It was a perfect beach day, a time to relax, but the atmosphere felt subdued and tense.  Some residents had recently been involved in a confrontation with protesting Black surfers in nearby Rockaway Beach.  Others had faced off with demonstrators in the streets. As a stranger with a beard, I was regarded with caution. The last time I visited, in 2017, one guy told me I looked like his dog.  This time there was no conversation.   

It reminded me of South Africa in 1990, in the last days of apartheid, just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. All those white faces grimly trying to milk their white privilege to the last drop, knowing that the outside world was turning away from them.    

These feelings came back at me this week, watching Lady Gaga's new video, "911." 

Viral Spring #17: White Bodies Up Front!

Brooklyn,  6/4/2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Something turned in me over the span of a day last week, maybe because something is turning for America.  

On Thursday morning I opened the New York Times to the most gut-wrenching piece of arts criticism I've ever read. Wesley Morris, a young black man who is the paper's critic-at-large, wrote of  a song that came up on the radio and left him weeping at his kitchen sink. The 1985 song by Patti Labelle is about the end of a long, bad relationship.  If you don't know me by now, she wails, you'll never know me.

Morris's composure broke not over a failed romance but the police murder of George Floyd, and Morris's own feeling that another relationship is ending -- that if we whites still don't get it, after all these years, we never will.  

Here's what he heard in Patti Labelle's lament:    

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …

I finished the article shaken.  If black people give up on us -- who were raised to think of them in just these ways, who struggle daily to beat back our pre-conscious ideas, whose very perceptions are still twisted by a racist culture -- what is next?  Is there any hope?

Viral Spring #16: Masters of Deceit

-- By Tom Phillips

President Trump is kneeling on the neck of American democracy, and we are gasping for air.  The only thing in his way is the US Constitution, and that will be his next target.  

A classic coup d'etat is in progress, with all the earmarks of tactics school children learned to watch out for in the 1950s.  FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote a book on the truth-defying tricks of the Soviet communist party -- the "Masters of Deceit."  

The KGB's playbook -- adapted from the Bolshevik revolution -- was designed so that a small, determined group could seize power over a large nation, and make it look like the people's choice.  The key was co-opting legitimate protests, turning them violent, creating chaos and confusion, and then presenting the party as the only force that could restore order.  And both the KGB and CIA used this tactic during the Cold War, fomenting unrest as a pretext for seizing power in countries as big as Indonesia, Iran and Afghanistan. 

George Floyd

Now it's come home to America.  Following the police killing of George Floyd, multiple sources reported violence instigated by  young white men, heavily masked, smashing windows and setting fires.  Local people then took the opportunity to pillage, helping themselves to a sliver of America's luxury consumer wealth.  And TV News did its part, constructing a lurid loop of riot footage to accompany the news night and day  -- a misleading mashup that makes it appear the entire country is in flames.     

Just before he called governors to demand a military crackdown, our president talked by phone with Vladimir Putin.  The White House says they had an airy discussion of G7 invitations, the successful US space shot, and steps they're taking to fight the pandemic. Pardon my skepticism but I think there was another item on the agenda.  

Putin, the former KGB whiz kid, is today's Master of Deceit.  The President of the United States is his Apprentice.  Their playbook comes courtesy of the KGB and CIA, which manipulated the world for decades, fooling journalists like me into reporting phony crises that resulted in the rise of client regimes. Now they'd like you to believe those black-clad masked invaders are just irate citizens; that what you see on TV is what's happening in America. 

Do yourself a favor, America.  Walk out into the real world today and see how it compares with the president's fever-dream.  

Then try to breathe. The worst is yet to come. 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips