“I, The World, can’t breathe”

#BLM, the COVID Connection.

In Buddhist texts, the Buddha instructs that those who follow him on the path to enlightenment must start with an awareness of the breath. Even though, to stay alive, without so much as a single thought each of us breathe all the time; we often aren’t conscious of our breath until something goes wrong. Then we immediately become entirely focused on our breath or lack of.

At the end of January 2021 there have been more than 101 million cases of COVID-19. The good news is 56 million, more than half have recovered. However, that in no way minimizes the horrible reality that 2.19 million people have died alone, not able to breath.

As I look over the past year, I see that breathing, COVID-19 and our renewed realism of racism are intricately linked in a quantum web from which there is no untangling.

Before I explain, let me say that I have spent my life surrounded by people of many different ethnicities and cultures. However, I am not a person of color, so please allow me to make that clear before I say anything else. I cannot speak to the lived experience of being a person of color who has experienced racism. I speak as an outsider, yes, but as a person who has spent a lifetime observing human dynamics and I maintain that racism is not merely linked to skin color. People of the same skin color can be racist against others of the same skin color because racism, at its core, is “othering.” And “othering” extends to all members of the human family.

“Othering “is defining yourself by stating what you are not. Therefore, othering is the process of casting a group, an individual, or an object into the role of the “other” and establishing one’s own identity through opposition to and, frequently, vilification of this other. The most apparent othering is skin color, but India’s caste system clearly demonstrates that skin color is not the only way of determining “others.” I say it again: at its core, racism is othering.

So, you may ask, what does this have to do with COVID and breathing?

You may remember that after the court’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the tragic shooting death of African American teen Trayvon Martin in July 2013, a social justice movement began to use the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media. Despite the initial outrage about the injustice, society soon moved on. And so, #BlackLivesMatter may have entered the zeitgeist, but it would generally remain in the shadows for quite some time. Of course, it would emerge into the light on other and all too frequent tragic occasions where the hashtag #blm would re-emerge and quickly fade with the pacifying “hopes and prayers” given by those in power.

In 2017 Eric Garner was put in a chokehold by an NYPD officer and there was a new wave of awareness and outrage. Moving forward just three years in 2020 and Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African American woman, was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment on March 13. Again, there was outrage…but there’s always outrage, and then it fades away. All this despite the fact that according to Statista.com, 859 African American people were killed by the police between 2017 and 2020.

Then, before our eyes, something changed, and we could no longer look away, or allow a form of collective amnesia set in. It was the moment of complete horror as we saw with our own eyes, the slow, painful execution of George Floyd. Murdered in the streets by a police officer while like a lost child he cried out for his momma, saying: “I can’t breathe.” For those who cared to recall, those were the very same words cried out in desperation by Eric Garner back in 2017.

It could be argued that George’s death was more graphic and therefore had a greater psychological impact, but I put it to you that George Floyd’s words had greater impact on us all due to a collective context none of us had before that very moment, because COVID-19 brought awareness to racial injustice.

How did Covid-19 bring awareness to racial injustice?

Some people think meditation is about trying to quiet the mind, and it is. However, if the mind is busy we must slow it down to become aware of what’s keeping us distracted. COVID is the focal point of our meditation, it has brought to our aware that which we have dismissed.

COVID-19 did reveal the inequalities in medical care and the higher rate of death amount people of color, but that’s not what I mean. It’s more basic than that.

Remember what the Buddha taught. It all comes back to the breath.

To live is to breathe and we all must breathe. We cannot “other” our way to thinking that some of us breathe and some of us do not. When it comes to the breath, we are all the same. Social class, education, income, skin color — none of those things matter. Humans of every color, ethnicity, race, religion, age and anything else we justify in othering require oxygen to live. Humans must breathe.

So, allow me ask you to slow down, take a breath and consider this. COVID-19 virus is a respiratory illness. Many who’ve experienced the severity of COVID describe its impact with those same words used by Eric Garner and George Floyd. The last words of many who have been put on ventilators are the same words used by Eric Garner and George Floyd. The final words of many Covid victims are “I can’t breathe.”

With the advent of COVID, we all had a deeper level of empathy about the fact that any of us or those we love could at any moment be gasping to say “I can’t breathe” and be directly confronted with the finite fragility of our lives. And so, in a literal breath, we have become aware that looking for artificial constructs in order to make divisions among people is no longer a sustainable illusion.

COVID-19 has shown us that we are all the same, we are all fragile.

When I can’t breathe, neither can you.

None of us can!

“Stay Curious My Friend, Stay Curious!”