“What Makes Us Human?”

“What Makes Us Human?”     August 9, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 

Forbes March 21, 2020

Mead said that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur found in an archaeological site. A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. This particular bone had been broken and had healed.

Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger; you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.

 

The Old Testament’s primeval history, recorded in the opening chapters of Genesis, gets dark fast. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. A serious 

Case of sibling rivalry turns into fratricide. Cain murders Abel and a very anthropomorphic character of God comes calling and asks Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” And Cain replies defiantly with a question that has echoed down through the centuries, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

 

I would be surprised if any sermon written on this text from the 4^th chapter of Genesis over the past 2500 years answered this question in the negative. The resounding response is so obvious that it is not even stated . . . “Yes,” “yes you are your brother’s keeper.”

 

But the language of church and synagogue are often in denial of the language in the marketplace. Seriously, to what degree is our neighbor, our sister or brother, or worse yet, the stranger on the other side of town . . . to what degree are they my problem? 

 

Especially in our post agrarian society, even more in our socially isolating, pandemic social order in which we focus on making sure that we have enough toilet paper, hand sanitizer, beef, and gasoline for ourselves before we give a moment’s thought to anyone else. Am I my brother’s keeper? To what degree are my sister’s problems also my problem? 

 

The most famous passage of scripture that isn’t in the Bible at all is, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” Especially in our American form of liberty and independence, we frequently insist upon a very strict, “I got mine” world view. We have seen this now for more than a decade of discussion about health insurance, especially in the coverage of “pre-existing” conditions. If insurance companies are legally required to cover pre-existing conditions, the healthcare costs for healthier people goes up. 

 

The debate over this part of Obama Care has pitted younger, healthier people who are often at the beginning of their career with lower wages, to help pay for the medical expenses of older and sicker people who maybe have more money. The Trump administration has filed law suits for the past three years trying to do away with mandated coverage for people with pre-existing conditions while publicly swearing that they will do whatever they can to protect this vital coverage . . . which, if you were looking for another reason to despise this president, this is a good reason. 

But in the “screw my brother and sister” category, locally, we have a classic example in Rachel Shelton who is suing the City of Springfield because of the mask requirement which she says that they do not have a right to impose on us. She explained, “Your health is not my responsibility. Your emotional well-being is not my responsibility,” Though she did cite her own claustrophobia as a reason for her lawsuit, so I guess 150,000 people are supposed to risk a lethal infection because of her emotional reaction to being asked to wear a mask over her mouth and nose. In classic white-privilege over-statement, she added in a news conference that the City Council, by asking us all to wear masks in public during a dangerous pandemic, that “they have created Nazi Germany here.” I’m sure you can all see the similarity between attempting military world domination and murdering millions of Jews, gays, gypsies, and special needs kids, and being asked to wear a mask.

 

She has set up a “go fund me” fund, asking for donations made out to her personally to help pay for her legal fight against this “Nazi” move on the part of 

the city. What galls me about her hypocrisy even more is that she claims to be a minister . . . which is why I always tell the stranger sitting next to me on a plane trip that I am a philosophy professor. 

I don’t believe we should call anyone “Karen” because it comes too close to being just another racial stereotype, besides, some people actually are named Karen and they probably want their name back but Rachel makes me understand why people came up with the term.

 

Rachel sees herself as an exemplary Christian while failing to get the answer right to one of the first questions in the Bible, “Am I my brother’s keeper.” Clearly, she doesn’t want to be. She is willing to fight for her right to be socially irresponsible and to publicly engage in depraved indifference towards her sisters and brothers, but she still wants to be the church lady. 

All of which is complicated for me by the fact that her legal counsel is our former city council member, Kristi Fulnecky, who literally embodies almost everything that generally makes people hate lawyers and right-wing Republicans. So, I don’t know about you, but I’m not donating to the legal defense fund. 

We took our wisdom lesson today from a story about the famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, 

Who told a class that the earliest sign of human civilization was tethered to the find of a human femur that had belonged to a man about 15,000 years ago. He had broken his leg and had survived long enough for it to heal. In most of nature, if you break the largest bone in your leg, you can’t run from danger, you can’t hunt, you can’t go for water, and so, in the animal kingdom, and among human ancestors prior to this, a broken femur meant that you would die. 

 

The evolutionary turn towards humanity was when tribal humans were able to move beyond the instinct to care for vulnerable babies to also apply that compassion to the sick and the elderly of their tribe. If Donald Trump had been around 15,000 years ago and saw this caveman with a broken leg, he would have said, “That’s a pre-existing condition, we don’t cover that.” Which, if Margaret Mead is correct in her anthropological assessment that caring for the man with a broken leg was a sign of humanity, not being willing to care for a man with a pre-

existing condition might therefore indicate that Trump is less than human . . . and that assumption matches previous evidence but that is not what we are here to talk about today.

 

What we are here to talk about was this crucial moment in ancient history when our pre-human ancestors stopped to consider taking on the challenge of caring about another member of the tribe who could no longer care for himself. This point of reflection when horror and fear are conquered by something else . . . when a primitive mind moves beyond sympathy, beyond empathy, to compassion . . . a level of compassion that involves willing sacrifice for another person. In fact, in this case, I can say even that this wounded individual became a “person” when someone decided that he was worth the risk, the effort, the sacrifice, to take care of him until he could walk again. 

 

It is a choice. You can see the wounded man as an “other” or as “one of us.” Maybe even see that it wouldn’t take very much of a twist of circumstances for you to be the one lying on the forest floor faced with the prospect of becoming saber-tooth food by sunset. It is in this very ancient impulse to “do unto others what you would have them to do unto you,” that we find our humanity.

 

But here is the problem: the work of evolution is never entirely finished. It is not that this cave man 15,000 years ago had a dawning realization and forever since there human civilization has been aware that we are our brother and sister’s keepers.

One moment in history we realize that we are our brother’s keeper and then, 15,000 years later, that old reptilian brain is still down there in our brain stem and we can give full throated vent to the belief that your health, your well-being, your survival is just not my problem. And I don’t mean to exploit Karen . . . I mean RACHEL here because it really isn’t just her. Some days it is all of us, and every day, it is a lot of us, who choose not to evolve, to take a giant step backwards. 

 

We have very persuasive language about it…. We need to have boundaries . … we don’t want to be enablers . . . we need to tend our own gardens . . . . you be you, I’ll be me. There is some truth behind all of that . . . but then there is this guy with a broken leg, you know, the person who lost their job, whose employer moved to China, the one who struggles with demons we cannot see but that are real to them. 

