Oscar Valdes is a writer and psychiatrist with an interest in public affairs.
Racism is a false belief, born out of a desire to prematurely close the inquiry into what makes each of us human. At the root of such desire is fear – fear of knowing the other – which when unexamined leads to their devaluing, their mistreatment, their abuse and death.
Oscar Valdes is the author of ‘Psychiatrist for A Nation’, available on Amazon.
There had been one blunder after another during his disruptive tenure, and yet the economy had held up.
Then came the virus.
The President failed to take measures to protect us against it. Over 106,000 deaths later, the best he can do is to point the finger at China and say that it was their fault. It has to rankle him that China, with a population over 3 times larger than us, has had only a little over 4,600 deaths.
But the President is doing what he’s best at, deflecting blame.
To this day, he remains unable to admit that he was late in responding, unable to admit that he was distracted with the impeachment and that the challenge to his authority was what concerned him the most. Never mind that, with a clear majority in the Senate, there was no doubt he would be acquitted of the charges.
Then came George Floyd.
And the President lost it.
To this day, he has been unable to address the nation. A nation riven by protests and looting. A wounded nation in search of clear guidance and support. A nation bleeding from a deep wound to its soul.
And there the President stands, watching over us as we bleed.
The moment a person becomes elected to the highest office in the land, they become the person to turn to for answers to our deepest troubles. It may be too much to expect for one person to have all the answers, but we look to that person because even if they don’t have the answers, they will have access to our best and brightest, to our wisest and most serene.
But our President appears unable to take such responsibility.
And so he fails us.
It is a profound failure.
A blatant shirking of his duty.
When protesters circled the White House, he was hurried to his bunker. Please. No. Don’t you hide from your fellow Americans.
With every day that passes and you don’t address us as a nation, the greater the sense that we are truly leaderless. Someone is in the White House, sleeping and eating… we hear him rant, tweet, insult, call for the Army to take over our cities and silence the protests.
But we don’t hear a man take us into his heart and say to us, ‘I am deeply pained… that during my tenure, in this great land, a police officer had the audacity to pin down and slowly kill a man while others who were watching, begged him to stop. But it happened, happened here in this great land, on Memorial Day, in the great city of Minneapolis. To the extent that I have not endeavored to heal this nation, I, too, am guilty of what happened to George Floyd. And so I am deeply sorry that I have failed you. In this day of sorrow for our nation, I ask that we forgive each other… and forgive me… forgive so we can come together and work as the great family that we are… and join in the effort to not let this happen again.’
Our President, however, cannot say that.
To do so he would have to shed a tear for George Floyd.
And yet… still we look to the White House… only to realize that it is empty… and as we shed a tear for George Floyd… we shed a tear for ourselves.
Oscar Valdes is the author of ‘Psychiatrist for A Nation’. Available on Amazon.
Oscarvaldes.net
The protests are. The looting is not.
African Americans are justified in their rage at how they have been treated by the police. They are justified in clamoring for fairness, for dialogue, for the end of prejudicial behaviors. They are justified in their call for prompt review of cases where improprieties or sheer cruelty have been present.
Yes, they are.
But as riots and wanton destruction spread across our land, I am disturbed by the lack of leadership to call the nation to its senses.
Why hasn’t our President been a President?
Why hasn’t he held a national broadcast calling for whatever actions are needed to stop the unfairness from continuing? Why hasn’t he called for police reform on a national level? Why hasn’t he looked us in the eye and acknowledged that something has been very wrong for George Floyd to have died as he did in Minneapolis.
And why hasn’t the African American leadership of the country stepped front and asked that the looting stop right now?
That is a responsibility that should not be shirked.
We need action now.
We need dialogue.
People have the right to protest, and loudly so, but not to loot, not to steal, not to destroy.
We do not need silence from our leaders, whatever their color. What is the point of letting a deeply flawed President continue to embarrass himself by his repeated blunders?
