SHELTER IN RACE: AN UN-AMUSEMENT

Two conversational topics, we are told, should never enter the work-place: religion and politics. You might as well add to that list “mortality” -- people work too hard making a living to be reminded of their death. We don’t talk about these things because they get sticky. After all, we might disagree. We might have varying opinions. You might want to give more weight to something than I want to give weight to it. What happens when the weight you feel outweighs the weight I don’t feel? See? It’s too tricky. We might even decide we don’t like each other as much as we thought we did when we both agreed that all these schmucks ruin their black coffee with vanilla flavored liquid PVC. Man, those were the days! Back when you and I agreed on what mattered most! Pure black coffee without the frou-frou nonsense! But that all had to get spoiled when I found out you think / believe / want / pray (or don’t) for and to ______________. And now my coffee doesn’t taste the same around you. My coffee is tainted with you-flavored PVC. Why’d you have to do that? Why’d you go and ruin both my work-place and my coffee? To avoid as much, we drink more and say less, even while yapping endlessly about nothing at all.

2020 has been -- how you say? -- an interesting year. Between our bodies forced to stay home and then, just as suddenly, our conscience forced outside, long hidden topics emerged. Major 2020 headlines assured Americans that religion (how we hope) and politics (how we treat people), even mortality (how long we dance with -- or around -- the first two), refuse to remain hidden. Pretending we have nothing significant to discuss is no longer an option. Pretending we have nothing more to learn is absurd. Pretending, in and of itself, has become an amusement, one we can no longer afford.

The word “amuse” is a funny word. We think of the word “amusing” as synonymous with “entertainment”. We are “amused” when something effortlessly holds our attention. “Amusement” feels good. It feels right in many moments. And we approve -- even gravitate -- towards conversations sparkling with “amusing” anecdotes. But “amuse” is born from a strange etymology. From the Old French “amuser”, the term meant “to avert attention, to beguile”. Adopted in English, it offered the opportunity “to divert from serious business.” Passed through time, “amuse” became a commonly trivial term that bore a strong -- though unknown -- indictment against the “amusement” seeker: to be “amused” literally means to look away from an important thing. So it’s safe to say that overly seeking amusement is a way to stifle personal responsibility, perhaps even curiosity. As the idiom suggests, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Amusement is lovely for assuring we’ve got nothing to fix.

2020 is the year America grappled with her love of amusement. Hollywood shut down. Concert venues, big and small, locked their doors. Sports took an indefinite time out. Bars issued a “last call” and meant it. Comfort food grew scarce. Streaming and gaming and Zooming grew repetitive and dull. Travel, even to the corner store, was banned. And, inevitably, we found fewer places to spend money in ways that scratched the itch of inadequacy. Our amusements, as a result, dried up like a God-damned dust bowl famine. And nothing burns America’s burger more than a failed amusement.

It was cute at first. We rediscovered nature. Rekindled old hobbies. Cleaned one thing and refurbished another. Checked in on so-and-so in an old fashion telephone or postage stamp kinda way. We stretched something other than the thing we normally exercise. We even found an old jigsaw puzzle or board game in the closet, and, for a moment, the people in our spaces felt less threatening long enough to share a plate of cookies without a need for earbuds. Hey, this wasn’t so bad. We might actually get through this. Home was not as foreign as many of us had feared. 

But then shit got real. Serious business and important things demanded our full listening attention, even if we were out of practice giving it.

Folks died. People out there -- not real ones in our cell phone -- expired under a viral weight. The numbers increased until they did not so much. So, per advice or spite, we ventured back into the street. Toes in water. Money in hand. Life was creeping back to normal, a million little fishes crawling back onto evolutionary land. Like good Americans, we prevailed! Until one day, in a street in a city in front of people who will never be so easily amused again, one man died under the weight of another man, and then we all discovered how “ain’t broke” we weren’t. We were the opposite in fact. Fragile as faberge against the hurricane winds of one another. 

And, just like that, all our avoidance of revealing topics in favor of amusing anecdotes left us dumbfounded and gobsmacked. We became all reaction and response and reTweet, righteous indignation curled up and floating out like chemical burn. And, sadly, even as we droned on and shouted louder, we were actually very much without words. Even worse, without the ability to listen. We had either forgotten how or maybe never learned; our hearing long tuned to a favored set-list of “Amen” and “Selah” and “Fuck Off”. Outside, the streets filled. The feet stomped. The signs waved. Trucks streamed waving flags. Statues chipped and fell. Cars blazed in high tongued flames. Gasses clouded our view and our path. People sat at home transfixed by the images, rubbing their jowls, shaking their heads. The news cycle spun on and on and on and on like a sweaty seated Peloton. From their vantage points of more years, my father spoke and your father spoke while George Floyd’s son entered downtown Bryan, Texas on a Sunday night to hear his father’s final words called out en masse as chorus. What did it sound like to Floyd’s son? So much breath declaring the opposite. So much volume announcing a silence. Afterwards, what more is there to say? If we’re not careful, we’ll think of something too quickly, not allowing these days to seep quietly into our skin and embolden our bones. 

It is amazing to consider our current moment. To recognize old prophecies in action. To witness creaky hinged closets shaking loose their bones. To realize that Americans have pushed hard to keep their biggest haunts -- Hope and People, even Death -- at bay; only now to drown in their inescapable shadows. The grand mission before us is not to make an amusement of one another’s plight. To not see the smoke filled street as a staged tragedy we might assess as entertainment. Many of us, beguiled by diversions, will. After all, we are Americans. Our blood runs back to more blood running down backs like butter over popcorn. We thrive in the tickle of such consumption, most significantly of each other.

But we were not designed this way. Long before we learned to consume one another as spectacles, we began together as a story. We were born as Breath. Given breath to give names. Named ourselves as characters. Intermittently recalled as syllables in the pulmonary squeeze and gust of a single oral history. Ask the scribes: our world is no library. Ask the seers: the nations are not separate channels in the stream of time. From the prelude bang to our present world to the whimpered end, everything that has Breath provides a word. Some become full sentences. Who’s to say what flourish or neutrality a life might add? But do not think for a moment that your dissatisfaction -- grumbled over your coffee with others preferring similar genre tropes as yourself -- means we’ve all lost the plot. Not a chance. We haven’t lost it because we’re smack dab in the middle of it. So hurry up and hush already. Stop your yapping and listen. Pages are turning here. The spine is taking new folds and creases while the day dawns with a great clearing of the throat, rumbling like bird song and ocean crash and wind wild whether we notice or not. So listen. Seriously, you do not want to miss this part.