There are people who have a very high likelihood of dying from Covid-19 if they get it . . . people who need for us to wear a mask, wash our hands, keep our distance, and get a vaccine when we can.

 

How human we are is not about something that happened among our ancestors thousands of years ago. How human we are is the sum total of the choices we have made during our lives. We don’t always choose correctly. We get it right sometimes, we get it wrong sometimes, and sometimes we are just too tired to do the right thing that we know is right.

 

Still, I love this bit of wisdom from the solitude of Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor.’

 

Mrs. Shelton, in spite of her protestations of faith, is reacting out of fear, letting her lizard brain speak before her more evolved brain gets a chance to do the right thing. And, Mrs. Fulnecky is, well, being Mrs. Fulnecky . . . her name has more than 4 letters but it is still a 4 letter word . . . but you, you are not Shelton or Fulnecky . . . about you I can say that I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a person to elevate her or himself by conscious endeavor. 

 

Covid-19 is highly infectious. It often manages to get around masks, hand sanitizer, social distancing and it may even get past the first rounds of vaccines and we can be reasonably frightened by this potentially lethal virus. But beyond that fear, this is our opportunity to evolve, to be more than what we have been, to be the heroes that the moment calls for. 

 

Compassion is the key to the spiritual life. You are the one who will not leave the guy with the broken leg to die. You are the ones with an evolved conscience. I trust you and I believe in you.

Fake News: Being Informed in an Age of Propaganda

Fake News: Being Informed in an Age of Propaganda       August 2, 2020

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.” ~Will Rogers

 

I have never been one to wear a hat. I never thought they looked good on me, so I had all but dismissed the topic when I started to get some bad spots on my face that made my doctor insist that I start wearing a hat when I am in the sun. But you can’t really wear a straw hat in the winter time, and you can’t wear an Indian Jones fedora when you are wearing a clergy collar to a protest. So, the collection grew. But then came the pandemic, with lots of hours of looking into a computer screen, a computer screen that knows that you ordered one hat a year or two ago, and has never given up on suggesting others. You spend a lot of time alone during a pandemic. 

I don’t want to be too specific about just how many hats I have ordered during these past few months but it ended with this one. . . which both sort of rounded out the collection and made a bold statement regarding the complete irrationality that I would ever have an occasion to wear a steam punk top hat. . . unless it was right now?

 

This little hat buying jag I have been on is the result of both targeted advertising and the fact that, for reasons that are not clear even to me, I wanted to be persuaded to buy several hats. In my own defense, I have spent most of the past four months almost entirely unsupervised. Pandemic isolation starts to work on you after a while. 

That’s the real secret sauce in advertising. Commercials can make a product look glamorous, or tasty, or convince you that it is a sign of status, success, or sex appeal but they can’t make you buy it. They can just feed into the appetite that you already have and give you a clear glidepath to the cash register. 

 

The spyware on our computers, the customer information profile that Amazon and Sams builds on us and, possibly even the ever-listening home assistant devices that many insist will hear them mention products they might want, certainly helps to target advertisements to us. My FaceBook page knows to show me ads for scuba diving vacations, fountain pens, hats, and even though I have an SUV and a pickup truck, my page knows that I used to own a convertible and that I never fail to stop and look at ads for what might be my next one. 

 

Still, no matter how they may try, they cannot sell things to me that I do not want. It doesn’t matter how much they discount Arby’s, Taco Bell, tattoos, or feminine hygiene products, I’m not buying. 

 

So, when we talk about “fake news” in our day, a lot of what passes for news is fake, some of it pathetically obviously fake, and yet, what makes it believable to people is that they already want to believe it. As Fran Lebowitz so succinctly summed up the motivation of the Trump supporter: 

Trump’s very public bigotry and racism gives people permission to say and to believe things that, even five years ago, they would have been embarrassed to say out loud; but they harbored bigoted and racist feelings and now, in the time of Trump and their enablers at Fox News, they are given license to elevate Archie Bunker to the role of messiah. 

Objectively, for all of the public bloviating about it, during the entire time that

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/theres-new-wall-194-miles-border-16-miles-didnt-have-wall-before/

Trump has been in office, his administration has managed to construct only 194 miles of wall between the USA and Mexico’s 2000 mile long shared border but even that amount is inflated because all but 16 miles of it was replacement wall. And yet, Trump has recently credited his “big beautiful wall” with keeping Mexicans out of the USA and by keeping them out, he has prevented the spread of Covid 19. This is clearly not true. The addition of 16 miles of fence on a 2000-mile border is very nearly inconsequential. So, who believes this propaganda? Obviously, the only people who believe it are people who desperately want to believe it and virtually no amount of evidence could convince them otherwise. 

Religious people have known how this works for thousands of years, from a talking snake to a talking burning bush, to virgin births, walking on water, and miraculous healings we have been limbered up to believe the impossible because we want to believe it, not because it is true. There are 50,000 people right here in Springfield who would be willing to fight you over the claim that Jesus physically walked on the Sea of Galilee, which, sadly, is about the same number of people who in Springfield who believe that Trump has built hundreds of miles of wall along our border with Mexico and that somehow, Mexico paid for it, which, if it were true, would have been more of a miracle than walking on water, but it comes from the same kind of thinking. 

 

Chris Wallace recently interviewed President Trump for Fox News and I don’t know if this was just a fig leaf for Fox or if Chris Wallace was sincerely going after Trump, but there were dozens of points at which Wallace confronted Trump’s misstatements of facts. Things that are objective facts, like claiming that the USA had the lowest death rate in the world from Covid-19 infections when we are, in fact, on a per capita basis, somewhere between number 7 and number 10 in the world. And even when confronted about the facts, Trump defends himself by claiming that Fox is fake news, one of the only things I would normally agree with Trump about, but, in this interview, Wallace came armed with the facts and he was not afraid to produce them.

 

It was still a bit of a softball interview, no questions about the use of secret police in American cities or the Russian policy of paying bounties for every American soldier killed in Afghanistan. . . it wasn’t like Trump had agreed to let me ask him some questions, but, for Fox, it wasn’t a puff piece. 

 

But the current pandemic presents us with life or death issues in discerning what is reliable information and what is fake news. Right now, we are still fighting the ne mask requirements in most cities. This fight probably won’t last much longer because it is increasingly difficult to deny the obvious fact that wearing a mask slows the spread of infection . . . it doesn’t stop it entirely but it may reduce the threat of infection by more than 90% and half of that would make it worth mandating. But there are still any number of people who don’t want to wear one and, sadly, many people have turned it into a partisan issue.