The nation is in flames and he has yet to step up and say, ‘Yes, protesters, there is something wrong, yes, and I too watched the video of George Floyd’s death. I, too, fellow Americans, felt the suffocating pain of his last moments as he lay pinned down by the knee of an officer with no regard for the damage his action might be inflicting. I too felt the anguish.’
But our President cannot say that because he lacks that depth of feeling. It is simply not in him.
Calls have gone out for him to address the nation, but as of this writing he has yet to do so.
There is a huge void of leadership in the country.
Someone has to step in. If we feel at a loss then let us reach back into our recent history.
And so I assure you, that Marin Luther King would have by now, stood up on a doorstep somewhere in Minneapolis and addressed the entire nation, whites, blacks, Latinos, Asian, vehemently asking, with all the power he could muster, that we show restraint, that the difficult time we are now living calls for reflection, for feeling the fullness of our hurt, asking that we reflect on how all of us have been deeply offended by the violence of some police officers and, even beyond that, that we are deeply offended by the institutionalized violence that leads to lack of opportunity in our land, uneven health care and education.
Martin Luther King would not have played it safe, holding back to see how much more our flawed President will do in his path to self destruction.
So, please, dear leaders, someone, no matter what your color, step up and call upon the spirit of the man who gave us the glorious words, ‘I have a dream, that one day in America we will be judged by the strength of our character and not the color of our skin.’
Someone, please, in this hour of need, someone with access to the media, please step up and do the right thing.
Oscar Valdes is the author of ‘Psychiatrist for A Nation’ available on Amazon.
Oscarvaldes.net
The knee… there it was… pressed hard against George Floyd’s neck as he lay prone on the ground, his hands cuffed in back.
‘Mama… please… I can’t breathe…’ said Floyd as he lay helpless, pinned in place by the pressure of the officer’s knee.
But the officer seemed deaf. He couldn’t hear the plight of the man he had completely neutralized. He couldn’t hear the call for help of a man who, at no point, had been a threat to him.
George Floyd had been drunk and had bought cigarettes with a fake 20 dollar bill. The store clerk called the cops.
George Floyd did not put up a fight, having allowed himself to be cuffed, but then objected to going in the back of the police car. So the officers pulled him out and George fell or was thrown to the ground.
And there he lay. With the officer’s knee taking away his life. Moment by moment.
The other officers, meanwhile, swirled around, not one of them, not a single one of them, having the common sense to tell the officer pressing down on Floyd’s neck to ease up, please, you might kill the man.
Ease up, you don’t know what kind of shape that man under you is in.
Ease up, you don’t know what damage you are inflicting.
Ease up, we’re here over a fake 20 dollar bill.
Ease up, the man under you hasn’t physically hurt anyone.
Ease up, please, because you might take his life away.
No.
The other officers kept swirling about, just as onlookers videoed the scene and tried to persuade the officer pressing on Floyd’s neck to come to his senses, to please realize what he was doing.
But the officer didn’t get it.
And then George Floyd was dead.
It happened on Memorial Day in Minneapolis, a liberal American city, with excellent universities and sound institutions. A city with lots of good people.
But the accumulated wisdom of the city’s citizens had not passed through to the leadership of their police department.
For that officer’s knee to have stayed so long on George Floyd’s neck, that officer had to have demonized him. Yes, Floyd had to be a very bad man. He deserved to be punished on the spot. Never mind waiting for his day in court.
George Floyd had bought cigarettes with a 20 dollar fake bill, so that’s what you get for it in the city of Minneapolis, a knee on the back of your neck, so watch out people.
What the officer pinning George Floyd down chose to ignore, or never bothered to look into, or was never told about, or just wasn’t within his reach, was that as he demonized George Floyd he dehumanized himself.
None of the officers’ higher ups had made a point of making that clear, or maybe they thought that knees that pinned people down were good deterrents.
Maybe the Minneapolis police department had a department of psychology, maybe not. If they did, then they hadn’t been showing up. They hadn’t gone out to see the troops in action, and spot potential problems.
