Streaming My Conciousness

My Mind To Yours by DEBRA MERRYWEATHER

Max Brooks’ words entered my consciousness via the March 24 airing of NPR’s Fresh Air. Max Brooks, a lecturer at the Modern War Institute at West Point, author of several zombie related books, and, son of Mel Brooks, urges us to practice “good fact hygiene.” We need to be careful about what we let into our minds. We should verify the information we hear. Those of us programmed to defer to authority will find this challenging. We often have bosses in our heads.

Brooks mentioned how, fearing nuclear war, the government, and Brooks emphasized, we voters are the government, planned ahead, stockpiling emergency equipment until agencies started weighing the known costs of warehousing supplies against the unknown costs of an open ended “just in time” emergency supply reliant on private retailers. Unfortunately, most private retailers follow “just in time” supply models.

I think I read about this in my public policy studies. I may have seen something about this on “60 Minutes.” How much preparedness is prepared? With COVID 19, we’re scrambling. The group tendency to think someone else has things covered involves “diffusion of responsibility,” a psychological term that became popular after a killer stabbed New Yorker Kitty Genovese to death while neighbors supposedly ignored her cries. (Neighbors didn’t ignore her, but fiction often plays better than fact.) Too often, the whole story of everything reveals itself long after most of the people who know anything about events have moved past them or passed. Our world, and our communication and understanding of it, evolves within space and time as measured by the earth and moon’s movements around our sun. By the time anyone reads what I’ve written about anything here, especially about COVID 19, some new facts and stories will be spinning. Some perceptions will have changed. We will have changed.

And, whatever is happening now started with something that happened before now. While change happens to us here, others are watching us from over there. That sort of sociological and psychological distancing has always occurred. Pain, fear and uncertainty affect individual and group consciousness. Individuals and groups have long projected responsibility for systemic problems - nature is a system - onto scapegoats.

We don’t need scapegoats. We need good information. Since China’s COVID 19 wave/curve/trajectory crisis precedes ours, maybe we can learn from what they learned rather than blame the Chinese because the Chinese suffered the virus first. Being the first to suffer some unforeseeable or unforeseen circumstance does not mean you are to blame because you are the first victim. Us/them mentality often results in non-victims or not-yet-victims characterizing victims as bad examples or jokes.

By late March, I’d read humorous social media posts suggesting we try tossing virgins into volcanos to stop COVID 19. Funny. Closer to reality, Harvey Weinstein has tested positive for COVID 19. I’ve read social media posts calling for authorities to utilize Weinstein as a test subject in potentially painful COVID 19 experimentation. Not funny.

Since I’m streaming my consciousness, let me weigh in on the conviction of Harvey Weinstein. Based on what Weinstein’s accusers said about him, Weinstein was/ is clearly a bullying creep who, nonetheless, may honestly believe that he didn’t do anything terribly wrong. For millennia, girls and women (and boys and men) found their vocational options limited by gender. Male dominated traditional hierarchies sexualized girls and women. And, having been sexually objectified, women found themselves scapegoated for trusting predators or not fighting back hard enough.

When I was just eleven, a trusted priest told me that sometimes girls had to suffer like Christ so boys could maintain clean records so they could get jobs. Harvey Weinstein

PAGE 31 • April 2020 • TABLE HOPPING was born the year before I was, during times which still empowered young males to test limits while grooming girls to be indirect and polite. Weinstein, his victims and many of the rest of us grew up during times when, across the board, religious and political authorities accepted that boys will be boys and girls better learn to keep quiet. Threats and violence often enforce secrecy.

Skipping forward, speaking on “Fresh Air,” Max Brooks suggested that China’s culture of secrecy contributed to coronavirus’s initial spread through Wuhan Province. Here, some leaders robustly denied American vulnerability to COVID 19. I wish we all could talk about tough things and not just talk tough.

Governor Cuomo suggests that mandated social isolation frees some of us to do things we’ve not had time to do. I want to write about what it’s like to recover from brain injury that, for decades, robbed me of my own memory and consciousness. I would rather gather together with friends and family. I want to go eat in a restaurant. Governor Cuomo says PAUSE but look forward. Excelsior.