 

Now that we are seeing members of the Trump administration wearing masks and, in fact, several members of the administration testing positive for the coronavirus, then it is becoming less partisan, but a lot of the crazy videos we have seen of people in grocery stores and Walmarts around the country who were throwing fits over being asked to wear a mask really boiled down to a conservative verses liberal divide. 

 

Things like science, medicine, virology, should never become Republican vs Democrat, or conservative vs liberal, but they have; and my fear is that it will extend to the next big Coronavirus hurdle, which is vaccinations.

The case for wearing masks is pretty straight forward. You are less likely to spread the virus if we avoid spitting on each other. Something that people in Asia who have lived through other infections viral diseases in recent history, now instinctively accept. But a vaccine is less easily verified visually.

 

Look, folks, we all want for this to be over. Life may never be normal, if normal means life as it was lived before the pandemic. I don’t know if we will ever go to crowded concerts or even churches ever again, but as normal as life is going to be, it is going to be accomplished when we have herd immunity. 

Now, let me drill down on this: The virus, as scary looking as it is, does not have legs, it does not have wings. The virus can only travel in the lungs of a host. Literally, you have to help to spread it or it will not spread. If everyone on earth socially isolated for 14 days in a row, it would virtually cease to exist. 

The pandemic continues only because our attempts at stay at home orders and business closings have only been partial and, in most cases, halfhearted. We are still working for the virus, carrying it to thousands of new victims every day. 

 

If this were a less lethal virus, we might reach herd immunity by just going on with our lives and letting virtually everyone become infected. When the infection rate got high enough, so that 80-90% of people had antibodies, then the spread of the virus would diminish to very low levels. But this novel virus keeps surprising us. Not only is it very lethal for certain parts of our society, but the antibodies don’t seem to hang on at any useful level very long. 

 

Sweden made a courageous attempt at just martialing forward to achieve herd immunity through infection. They told the elderly and those with underlying conditions to shelter at home, but they let everyone else just go on with work, school, and retail life. The result has been that Sweden has arrived at one the highest death rates in the world and they never reached herd immunity. Estimates are that if the USA had followed the same path, rather than having lost over 140,000 Americans, we might have had as many as 2 million fatalities.

Herd immunity happens when nearly 90% of us can no longer be infected by the virus and, the only way that is going to happen is when there is an effective vaccine AND, AND, when 90% of us have been willing to get vaccinated, and that, my friends, is our next big moral hurdle. We’re probably at least 6 months away from a vaccine being available and it could easily be much longer but, in current polling, as many as 50% of Americans are already saying that they are not going to take it. 

Just not going to take it. Mind you, with a virus like this, it isn’t just about me being protected, we need herd immunity and not just in America, we need herd immunity on all 7 continents because if we allow some poor nation to become the next hot spot, the virus will gather strength, mutate, and spread again. We need global compliance. 

 

When someone tells you that they are not going to get the shingles vaccine because they don’t believe in vaccines, you might try to reason with them, but, in the end, if they are unconvinced, just tell them to enjoy their months long experience of searing nerve pain and hope they don’t lose vision in one or both eyes but, in the case of shingles, I have my vaccine and what she does will not affect me personally. Covid-19, however, won’t work that way.

 

So why do people say that they have decided not to take the vaccine? There are a few possible reasons.

The first is, as you know, some people are crazy. . . like this lady demonstrating in front of the White House earlier this spring. They think the vaccine is a way for Bill Gates to inject them with a GPS tracking device as if Bill Gates really really wants to know which bingo hall this senior citizen goes to on Friday night. The sign she carries says “chloroquine works” which, by my count, makes her approximately the third person in the world insane enough to believe that, right after Trump and Brazil’s Bolsonaro. 

 

We could wish that this abuela was an outlier but when you consider that after all we have been through, 40% of American voters still plan to vote for Trump a second time, you see that there is a strain of irrationality within our society that, while not a majority, is a significantly large minority. 

 

Secondly, there are what we call the “anti-vaxxers” who just don’t want to inject themselves and especially not their children with unknown foreign substances. Some faction of this “crunchy granola” crowd continues to pass around the myth that vaccines cause autism, a claim which has been proven to be totally wrong in multiple studies over three decades and yet, some people are more willing to trust a rumor they got from social media than they are hard scientific research. As our friend Paul Thomlinson has said here in the past, “What do children get from vaccines? – They get immunity to polio, chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough – but they don’t get autism from a vaccine.”

 

And thirdly, there are those who simply do not trust anything that comes from our government anymore. I have some sympathy with them. Many black Americans refuse to trust the government with any inoculation and that is not without reason. 

Over a period of 40 years, lasting right up to when I was in high school in the 1970s, the government was secretly injecting poor black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, with syphilis to see how the disease affected them. More than 600 men were tricked into this study. This is not on some 19^thcentury slave plantation, this went on until 1972, 20 years after the Civil Rights Movement, then years after schools were integrated in Alabama. Sure, it has been a minute, but I understand if there are a lot of black people who are not ready to let their guard down.

 

Many people in the Latinx community are distrustful of government vaccination programs because, for them, the pharmaceutical testing done on women in Puerto Rico is still not a matter lost only to history and even after the tragic mishaps of testing in the 1950’s on unsuspecting women, many pharmaceutical labs have continued testing on paid “volunteers” in Puerto Rico until recently. . . because it is still legal to exploit the poor. 

 

But, hey, I’m not black and I’m not Latino but I have my trust issues when it comes to the government and not just ours. Boris Johnson told people in the United Kingdom that the Covid virus was nothing to be afraid of, until, of course, he got it. Boslonaro in Brazil told his citizens that it was just like getting a cold and chloroquine would cure it . . . I don’t wish anything bad on Brazil’s “Bozo” but if he is injured by chloroquine, I am not likely to go into mourning.

But, of course, no one can raise “stupid” to a higher standard than our own president who not only tried to dismiss the severity of the infection, and tried to sell people on taking chloroquine, but even went so far as to suggest ingesting or injecting disinfectants or trying to get intense UV light into your lungs. . . prompting many disinfectant companies to quickly put out public service announcements to tell people that following the president’s advice could cause serious illness or death.

 

So, in a way, I get it, black people, brown people, women, even white men, we all can find a very plausible reason to be suspicious of anything our government tells us that they are doing to help us because we know that they have a long history of actually coming to do something to us.

 

In these days of seriously incompetent government, and rampant fake news, when even the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are so mired in politics that you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt, we have to find a way to research, give critical analysis to what we are told, to find credible sources of medical information, and find the vaccine that you will take, if not only for yourself but for everyone else, who would like, one day, to be able to go to a movie, to a concert, to church, or a family vacation. 