George Floyd was killed by an officer of the Minneapolis police department. It happened on Memorial Day, the 25th of May, 2020. Four days later, on the 29th , the officer was charged with murder and he began to be referred to as a former officer. But the whole department is responsible for George Floyd’s death.
The greatest fault ought to lie with the leadership. The ones at the very top. The ones entrusted with the task of thinking about the value of human beings, about the importance of not demonizing others.
It is very easy to single out the officer with the knee and put all the burden of wrongdoing on him.
To single him out is to divert attention from those who, having the responsibility of selecting and educating the officers, have failed to do their jobs.
It falls to the leaders of the department, to continually be reminding their troops that their task is to restrain, not punish, and that the more force at their disposal, the more careful they have to be so as not to inflict harm.
We’re all at risk for demonizing others. It’s the easier path. It does not require much thought.
The higher task, on the other hand, is to acknowledge the value of every human being, and as we do, we will likely find value in ourselves.
The officer pinning down George Floyd, had not found much to value in himself and so, he thought, there could not be much of value in George Floyd.
Oscar valdes is the author of ‘Psychiatrist for A Nation’, available on Amazon.
oscarvaldes.net
He saw him running down the street of their lovely neighborhood. But a black man running down our streets? Must be up to some mischief, thought A.
He quickly called his son and asked him to get in the truck, they were going to chase after him. Bring weapons, of course, you had to have those. And so they did.
They chased after the black man, caught up and yelled at him to stop, they needed to talk. But the black man was too scared to stop.
He could have. He just didn’t. Something about the rage in the white men asking him to halt.
A scuffle followed, fists flew, and shots were fired.
The black man fell to the ground, mortally wounded.
He was a neighbor it turned out, lived in the outskirts of town with his mother.
He had gone out for a jog, stopped by a construction site and went in to check it out. There were no signs barring him from doing so. He was curious and stepped in. He looked around for a while, then went back out and resumed his jog.
But A. and son had already set after him.
The killing was reported to the local authorities and was on its way to being buried and forgotten when someone in the court system leaked a video to the press.
The case became national news.
A. and son were arrested and charged with the black man’s murder.
Sitting alone in his cell, A. reflected on the incident. His life forever changed. He had never killed a man. Now he had.
But why?
If he thought the black man may have been up to mischief, he could’ve pulled up alongside him, asked him to please slow down, he just needed to ask him something. He could’ve done it without the rage in his eyes. He could have done it without the accusatory tone.
But he didn’t.
Why didn’t he?
The black man had been jogging. He was carrying nothing in his hands. But A. assumed the fellow had done something wrong. He had assumed a black man in a white man’s neighborhood would have to be up to some mischief. What else?
Sitting alone in his cell, A. reflected on the incident. His life now forever changed. But not only his life but his son’s life.
He didn’t like the feeling.
One thing was to have had all those preconceptions about black people, another was to have passed them on to his son.
He felt worse.
He had not examined his rage for black folks, and then passed it on to his son.
He was an old man, now. Retired. But his son was just starting out in life.
Why had he done that to him?
Why hadn’t he had the courage to say to him, ‘son, I have my views on race, but you need to make up your own mind. I may just be wrong about all this. I may just be wrong because I haven’t really thought about it real hard. So, son, you think about it. Think about it, make your own choices, and live your own life.’
As he sat in his cell, feeling alone and depressed, saddened that his life had come to this, what hurt him the most was that he had passed his hatred of others on to his son. What hurt him the most, was that he didn’t give his son permission to be his own man.
Sitting alone in his cell, A. kept reflecting on the incident.
He felt tired.
And just who had taught him to hate? Had he learned on his own? Had any black man ever injured him?
No one had.
When he was a young man he had thought of leaving his town and going somewhere else, see how other people thought about things, but he hadn‘t done it.
When his son was growing up, he had thought of telling him to go off, get away from this town, and find out how other people think in the world.
He had thought about it but hadn’t done it.
Now he regretted it.
