Alfredholzheu’s Blog

Alfred,

I know you are only on Instagram and not on Facebook so I wanted to share this post with you.  Kathleen kindly commented on it. 

You are probably missing all the fights on social media over black lives matter versus all lives matter.  I tried to put the positive post up about Flint, Michigan and instead had people fighting on my facebook page in the comments.  It was disturbing to me so I wrote the below.

And today was our last River of Giving food distribution.  People I don’t even know cried and hugged me and told me how much we helped them.  So thank you again for being such a giant part of it!

Here is my facebook post:

One of the greatest human needs is to be heard.  Most people often listen, not to hear, but to reply.  They already have their reply and response ready before the person talking can even finish their sentence.

To be heard and listened to means you are being validated.  Even if your opinions may differ in the end, having your point both heard and understood is a fundamental key to healing and moving forward.

Often in marriages the partner needs to be "right" and doesn’t want to hear their partner’s  message because it is more important for their voice to be "heard" instead of to listen to their partner.

So in marriage therapy one spouse will say "I always wash the dishes" and the other spouse will say "I always take out the trash."  Instead of saying "Thank you, I never realized you always wash the dishes because the sink is always empty.  I didn’t even notice.  I’m sorry.  Thank you."  Instead, each side states their position even louder under there are anger and tears.  When someone isn’t heard, there is resentment and withdrawal.  Then communication is abandoned and the relationship becomes distant.  It is hard to trust someone who won’t listen to you. 

When I watch my friends argue on facebook about hashtags about whose life matters more I feel like I’m watching a married couple who actually loves each other, but can’t stop fighting about their view and their side.  They can’t even hear the other view or side.

So maybe we need a new hashtag.  Maybe we need something that all sides can hear without being excluded or unheard.

One of the biggest myths in the world is that "money solves everything therefore rich people should be happy."  Many people falsely believe if they just have money it will solve all of their problems.  Even the person with the money often ends up in therapy wondering why they are not happy because they feel they should be happy because they are wealthy.  

I’m technically a servant.  That is who I am.  I serve people by feeding them.  In this position I have had the pleasure of being in both the wealthiest homes and poorest homes in America as well as everyone else in between.  And what I can tell you for sure is that every single person has some kind of pain.  So you can’t really argue which pain is greater:  the pain of losing your child may be greater than the pain of losing your husband.  But both are painful and both deserve understanding.  Murder is harder to deal with than perhaps death from old age but for a couple who has been married for 65 years, losing their spouse is very painful, even if the cause of death was natural and normal.  It is still a loss.  I remember someone asking me if it was worse to be divorced or to have your spouse die.  I tried to explain they are different kinds of pain.  In one case you are being attacked by someone you loved and in another case you lost someone you love.  In both cases the spouse and children feel a giant loss.  It is really hard to decide which pain is worse.  So it really isn’t okay to judge someone else’s pain or decide if losing your spouse or child is more painful because it is all pain. 

I was molested as a child.  I remember when my best friend lost her fiancé, Eddie, in an explosion in New York.  I went to stay with her after the death and be with her through the funeral.  She said to me "I never could have gotten through this but I know you suffered something worse than me."  So in this instance of both of us being sympathetic to each other we each thought the other had experienced a worse pain.  I didn’t think my pain was that bad because I had already worked through it.  Yet she thought my pain was worse than hers.  The gift of my pain is that it made me able to have deep empathy for others.  But I’m not sure anyone can truly measure on a scale someone else’s pain because we all process pain in a different way.  And I just remembered that Eddie’s grandmother was a concentration camp  survivor.  She and her brother were the only two surviving members of her entire family.  She thought she left all her pain behind her but when her grandson died at age 27, in that explosion in New York, that was an unbearable pain.  How do we judge if the pain of losing her parents in a concentration camp is worse than the pain of losing her grandson in an explosion.  Pain does not need to be ranked, justified nor measured to be felt and acknowledged.

Currently we are all horrified at the death of George Floyd.  Watching a man be murdered while he is saying "I can’t breathe is horrific."  We witnessed someone being tortured and we need to do something about it.  Everyone has a pain in their heart from that.

But if you tell another person that they don’t matter because they don’t know what is like, it is not the way to bring them into the circle of mourning.  You are basically saying you will never understand instead of finding a way to help them understand.  The solution and healing will never come until we can all feel the pain and loss and know that we need to make necessary changes to prevent murder and injustice.

There was a great example of a black man who had to keep a child’s car seat and toys in the back of his luxury car so that when he was pulled over a policeman wouldn’t harass him when he pulled him over for “driving while black.”  Because before he had the child’s car seat in the back of the car he had been pulled over many times and would be harassed.  The same with the tall black man that has to go on walks in his white neighborhood with his daughter and his dog.  If he’s walking his dog with his daughter he is viewed as a kind and gentle man.  If he is walking alone he is viewed as something to be scared and afraid of.  Those are just actual facts of how two men have found a way to cope under current circumstances.