 

I’ve known plenty of people who have turned wallowing in conspiracy theories into a form of entertainment. I’ve known people who believed that the government was seeding the atmosphere with mind control drugs in the chem-trail vapors left behind jets, that George W. Bush planned the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and anxiety about genetically altered foods and the motivations behind their development has turned Momma Jeans from a quirky little hippy health food store in the low rent district into a multi-location, fabulously successful exploitation of the irrational paranoia of people who didn’t do well in high school science. . . OK, OK, I’ll grant that there is reason for concern about how corporations are tampering with our food supply but since they have been putting preservatives and sugar into almost everything we eat for a hundred years, I’m just saying that your GMO concerns might not deserve to be your primary focus.

 

Still, just like listeners to talk radio learned to find being angry to be a form of entertainment 30 years ago, people who share conspiracy theories these days do so for cheap thrills and attention on social media. Knock yourselves out when it comes to “who really shot John Kennedy,” and, I’ll admit, I really don’t think that 

Jeffery Epstein committed suicide . . . what malignant narcissist every does?

 

But don’t play that game with Covid-19. Don’t repeat stupid myths about how wearing a mask is the same thing as wearing a yellow star in Nazi Germany, and don’t gin up crazy reasons to endanger everyone else by refusing to take the vaccine as soon as it is available. 

 

Look into it. You have reason to be cynical about the profit motivations of big pharma, the political motivations of our government, and the sloppy science behind a lot of media hype . . . I’ll admit, I would rather get my first vaccine from the labs at Oxford University in England that will not try to profit from it, than from any American laboratory that will. Still, I’ll take the first vaccine that is available to me that Dr. Fauci says is reliable. And yes, I know that he has not always been right and that historically, he really missed the mark on some issues, but on the whole, I believe that he and a number of other very sincere scientists are trying their best to save us from a lethal pandemic and we all need to do our part to make them successful.

 

 

We like to say that we are all in the same boat, but we are not. We are in the same storm, but we are in different boats. People who have the same income today that they had in January are not in the same boat with the 40 million people who have become unemployed. People who are comfortably living in the same house that you were living in when the pandemic began, are not in the same boat with the anticipated 15 million families who will have their home foreclosed on before the end of this year. And if you are a couple living, just the two of you, in a three or four bedroom home where you get bored and antsy waiting out the pandemic, you are not in the same boat as most immigrant families, living with three generations in a two bedroom, one bath home with a dozen people in it. Try to properly distance in that boat! And if you have health insurance and an established relationship with a trusted healthcare provider, you are not in the same boat at all as the people who are facing this coronavirus without access to medical care. 

 

For the insured, comfortably housed, who have a secure income and good healthcare to wallow in conspiracy theories or to be obstinate about either wearing a mask or getting the vaccine is a luxury that the poor and minorities cannot afford for you to claim. 

 

Besides, right now, because we have screwed up this first part of the pandemic so badly, we are not welcome to travel to Bonaire, Belize, the Bahamas, or any of the other places where my daughter and I plan to go scuba diving. 

So, I’ll listen to your theory about how the mafia orchestrated the assassination of JFK, just take the vaccine and so that Uncle Sam can let my people go!

 

 

 

 

 

“The Invisible Pandemic within the Pandemic”

“The Invisible Pandemic within the Pandemic”  July 26, 2020

Drs Stephen Christiansen, Roger Ray, and Paul Thomlinson

click here to see the video

Politico, By BRIANNA EHLEY  06/29/2020

Top Trump administration officials say drug overdose deaths are surging amid the coronavirus pandemic, driven by increased substance use due to anxiety, social isolation and depression.

A White House drug policy office analysis shows an 11.4 percent year-over-year increase in fatalities for the first four months of 2020, confirming experts’ early fears that precautions like quarantines and lockdowns combined with economic uncertainty would exacerbate the addiction crisis.

ROGER: I am not the sort of person to ever say that I am tired of being right about things but at this moment, I am. When the pandemic began I publicly expressed concern about the spread of the virus among imprisoned populations and especially among the children being held by ICE on our border. I did not mention nursing homes but, those in prison and in detention, and those housed in long term care facilities have been the hardest hit in the pandemic, accounting for more than half of the fatalities in America. 

At the end of March, when we first began our lock down, I posted some

meditations online warning those who had a proclivity for drug abuse, depression, or who suffered with suicidal ideation out of a fear that since all three of those problems are either caused or made worse by social isolation, that the pandemic would likely make all three a more serious concern.

I have been actively supportive of AA and AlAnon meetings for the past 40 years and I have never seen a holiday, or an event of weather ever cancel a meeting, but a pandemic is different. In person AA meetings have almost entirely ceased and online alternatives just don’t work for everyone. So, I expected addiction to be a growing problem. But I was not prepared for what I read in the Washington Post a few weeks ago when they published that: Nationally overdoses in the United States jumped 18 percent in March, 29 percent in April and 42 percent in May according to the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program, a federal initiative that collects data from ambulance teams, hospitals and police.” 

Data for June and July are not currently available to me but given this meteoric rise, in spite of a relative silence in the media, deaths from overdoses, primarily a synthetic fentanyl, must be rivaling the fatality rate from Covid-19, literally, a silent pandemic within the viral pandemic. 

I have invited two friends, both of whom I have known for more than 25 years, to join me today. Dr. Paul Thomlinson has two PhD’s in psychology and is a leading researcher in suicide’s causes and prevention. Dr. Stephen Christiansen is a former trauma surgeon who evolved into being an addiction treatment physician. 

Speaking first as a member of the clergy, I have been painfully aware, as Viktor Frankl noted nearly 75 years ago, that addiction, depression and suicide are primarily caused by social isolation . . . and not mere loneliness, because many of the people we have seen have lots of social connections, but more an isolation from meaningful connection. 

Frankl could not have imagined the emergence of the internet and certainly not social media, but he did chronical the breakdown of social norms and customs which once kept families and friendships knit together at a more substantive and meaningful level. 

I have always believed that the two most meaningful reasons for churches to exist in this modern and largely post-theistic age, is to create meaningful community connection and to organize well-intended people into opportunities for community service and action. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, we are nearly entirely prevented from in-person community gatherings and a non-compliant community makes community service or public demonstration a potentially life-threatening situation.  We do what we can to make progressive faith relevant to our viewers online, but I know that the lack of contact is undermining our effectiveness. Let me ask you, Paul and Steve, for your reactions to this sudden escalation of addiction over the past three months.