Sitting alone in his cell, A. thought of himself as a trapped man. No one was holding him down or tying him up. He was trapped by his own views and thoughts. And what hurt him the most now, was that he had trapped his own son.
Every man had to be responsible for his actions. To do so every man had to have thoughts of his own.
Sitting alone in his cell, A. thought that he hadn’t put in the time to have thoughts of his own. Certainly not on the matter of race. And he hadn’t taught his son, either.
That’s what hurt him the most.
And it was on him.
Yes, it was.
He wanted to apologize to the mother of the man he had killed, yes, he did, but he wanted to apologize, most of all, to his own son, his own blood, whose life he had cursed.
Recent talk has it that Mr Trump has got his reelection well in hand, his supporters contending that the economy is strong (by other accounts it is slowing), and with unemployment low what else is there to care about?
Behind this hubris is the implicit – and sad – belief that “money is what it’s all about, so carry on, please,” and to mind comes the often quoted line “Money, money, money, makes the world go round,” which was part of a song in the film “Cabaret” (1980), a story of Germany’s descent into Fascism.
Mr Trump is, undoubtedly, a savvy politician, able to persuade a lot of folks that what he offers and represents is what the country needs. He is very lucky too. He inherited a sound economy, an economy that took a lot of effort and patience on the part of the Obama administration to bolster, so we could pull out of what could have been a catastrophe (the credit crunch of 2007-2008).
The economy that Mr Obama bequeathed to Mr Trump was in such good shape, that it has managed to withstand the latter’s efforts to wreck it, as with his vaunted trade war with China, the renegotiating of NAFTA 2 (the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico) and his continued assault on the Affordable Care Act.
All of what Mr Trump has done so far is to make a lot of noise – loud noise – to keep people and himself from paying attention to what really matters, which is not his deification but the designing and creation of social, training and educational programs necessary to boost the productivity of the American worker so they can compete effectively in today’s demanding world.
Not knowing how to go about it – without risking a hint of disapproval from his supporters – he prefers to bang his drum louder and louder instead.
Mr Trump’s strategy is not difficult to decipher, but it will take much discipline on the part of democrats to mount an effective campaign against him.
To think that America is all about the money is for Mr Trump to profoundly underestimate us.
To ignore the great need to build bridges between us is for the president to bury his head in the sand.
Building bridges is no easy task but it is the grand task now before the nation.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) intellect and vision led us out of the Great Depression, and then we went on to lead the effort to win World War II, ushering in a long period of economic and cultural expansion.
Today we are in the midst of another great depression, not economic but of values – a depression of the spirit – as evidenced by our deep national divisions and the inability to overcome them. When WWII brought us together, we could point to someone outside of us and brand them the enemy. Today, however, the obstacle in our path lies not without but within, and it is none other than the intolerance we have for the dissenting view, the unwillingness to pause and reflect on our differences and to dare start a dialogue.
Tolerance does not mean approval of an opposing view, but instead signals the need to examine its roots. In a nation like ours, where plurality is a strength, such tolerance is essential.
Extremist views cannot be excised, as you would a tumor, but they can, with great patience and understanding, begin to be dissolved. It can be done by meeting and talking, confident as we should be that all extreme positions, whether on the right or the left, are fortresses of fear.
An effective campaign against Mr Trump must offer a clear alternative, and a key part of it ought to be an invitation to establish such dialogue in the hope of finding common ground.
Why, then, not abstain from calling people racists, and instead express our disapproval by saying that such view is unkind? Isn’t that choice of words less likely to ruffle anyone’s feathers? If I behave in a prejudiced way, I would much prefer for you to say to me that I’m being unkind rather than labelling me one thing or another. Labels stir up anger and close doors. Even truly racist people are not without kindness. Using words that lead to reflection open the path to possible change. Since we are now at a damaging standstill, couldn’t that be one alternative to try?
With the world in a period of transition fostered by massive technological change, the call is out for exemplary men or women with the ability to heal and lead. Mr Trump is lacking on both counts. An opposing democratic candidate must have such credentials to counter him effectively.
