A SOULFUL SOLILOQUY
I smiled as I approached NBA Hall of Famer, Isiah Thomas, as he was leaving the vestibule of the Fontainebleau Hotel.
We were about to cross paths and I didn’t want to miss my shot to shake the hand that delivered over nine thousand NBA assists, so I extended my hand to say hello.
Isiah, an accomplished international businessman, was the keynote speaker at the Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference in Miami. I was one of the thousands of attendees buzzing around the hotel on the hunt for deeper knowledge about the growing cannabis industry.
I introduced myself by lamenting the fact that I wished that I had spent more time watching his ball-handling guard skills rather than analyzing his teammate, Bill Laimbeer’s low post moves.
He let out one of his notable hearty laughs and asked me what I was doing at the conference.
“I’m a writer and technology consultant,” I began.
Not expecting him to extend the conversation, I quickly followed up by sharing my vision of continued learning, educating, and writing.
I invoked the mention of a piece I wrote about an infamously sabotaged Reconstruction era policy and the robbery of the Freedman’s Savings Bank when suddenly a smile flashed across Isiah’s face.
I felt like I was petitioning our Ancestors as I blurted out every word of my soliloquy. A moment was taking place: a moment of mustering the courage within myself to speak to a champion, a moment of confidence that influenced my energy and posture, and a moment of discovering the words to vocalize and boldly declare my intentions for tomorrow.
“Keep educating folks on our history and writing, young brotha’,” Isiah replied as we exchanged business cards.
I left that chat encouraged to continue raising my voice but then I remembered that I was in the conservative South and that legislatures all over the nation were actively passing anti-black laws to ban Black literary works under the guise of preventing critical race perspectives from being discussed in classrooms.
How can we free ourselves from this period of great despair and move into an era that is defined by transformational consciousness?
In these uncertain moments, I lean on the words of James Baldwin to find hope during these crushing times:
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
We gotta’ approach the people in power to give voice to our visions, have the will to endure the excruciating pain of the moment, and find the will to move into a more fruitful reality.
I flew down to the Benzinga conference to meet a socially conscious CEO of a retail dispensary that I was connected to through the National Cannabis Industry Association.
I recently took on the retailer as a client and during one of our meetings we began to discuss the impacts of George Floyd’s public lynching at the knees of the Minnesota police department on the workforce in Washington state.
As I sat in her office discussing that period of racial unrest, I was revisiting that period of mental anguish and reflecting on how I grappled with the complexities of finally beginning to release my soul and mind from the grips of the false narrative of American patriotism.
A mixed feeling of validation and guilt washed over me for having put my own self-care ahead of any desire to speak out alongside my countryman for a democracy that remains in tatters. The proof is in the outcome of nominal change that has taken place across the country in the wake of George’s murder. The feelings of heaviness center around leaving Brooklyn to escape the unrest and find peace of mind.
As I learned of the protests that resulted in the closures of various businesses in the Greater Seattle area, I remembered that Constitutional concepts such as forming, “a more perfect Union,” are based on a faulty premise that a union between capitalism and slavery could ever bear positive outcomes for human rights, equality, and freedom.
It's the matrimony between these ideologies that is leading to the demise of a corrupt empire. And perhaps for the first time, we are able to watch it in real-time via our mobile devices. This enormous awareness that we have access to a continually eroding set of circumstances seems to reach from the grass underneath our toes well into the deepest expanses of the known universe.
In the time that womankind has discovered the ability to stand upright, we’ve made gains toward decoding our inner genetic composition and have remotely navigated spacecraft to the outward expanses of our galaxy. However as much as we know about the finest details of the human genome and the solar system, we’ve yet to release ourselves from the constructs that disenfranchise our species by race and sex.
It’s this sophisticated intelligence that separates our abilities from the capabilities of other species. Nonetheless, as we display our brilliance, we are collectively complicit in the brainless worsening of climate conditions.
Complicit in the propping up of a government that is incapable of adapting to a 21st century pace armed with an 18th century piece of parchment paper.
Complicit in feeding bullet-riddled bodies to a gun culture monster that worships violence to secure their weakening supremacy and pacifying their idolatrous assault weapons god.
Complicit in the theft of a list of human rights that are being ripped away and a looming engagement between artificial intelligence and surveillance that seems primed to push us deeper into a dystopian reality.
How can we commit to enduring the pain of this moment and the road ahead?
Baldwin provides the balm:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
The interconnectedness between us and the galaxies and all the history of mankind that comes before us to the future that lies ahead of us, is the diamond of truth that has become more crystalized during the pandemic era.
We are connected in this ability to endure pain and continue finding the will to live on, survive, and push the species forward.
Not to merely exist but to be liberated in our bodies — to seek pleasure, avoid pain, find joy, move on with our lives, and feel worthy enough to take up space. Concisely, to experience a full and free life.
The invented constructs that we have erected our laws upon, developed policies around, and codified societal norms into, could be adapted to be bent to the will of the People, ya’know.
The will of a person to stand upright continues to be berated but we must find the will to make it through the hardship that meets us.
At the conference, the exhibition floor was overflowing with conversation. The collection of booths displayed the various opportunities that can be yielded from the cultivation of the cannabis plant.
My nostrils got a whiff of the aroma of opportunity, and I knew that I had to follow the nose of my curiosity to find the right folks to engage with.
As I prowled the event floor, I encountered a silver fox who was the founder of a successful culinary school. We stopped to chat for an extended discussion. Despite the differences between our profiles – his thick gray hair and my bald head – we threw ourselves into the similarities that we shared.
We learned that we were both Brooklynites, played basketball in our formative years, enjoyed the hard work that nurturing innovative ideas entails, and shared a gentle machismo that sprouted a relationship between us.
I have found that openness to follow our inner voice leads to decreased feelings of otherness or strangeness. It’s as if putting yourself out there is the glue that binds us together on this iron rock. The antidote to the outbreak of loneliness and isolation that has emerged from the stress of battling viruses and racism.
When we’re open to chance encounters with others, it makes us feel that somehow our steps are being ordered by a greater force within us and that we are not navigating this moment of hardship alone.
Individually it will be impossible but collectively, we can create coalitions that can resolve these complex problems if we choose to act.
How do we make it through the pain of this moment to approach an era of healing?
Again, leaning on Baldwin to cope:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
We must move forward together to face this time of great change. NBA Hall of Famers, CEOs, and Founders of Big Industry and small businesses alike to align our minds and muscles for restorative action.
Pushing forward as a People who are united in taking action to propel us forward ever, and backward never.
Together.
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