STEVE:   Let me begin by thanking you for asking me to participate. A great deal has changed in our understanding of the "use disorders", the present idiom for what used to be called abuse or addiction. There is a growing realization that all of these "disorders" represent self medication of what is usually a inherited problem with producing brain chemicals. These disorders can broadly be grouped into self treatment for anxiety(nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, bento's, and barbiturates) or self treatment for depression(amphetamines,ketamine, peyote). Since these are inherited diseases, they are best treated by restoring the deficient brain chemicals to a better balance by using medication , exercise, counciling, or other social interventions so that the patient can be the best person that they can be. I believe that the increase in deaths we are seeing related to OD is caused by the increased stress we have been experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the social unrest related to the polarization of society. Stress requires increased coping skills which are already stretched thin in  people already self medicating to cope. Obviously, it doesn't help that fentanyl has arrived and is incredibly potent. Any failure to appropriately mix it with base leads to overdose. As an aside, overdose from stimulants have been on the rise and are now nearly as large as opioid deaths.

Of interest is the most recent press release from the Mo governors office stating that opioid death rates have fallen in Missouri. I am not sure that rings true and it does not speak about the surge in stimulant deaths in the last year that no one is talking about. Today, the accepted most effective therapy for opioid use disorder is MMT(monitored maintenance therapy, medication maitainence therapy). The success rates for abstinence based therapies are about 10%(meaning 10% remain off of opiates at the end of a year) while the success rates for MMT programs(which combine a closely monitored maintenance dose of an opiate and counciling) are about 70%(meaning that 70% of those who began the program remain on it and off street drugs a the end of a year). The documented reduction in mortality is also impressive. A IV drug user has an apx 13x increased risk of dying compared to an non-user. An oral opiate user has a 4x risk. MMT reduces those risks to about 1.7x a non-user. In practice, safety is the last selling point for the programs but the easiest for a non-user to understand. MMT is safer, cheaper, and legal. The average price of oxycodone on the street is about a dollar a milligram(a 10mg oxycodone retails for about $10). Most oral users use 60-120mg a day. Most MMT programs cost about $10/day including drug costs and monitoring. It further allows a user to qualify fro jobs that demand a urine drug screen pre-hire. This opens up a large range of employment opportunities that otherwise would be closed. Once the daily search for money and supplies has ended, social relationships that have been damaged or destroyed by years of lying and stealing can be repaired. 

While the only currently approved replacement therapies are for nicotine and opiates, there is interest in extending the replacement and counciling model to stimulants. The most challenging and common problem is the anxiety driven use disorders. The ugly truth is that we do not have a good medical treatment for excess anxiety. Benzodiazapams(Valium, Xanax, ativan, klonipin, etc) are effective in the short term but habituation occurs making them less than desirable long term choices. Gabapentin is marginally effective for anxiety though is often used in an attempt to avoid the benzo's. Commonly used drugs like VIstaril(which is an antihistamine) do not target the GABA receptor at all and just make people sleepy. SSRI's and SNRI's have some anxiety relieving effects but are not reliable or rapidly effective. Alcohol works rapidly and is effective but in susceptible individuals, can lead to overuse and a long lis too problems. Nicotine is the only anti-anxiety drug I am aware of that has a rapid onset, tolerable habituation, and makes you more alert, not less. Unfortunately, the delivery system(inhaled smoke or chewing) leads to a whole host of problems which are well publicized. 

I wish that there was higher availability of counciling services and the they were much better coordinated with the services I provide. In my experience, finding a good councilor is difficult and once found, getting insurance to pay for any councilor, let alone the good one is very difficult. Counciling is an investment in oneself and requires time to be effective. For those reasons, my schedule is always full of people struggling with anxiety, depression, or fatigue and wanting relief.

Paul:  Thanks for the invitation, Roger…always a pleasure and my honor to share this panel with you and Steve. As you know, I’ve also been concerned about this from the jump as well, and have done a couple of podcast pieces on it through Compass Health Network.

Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse has recently written in the Annals of Internal Medicine of how the global COVID-19 pandemic is colliding with the more familiar public health crisis of substance use disorders. By that, she meant that we were already struggling with the wildfire opioid epidemic and the fatalities related to that, and then the COVID tsunami hit us.

As Dr. Volkow points out, we can easily see how COVID-19 can make things even more difficult for people with addictions…for example, the healthcare system may not prepared to take care of them in the midst of the demands created by COVID. There are also stigma and social issues created by this crisis: so-called social distancing may make these people even more vulnerable because it interferes with many of the support systems that can help them to reach and maintain recovery. Add to that the fact that drugs themselves negatively impact our physiology and make us more susceptible to infection and more prone to poor outcomes and it becomes very obvious why we should be concerned about the collision of these public health crises.

As I’ve noted before, the lack of a sense of mission, the lack of a purpose in life, has been identified as one of the major factors that make people more vulnerable to taking drugs. We know that feeling irrelevant, feeling that no one cares about you, is probably one of the most devastating feelings a human being can have. Epidemiological studies show that social isolation and neglect increase dramatically the risk of taking drugs, and, if you are trying to stop taking drugs, it increases that risk of relapse. So, as Dr. Volkow has put it, the challenge is “How do we provide social support for people at risk of substance abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic?” This got me thinking about what we’ve learned about substance use in the past few decades. Some of you may remember a series of anti-drug messages from the 1980’s including one PSA, based on studies from the 1960’s, showing rats in a cage dying from consuming heroin. You see, in those studies scientists put rats in cages with two water bottles. One bottle had water; the other bottle had water laced with either cocaine or heroin. In virtually every case, in this free choice situation, the rats would keep going back to the drug-laced water bottle and fairly quickly die of an overdose. The conclusions are clear, right? Drugs have an inherent hook in them, they are addictive, and if you start them, they will kill you.

Kind of ironically, those messages and the underlying studies became an inspiration for a psychology researcher named Dr. Bruce Alexander at Simon Fraser University. This clever psychologist wondered, what else is going on here, and maybe it’s not really the drugs themselves that explain what’s happening. He wondered if it might be the cage, the environment in which these rats were placed—a bleak and solitary existence in which they only thing there was to do was…drink water or take drugs. So, Alexander repeated the experiments, but rather than putting one rat in a small cage, he created what he called “rat park.” Famously now, this cage was filled with lots of good things to eat, other rats for socialization and plenty of physical intimacy, and toys and colored balls for recreation. Rat park also had two water bottles: one with water, and one with drugged water. The rats tried both, but given the choice between good food, enjoyable activities, and playful friends, none of the rats became addicted or overdosed. Not a single death by overdose. They, in fact, didn’t like the drugged water.

