"I did not come to fight flesh and blood but spiritual wickedness in high in low places" is my mantra as I struggle to regain my sense of presence. A reminder that this a spiritual battleground, psychological warfare. As millions around the country celebrate the fate of Derrick Chauvin, I sit in silence. A friend of mine calls me, expressing how she cried tears, I assume of joy. She seems surprised as I explain to her that I don't celebrate other's suffering. I believe in Karma, and I pray for justice, but that's as far as it goes. I see Chauvin as a branch of a tree. I am focused on the root of the problem, the war for our souls. The Bible states, "the eyes are the window to the soul" (proverbs 30:17).
The real pandemic is happening in our minds; the disease of hatred is undisputedly the most widespread virus known to humanity.
I was astounded when I learned that Adolf Hitler's left-hand man, joseph Goebbels, was the head of media for all of Germany. I asked myself, "why would this powerful man who was on the verge of conquering the entire world choose someone who dealt with the media to be in his entourage?" The answer is simple; if you can manipulate what people see, you can shape how they think. Hitler understood the power in controlling the narrative. This is the same reason America chose to create "birth of a nation," a film demonizing black men as a rapist and terrorist while praising the KKK as heroic saviors, shortly after slavery was "abolished." The film was played in theaters all across America, including the White House. Although white men had enslaved, beaten, raped, and murdered our ancestors for centuries, this movie somehow convinced them that the roles were reversed and ushered in another era of "justified" terror towards the black race. Wicked seeds have been planted in humankind's subconscious. We are witnessing the harvest.
If we want to make a change, we have to address the attack on society's subconscious. A specific clip from Terence Nance's remarkable short series' random acts of flyness' comes to mind about white people's hidden desire to "unleash the beast." He uses 'breaking bad,' a wildly popular tv show where an ordinary middle-aged science teacher is transformed into a murderous drug dealer after a terminal illness is declared over his life, as an example. It speaks to a hidden fantasy, some life-changing event that grants you space to "unleash the beast." In 'John Wick,' the murder of Keanu Reeve's dog, a gift from his late wife, sparked his killing spree. The joker is possibly the most famous villain in American cinema history. Joaquin Phoenix even won an Oscar for his most recent portrayal of the psyche clown. The story of neglect and abuse, of feeling invisible, of being the laughing stock of corrupt society that eventually drove him crazy and evoked his brutal rise to power is a story America will pay to watch repeatedly. Another version is rumored to be in the works. These storylines are water and sunlight for the vicious seeds harvested in America's soul.
Recently, Amazon's new series "Them," produced by Laila Waithe, Sparked controversy about degradation porn. What seems to have been inspired by the hit HBO show "love craft country," Waithe's rendition takes black atrocities of the Jim Crow era and turns them into a horror series. This ongoing theme has been raising eyebrows for quite some time now. '12 years a slave', which showed gruesome imagery of the horrific torture blacks had to endure, was rewarded with an Oscar, the highest praise Hollywood has to offer. Which lead black America to ask a simple question...Do white people get off on black trauma? Does seeing the suffering of our people feed a hidden fetish that they can no longer publicly show? Indeed there are many other lights to show us in. Why is this one in such high demand? As a black man, I never watched the George Floyd video, although every news outlet played it over and over again. Yes, the truth has to be told. Yes, America has to see itself to take accountability, but there has to be a more compassionate way to go about it. Ask yourself this, would you want to see the murder of the person you love the most replayed on national television?
The eyes are the window to the soul. There has never been an era where entertainment was so easy to obtain. With so many streaming platforms and electrical devices, it is effortless to humor your mind. Nowadays, for parents to calm their children, they hand them a tablet. In Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece "once upon a time in Hollywood," there is a powerful scene at the climax of the film where one of the young ladies in Charles Manson's infamous cult says, "let's kill the people who taught us how to murder," referring to the actors of Hollywood. With so many mass shootings done by "troubled" (white) men, America has made gun control their main priority. But in the words of the late great DMX, "Guns don't kill people, stupid niggas with guns kill people". We have to focus on the source of the problem, the mind. Jesus says the eye is the lamp of the body (Matthew 6:22-24). The images we see are food for the spirit; to change the world, we must first change our appetite.
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