Murder is wrong.  No matter who is being murdered.  And yes if you want to start an argument, and find the exception to the rule, and say that someone who was raped and beaten multiple times and then planned to murder her perpetrator isn’t as bad as someone who murders an innocent victim, I could listen to you.  I could hear there may be some justification in the murder.  But I would hope there was another solution.  I would hope that murdering someone would never be the answer.  So if we made a hastag that said #murderiswrong would we then start having arguments over that too?  What is the correct unifying hashtag?  Is it #icantbreathe or is the problem too complex to be limited to short social media hashtags.  I feel like crying whenever I hear the words “I can’t breathe.”  I literally have a pain in my chest hearing those words. 

So how do we solve the problems of racism?  We’ve come farther than we have in the past.  Neil Armstrong knew that Katherine Johnson was responsible for getting him to the moon.  We didn’t know her name until the movie Hidden Figures came out.  Because not only was she black, she was a woman.  But now we do know her and can celebrate her.  Now we can all celebrate the union of people of different races coming together to put a man on the moon. 

As Maya Angelou said "When you know better you do better."  Some people feel guilty for not knowing that racism existed because they hadn’t experienced it.  But guilt isn’t the solution either because that also is divisive and exclusionary.  If a spouse has an affair, making them feel guilty, will never heal the marriage.  Guilt is one of the most destructive self-inflicting feelings in the world and the cause of most alcoholism and drug abuse.  So guilt isn’t the answer either.

Knowlege is power and by listening and understanding we can begin to work on the solution. 

I have a lot of friends in mixed marriages with beautiful children.  Not two friends or six friends, or ten friends. Too many to list here.  At one point in history those marriages wouldn’t have even been allowed and now they are more common with each passing day.  At one point schools were segregated, hospitals were segregated, dances were segregated, restaurants were segregated and the military was segregated.  All of life basically.  And that took time to change but it has changed and continues to change.  Now we have weddings and families that celebrate love. 

When I went to college in Washington, DC. I lived in an all black neighborhood.  I lived on 16 4th Street NE.  There were five white people on my street but that was the last street before it was an all black neighborhood.  I was frequently the only white person on my Metro stop and in Eastern Market.  I loved living there and had the best landlord.  I remember on Halloween one year that two children were trick-or-treating with their mom.  The little girl needed to go to the bathroom.  Of course I let her in.  My roommate at the time said "Are you sure it is safe to let her in?"  I remember looking at my roommate in disbelief that she was afraid to let a 6 year old girl into our apartment because of the color of her skin.  And my roommate was not a bad person.  What made her so fearful and afraid of a child?  If I just dismissed her as not understanding and being racist then I’m not going to solve the problem.  How do you get someone who is afraid to have less fear?  How do you unlearn a fear you have been taught? 

Once we can answer the question of fear, we can begin to find the solution.  Once we can assure each human being that their feelings will be heard and understood, they can listen.  How do you get to the point where it is so comfortable that it becomes a non-existent issue.  How do you get everyone to feel safe, comfortable and okay.

Fighting over hashtags on social media, seems to be making the problem worse.  If someone writes Black lives Matter I can like their post because I believe that.  If someone writes All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter or Mexican lives Matter or Brown Lives Matter or Chinese Lives Matter I can also like those posts too.  Because I BELIEVE all of those words above.  I truly believe THAT EVERY PERSON’S LIFE MATTERS.  I understand with every fiber in my body that the original purpose of the hashtag Black Lives Matter was to bring awareness to racism, murder and police brutality specifically to blacks.  I am fully aware.  And I don’t need to give you a thousand personal examples to tell you how very aware I am.  Until you can hear each other, care about each other and listen to each other with compassion you will never get to the solution to end this injustuce. 

I’m ending with what my friend Brogiin D. Keeton-Nagin wrote about her two sons because it is beautiful and exactly how I feel: 

"I’m raising two boys. One is of color, the other is not. I love them both with the same heart. I shouldn’t have to have two rules, two standards, two views on their existence because my sons are different colors. Both Alex and Albright have the same right to freedom and possibility and yes even the right to make mistakes and survive. Both these boys should be judged fairly and not end up maimed or dead because of an encounter with the police or their neighbors. Please America, give both these boys the same grace to grow into men like their daddy and older brother. The point is: all lives do matter, and in a just America, melanin shouldn’t influence how I have to parent."

Peace and grace to all.

Maili

Sent from my iPhone