Does this study have any relevance to humans? Of course it does. Pesky research ethics prevent us from putting humans in cages for extended periods of time with ad libitum drug consumption…but as Johann Hari beautifully describes in his book Chasing the Scream, in the Vietnam War and it’s aftermath, we have something of a natural human experiment that illustrates the principles very well. At one point, a huge number, upwards of ten percent of American soldiers stationed in a miserable jungle, where they didn’t want to be and where they might be killed at any moment, were using heroin. It was feared that when these soldiers came home, we would have hoards of vacant-eyed heroin addicts roaming our streets—but that’s not what happened, thankfully. When they were removed from their virtual rat cages in the jungles of Vietnam, and were able to come home to the embrace of family, the meaningful activities of employment and school, most were no longer interested in heroin and simply quit. They were not criminal nor physically addicted. They just changed their cages.

As the great Hungarian born, Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Mate has put it, “All substances of abuse will either treat pain or distract from pain. So the question is not, why the addiction, but why the pain?” This question is a haunting one…it is what we must answer if we are to make long-term, sustainable recovery possible for people with addictions. The sources of the pain that humans treat with whiskey and Oxycontin, with cocaine and benzodiazapines, are many—chronic physical pain from injuries and illnesses, for sure. But I’m convinced it is much more likely to include psychic pain from trauma (either in childhood or later), from interpersonal alienation from primary relationships, from family disconnection and conflict, from shame and guilt heaped upon us, from abject loneliness, from having not found a guiding passion or a meaningful purpose for one’s life. These are the real sources of pain that lead so many to find connection with alcohol or other drugs. These are the sources of pain that lead to self-medication. These are the sources of pain we can and must find ways and means of treating.

I’ll conclude with an all-too-obvious application of all this to our current circumstances, the COVID-19 crisis. Under quarantine, we may all begin to feel like rats in cages, right? What if our cage is feeling pretty desolate, and we have two bottles from which to choose? We might begin to choose the whiskey bottle, or the bottle of pills, rather than the healthier water bottle if we don’t take care to enrich our environment. Rat park was an enriched environment that included, not insignificantly, other rats with whom to play, socialize, have sex…be close to. So we need to enrich our environments by bringing our offline supports online through regular phone calls, FaceTime, Zoom, syncing up Netflix accounts. Getting and/or staying connected with others is really the most important thing we can do for ourselves right now. We need to enrich our environments by refusing to drink from the firehose and restricting the flow of bad news and misinformation—make sure we are getting good information, and balance it with stories of human kindness and resilience. We need to enrich our environments by developing and demonstrating mastery—learn something new or practice something old. To be most helpful and hopeful, make sure it is something that provides meaning and purpose to life—some way of adding beauty to your own life or those of others, some way of contributing joy to someone who may desperately need your light. Let’s all enrich these cages we are living in, together.

I also want to speak specifically to a potential perfect storm for a rapid spike in suicides as well. Clearly, there are major risk factors afoot these days: economic stress, social isolation, loss of community and religious contacts, barriers to mental health treatment, other medical problems not getting proper treatment, and social media influences. So far, we don’t know what the impact is on suicide…but we are worried, obviously. Yet, there is cause for some optimism on this point. Suicide rates have declined in the period after past national disasters (eg, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks). One hypothesis is the so-called pulling-together effect, whereby individuals undergoing a shared experience might support one another, thus strengthening social connectedness. Recent advancements in technology (eg, video conferencing) might facilitate pulling together. Epidemics and pandemics may also alter one’s views on health and mortality, making life more precious, death more fearsome, and suicide less likely. But, clearly, we are not pulling together to the extent that we could or should in order to make this a real protective factor against suicide. Wear a mask…it’s a tangible sign that you care about someone other than yourself…and that maybe, just maybe, we can pull together.

“Could You Be A Sociopath?”

“Could You Be A Sociopath?”    July 12, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) wrote in 1962, when The New Yorker commissioned her, a Jew of who had narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany herself, to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.

“You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/?fbclid=IwAR2_QRBEW3eq4-YH1NnnX-9PBHz8MpRvXICd2q2cyQS4ObGQz6dmZCudYIs

In October of 1989 there was an earthquake in San Francisco and a very old part of their freeway system, the Nimitz, collapsed. 11 people lost their lives in this incident, 39 people were trapped in their cars between these pancaked layers of the freeway who were eventually rescued. 

I remember when it happened. I was living in Louisville, KY. My daughter was just 10 months old; I had a new doctorate and a challenging career and, frankly, I didn’t think about this incident for a long time. Check your own feelings about it now . . . do you remember it? Does it pull any emotional energy out of you?

A few years ago, I met a delightful single woman for dinner at a French restaurant about 50 miles west of town. She is a children’s author who lives alone on a farm in the wilds of southern Missouri. She was one of the 39 people pulled from her car from between the collapsed expressway. 

She was a college student then but after the incident, she couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork. She took the money she had for her education and found the best deal on just a tract of land that she could find and moved to live in noiseless isolation without crowded expressways and long commutes. Though she never married, never had children, she applied her considerable intellect to writing children’s books and has had a successful career. 

I was evidently neither sufficiently charming nor interesting enough to entice her to meet me for a second dinner, but we speak now and then. I called to check on her after the pandemic “stay at home orders” and she laughed and said, “I was made for this. Staying home alone is what I do.” 

I know you were not at the dinner with us that night but when you look at this image of the collapsed highways now, do you feel a little something more? Knowing that about an hour and half west of here, there is a beautiful, mature woman, who is still, in a way, stuck in her car between two giant slabs of concrete and steel? Because, folks, we do not have an unlimited supply of empathy. We can only care about so much before we become emotionally exhausted. But if you spent a couple of hours with this author, you would remember the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway and the earthquake in San Francisco in October of 1989 differently.

One of the most memorable yet disturbing moments of my graduate school education was when my counseling professor, the late Dr. Liston Mills, said to me, “You try to tell yourself that you love all of your clients but the fact is that no one actually loves more than four or five people at any time. If you are a saint, you might be able to muster the energy to love eight people. So, you have a case load of 20 clients. Which ones can you really care about?” I argued with him, of course, that’s what I did. I had more than a hundred parishioners, 20 counseling clients, a dozen family members, he just couldn’t be right. I thought he was cruel. In fact, I don’t know how that got him to smile for this photo, I had him as my counselor, advisor, and professor for 8 years and I never saw him smile. I thought, Mills can’t care about more than four or five people, but I can. 

But folks, Mills was a lot smarter than I am so don’t be too quick to dismiss what he said. You wake up every day with a certain amount of emotional energy, . . . let’s say you have a 100 units of energy that you can spend. You spend some just dealing with the people you live with getting breakfast and getting dressed. Maybe some in traffic on the way to work. Maybe some more dealing with staff and peers.