We are not about the money alone and never have been. We are about the struggle for our freedom. Tolerance of the dissenting view does not mean we approve of it. Instead it must be seen as an invitation to seek clarity in the quest for truth. Our privileged geography and the bounty of resources that nature bestowed upon us, have put us on a favorable position for such endeavor, so let us not be timid in this crucial pursuit. We Americans are much better than what Mr Trump wants us to be.
As FDR once said, “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”
Oscar Valdes Oscarvaldes.net
By Oscar Valdes 4/26/19
One of the issues at the core of Mr Trump’s turbulent presidency has been and remains his unwillingness to take the lead in confronting the resurgence of white supremacy in our nation. His inability to do so defines him as a man who is not integrated, a person that although intelligent and energetic, appears unable to confront his fears. Therein lies the great paradox of his presidency, that the leader of the free world is not a free man himself.
Free men will have prejudices – it comes with being human – but truly free men are willing to question themselves and struggle to resolve such prejudices. More than two years into his presidency we have yet to see evidence that Mr Trump has such ability.
Racism is a false belief, born out of a desire to prematurely close the inquiry into what makes each of us human. At the root of such desire is fear – fear of knowing the other – and when such fear is unexamined it leads to their devaluing and opens the door to their mistreatment.
Members of the white race have done wonderful things for humanity. Their accomplishments have been there to be enjoyed by all. The great men and women of science, industry and the arts, who happened to be white, never did think that what they had accomplished had anything to do with the color of their skin. Rather, they were well aware that their contribution to their fellow human beings rested solidly on the capacity to conceive and imagine the fullness of ideas, and then to muster the tenacity to carry them out.
Members of the white race have also done horrible things to humanity; the Holocaust, the torture and enslavement of Black Americans, the cruelty to Native Americans. And yet, through it all, the majority of the white race strives on, willing to examine themselves, determined to reach the higher ground that comes from greater self knowledge.
But where is Mr Trump? Where is the leader of the Free World? Where is the leader of the evolving consciousness that lies at the heart of what means to be free?
The great performer, the entertainer, the great seeker of attention, is sadly silent on the issue.
Not willing to confront his own fears he is thus unwilling to take on white supremacists, and so ends up encouraging them.
Mr Trump seems to believe that sitting in the White House absolves him of his flaws. Alas, it has magnified them. What his followers fail to see, so far – for eventually they will – is that our president is a distraction leading us away from the path to greater achievement, which comes from our full development as human beings and is only possible when we accept our flaws as a necessary first step to understanding them.
The hatred of others is incompatible with the path to self realization. And it is so because ‘the other’ lies within us – deep in our breast – ingrained in our soul, ceaselessly yearning to be embraced. Each one of us is all of humanity, containing at least a sample of nature’s plenitude, at least a grain of the misshapen, the ugly, the restricted, the divine, the beautiful and the gifted. And so with colors, for whiteness, a beautiful color indeed as all colors are, is but a variety in the garden of nature and not a reflection of supremacy.
To hate the other is to hate ourselves. The self aware struggles with such hate, day in and day out, for it is the price of calling ourselves free.
Mr Trump has been unable to grasp this essence and so he is not a free man. He cannot or will not perceive the larger picture. He cannot or will not say to his base, ‘let us join hands and overcome our fears and we shall seek real freedom, the freedom that comes from the quest to find our truth and which will lead us to genuine achievement’.
That more than 2 years into his presidency Mr Trump has been unable to do so, is a grave flaw of character and a blatant shirking of responsibility, the responsibility that comes from being the leader of the most powerful free nation in the world – a country that remains a beacon to the hopes of mankind – and a fountain of ideas to remedy some of the most difficult problems humanity is facing.
America – all included – the white, the black, the brown and the yellow; the blue, the red and shades in between; the fully developed and the developing, the clear headed and the confused, the open hearted and the presently bigoted, all deserve a better president.
Oscar Valdes 