Then, imagine that you are a therapist and you have managed to make it to your desk with 80 units left and you are going to do an intake group of six new patients in the addiction treatment program, then go up to the floor and have individual meetings with patients for the next several hours. Maybe there was a suicide on the floor and the family of eight or nine people are waiting for you to go into a conference room to tell them that their dad won’t be coming home. You are going to have to borrow some of those emotional energy chips from tomorrow’s supply but then, your schedule tomorrow is going to look a lot like today’s. And when you get home, if you have family waiting for you, they will expect something from you too.

That was my job in my final year of my doctorate when Liston Mill’s was telling me that I just couldn’t begin to do what I thought I had to do everyday. I had three patients on my floor in the VA who had survived a suicide attempt. You can shoot yourself in the head and not die . . . I always had one or two of those on my floor, but I realized that I couldn’t remember their names. And I hated Liston Mills that day because I didn’t want for him to be right. . . but I knew he was.

So, you come here, and I ask you to be concerned about Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, George Floyd. I tell you about how the Taliban shot Malala in the face, about Asian women being trafficked for prostitution in local spas and massage parlors, and I talk about the poor being manipulated by predatory lenders, and tens of thousands dying from opioid addiction. And I try to keep all of those children in dog cages, separated from their families on the boarder, front of mind. Frankly, you are brave to come back here. I ask for a lot of your emotional energy. 

I know that preachers are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but I don’t really throw out a lot of comfort and I apologize for that. I have an assumption that spiritual people are always in training for an empathy marathon. As St. Bernard said, “I love that I may love, so that I may love.” That is, I am asking you to exercise your empathy, to make your loving heart stronger, to expand your grasp. But I know, sometimes you hear me talk about the #MeToo movement, then it is #BlackLivesMatter, and then it is #TransRights, and I’m sure that you have heard about black-trans people being sexually harassed, and so when I tell the very large and unmasked lady who is blocking the aisle at Sam’s that 120,000 people have already died from covid-19 and 2 million have been infected, when she replies with an invitation for me to kiss a frankly, shockingly enormous part of her anatomy, we can’t be too surprised. 

We started this pandemic four months ago with panic buying of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, so that those who have no empathy for others, hoarded basic necessities until our retail supply chain was literally broken. Now it is devolving into the moral battle of the wearing of masks in public to slow the spread of the virus. Those of us who have been exposed to the spiritual training of empathy, immediately accepted the expert advice to wear a mask in public but noticeably, most people just didn’t. Why didn’t they?

There was a piece in our paper this week about how retail stores are getting trapped in the middle of what has ironically become a political divide. Customers at our local sort-of-hippy health food stores, Mama Jean’s, have gotten irate at clerks for wearing masks, vowing not to return if they don’t take them off? What is that about? 

Wearing a mask may not be a panacea, while there is lots of evidence to say that they help, they are anything but a certain form of protection, but why would someone insist that others not wear one? It has, in the most mind-numbing way, become a matter of politics. 

Most of you will remember that in 1982, almost 40 years ago, someone in Chicago put cyanide in Tylenol capsules. 7 people were killed in this senseless crime, all in the Chicago area. But people all across America stopped taking Tylenol. It forced the over the counter medication industry to turn on a dime, changing how they made capsules and how they packaged them, so that now we have tamper proof seals on everything from aspirin to seasoned salt and whatever that film is that they put on my cottage cheese carton. No one ever suggested that Democrats should stop taking Tylenol, but Republicans should take two every morning. 

There was a known public health risk, everyone took precautions, the industry made adjustments and now, I’m sure, that if I hadn’t brought it up, no one ever thinks about those 7 people who died from cyanide laced Tylenol. Now, 120,000 people have died from Covid-19 and the suggestion that you wear a mask in public to protect others in case you are infected, has become a literal war, cast largely as a political left verses the political right and no part of this makes the least amount of sense. Why did we believe the experts about Tylenol but half of the country, and the majority of our locals, insist that their wishful thinking is more reliable than the advice of experts?

A sociopath is someone who lacks empathy. They will live in dangerous, sometimes violent ways, and they simply don’t care about the consequences. In grad school, I was led to believe that only 2 or 3% of society could be diagnosed as a sociopath, although, even then, we were aware than more than 25% of corporate CEOs were . . . but that is a topic for another sermon.

I famously had a showdown with the director of a Council of Churches agency that we have volunteered with for more than a decade. The last time I showed up at Crosslines to work with our team of senior citizen volunteers and I saw that absolutely no one, not staff or volunteers, were wearing masks, and I had a bit of a meltdown. I simply couldn’t believe that they expected members of my church, some of whom are in their 80’s, most of whom have underlying conditions that would make infection with the Covid virus almost certainly lethal, and the explanation I was given was that they were not required to wear them. I pointed out that it would make my volunteers 80 to 90% less likely to get the virus if everyone wore masks, and the response was an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. 

In a later email exchange, I carefully explained to the director why he is a sociopath. I have not had a reply. But if knowing that wearing a mask protects vulnerable people, cutting their risk of infection by 90% and you don’t wear one, if that makes you a sociopath then about 75% of the people who live around here are sociopaths. I want very much to go back to believing that only 2 or 3% of society are sociopaths. I don’t want to believe that most people in our community really would rather directly cause my death than to be inconvenienced by wearing a mask. 

Are they all sociopaths or are they possibly just emotionally exhausted? Maybe I’m not on their list of six or seven people that they can love today. Now, you may think that I was harsh for telling the director of Crosslines that he is a sociopath, I’m sure he thought so, but I’m not the only one to reach this conclusion.

https://www.psypost.org/2020/06/psychopathic-traits-linked-to-non-compliance-with-social-distancing-guidelines-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic-56980?fbclid=IwAR3KjBM131TJBaKNzJpgMELK8U7pdTWWIvZy_oY9MSpg4YkIi5IUTFqHNaY

In research done by the Personality Laboratory at Whitman College, they are providing initial evidence that certain antagonistic personality traits are associated with ignoring preventative measures meant to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus. I’m not the only one who sees a connection between refusing appropriate preventative measures and sociopathy. 

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the U.S. government’s Coronavirus Task Force, said, ‘There’s no magic bullet. There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors. Each of our behaviors, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic. . .’ 

We don’t have a vaccine. We have some marginally helpful treatments, but most of what we have in the face of this pandemic is the same thing they had in the face of the Spanish Flu . . . everybody needs to wear a mask, stay home as much as possible, and keep at least six feet between you and everyone else. It is only the behaviors of the population that can alter the spread of the virus right now. And sadly, people are not generally choosing very compassionate behaviors.

The people who get it can be pretty testy about this. As this sign in a restaurant window offers, “To accommodate Anti-Maskers, we have provided a space 40 feet west where you can stare at your reflection in the window since, apparently, you’re the only person you care about.” 

I was in New York for a few days a couple of weeks ago visiting friends from there as well as from Russia and Brazil. My friend’s daughters already think that I live so deep in the Ozarks that it is still the 16^th century out here but sadly, the Ozarks was in the news several times during my brief stay. The mayor of St Louis literally provoked vigilante retaliation against Black Lives Matter protestors by reading out their names, addresses and phone numbers on the internet. 

Then when there was a demonstration on the mayor’s street, and a pair of very affluent, though even more paranoid and possibly psychopathic attorneys stood in front of their million dollar mansion pointing guns at peaceful demonstrators walking down their street. I appreciate the lawyer wearing the Hamburgler costume, I wish all lawyers would.

But then the coups de grâce was when the network news mentioned Joplin having a spike in virus infections from the meat packing plant near there and the reporter ended her report saying that the Joplin City Council voted against a mandatory mask ordinance and rolled her eyes like a teenaged cheerleader.

But, of course, as infections are going up here, our City Council is set to meet to discuss the same thing and the only question is whether Springfield will reveal itself to the world as being as stupid as our neighboring community of Joplin. Everyone knows that we should all be wearing masks whenever we leave our homes but there is an inexplicable resistance which, I have to be honest, really looks evil to me. But I don’t want malignant narcissism to be the explanation, no matter how much it looks like that. 

 In 1962 when The New Yorker decided to send the Holocaust survivor, Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the leading architects of the Holocaust, she had to sort through some very profound personal emotions about the whole thing. She concluded that she would never again refer to “radical evil” because “radical” means that it goes to the very tip of the root and she found that evil was almost always much more shallow than that. Only good, she said, can be radical because goodness requires thought, decision making, intellect, it goes deeper than evil can. Evil spreads like mold on a society, infecting it, literally ruining it, but it never goes much deeper than the surface. 

Evil, she concludes, is thought defying and in our day, we can speak of it as being fact defying. She is saying that Nazism, the kind of malice and racism that caused the Holocaust was like a fungus that spread thinly across the surface of Germany and as much harm as it did, historically speaking, it didn’t seem to take deep roots in all but the most extreme of German people. When the war was over, very few people wanted to defend the agenda of the Nazis. 

I think we will see a similar distancing of conservatives from the Trump era early next year. I am reasonably confident at this point that Trump will be defeated this November, in spite of the Democratic Party’s best efforts at losing, and if anyone knows how to throw an election, it surely is the DNC, but I think that they will oust Trump in November and we will be treated to a 2021 version of  “I was only following orders” excuse from almost every elected Republican politician who failed to find a backbone for the past four years. 

The denial of science on the part of Britain’s Boris Johnson, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and our own accidental president, Donald Trump, has fed the virus, resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, but on the surface, it has given hundreds of millions of people permission to simply not take the threat seriously, to avoid distancing, mask wearing, and I have to suspect, hand washing, over the past 

 several months. I don’t want to believe that most of our neighbors are evil even though they all have to know that if only they would wear a mask that they could save lives by not spreading the virus. I don’t want to think that they are all stupid, even though I have wasted precious minutes reading social media posts by people who couldn’t pass a middle school science test if it was open book and the answers were underlined, who insist that wearing a mask is either of no help or is actually harmful. 

Not that I will ever be able to believe that only 3 or 4% of society are sociopaths again. I’m afraid that I have accumulated too much evidence to the contrary in the past few months, but I do believe that there is a third option, and that is that people, by and large, are emotionally spent. They are neither ignorant or malevolent, but they just can’t love more than four or five people, and they can’t care about #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, kids at the border, the uninsured, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the environment, the pipeline in North Dakota, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then wear a mask too. Most of that stuff is filed in the back of their minds somewhere along with the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in San Francisco 30 years ago. 

What we, as spiritually oriented people must remember is that what we want from other people is not the impossible . . . we’re not asking people to try to love dozens and dozens of people, what we’re asking for is for them to change some behaviors that will help out a lot of people they will never meet and about whom they will never know anything. And, excuse me, my brothers and sisters, but don’t we know by now that we can never judge anyone into changing a behavior. 

When we make people feel stupid, or judged, or labeled, they almost always just double down on their self-destructive behaviors. People change their behaviors when they feel safe . . . people will change their minds about something when they believe it is their idea. Conservatives will never adopt liberal behaviors and views in order to satisfy the demands of liberals . . . you see that don’t you?

Right now, the world is in the midst of a pandemic which is a medical problem that causes an economic problem. But, in Britain, Brazil, and the United States, we have politicians who see this medical and economic crisis as a political problem, and they are trying to respond to it as a political problem… with the bag of tricks politicians usually use . . . propaganda, lies, and electoral suppression. We must not be drawn into their political battle. As the old saying goes, never get into a mudslinging argument with a pig . . . you will get dirty and the pig likes it. 

There are those who want for us to believe that there will be a medical resolution to the pandemic within the next six or seven months, as either a vaccine or effective treatments, or both. I hope that they are right. But the fact that there are several corona viruses and there are no effective vaccines for any of them is not encouraging. HIV is a virus and in 40 years we have not come up with a vaccine, though we have had pretty good treatments for several years.

Covid-19 may be a part of our world for a year, or two, or a decade. Church may never be the same. Concerts, restaurants, movie theaters, may never be the same. The one thing that we can do to help the world maintain meaning, joy, romance, and culture, is to change our behaviors. And, if I may quote our friends in the AA movement, sometimes you have to fake it to make it. Maybe your heart just isn’t full of compassion and empathy right now, but you can fake it until you do feel it. 

Maybe you are emotionally spent and you just can’t care about the off chance that you are asymptomatic and throwing off a deadly virus onto unsuspecting strangers, but just pretend, just play along for a minute, learn how to talk to people from six feet away, through a mask. Make it fun. Draw a picture on your mask. Buy a superhero mask. Just choose to pretend to be a better person than you are right now and if you can keep it up for a few weeks, the surprising thing is, you will wake up and realize that you are a better person and you never want to go back to being the knuckle dragging, mouth breathing, narcissist that you were before. No one really wants to be a sociopath. 

I know you may find that hard to believe, so I’ll invite you to prove me wrong. Do the right thing for a month and see if you ever really want to be who you were before. Find one that matches your eyes.