Erosion of Our Humanity

Israel cannot be taken lightly. And I know that it is often we find ourselves in a place that says, well, I don't have any stakenness. You know, I don't have any people there, or I am not Jewish, or I am not Muslim, so this doesn't personally impact me. But then find yourself struggling emotionally mentally, with the inability to focus, bursting into tears, and you don't know why this feeling

of sadness and of grief has taken hold. And it is because and I will continue to say this, because I've said it multiple times this week, that is your humanness, that is your humanness wanting to connect to other people's humanness. And we can't help as humans that when we see such destruction and devastation play out on our screens, that we put ourselves in those people's shoes or in shallah.

I hope so right, because when speaking with my friends who come from different religions and backgrounds, spaces and places, they can't help. As I was in conversation with one of my close friends who is also Jewish, broke down in tears as she's saying, I can't imagine being a mother of two as I am right now in Gaza without electricity, water and bombs going off everywhere and the

inability to flee. I think that our exposure from the years of watching the war in Ukraine at the hands of Russia play out, hearing stories and seeing bodies, hearing stories of rape and brutality and violation of international law, it is very easy. As we watch these things play out on our screens, and we are so far literally geographically removed from the areas that are under siege, we have the ability to turn it off and look the other way. And there is guilt associated with that, and

that guilt weighs on us. And what I want to offer is that be intentional about your turning away and deciding on when you're going to engage in when you are not because of our collective humanity, of our compassion and empathy is purposeful through numbing, right, And so there is a sense of feeling numb that we have because we have been exposed to so much pain over the

last few years. And I would argue, while there has always been pain and destruction and dehumanization that has happened, the proliferation of social media and the ability to have cameras and drones in these places in real time is something that is new and modern. So you have to be intentional about what you are digesting, how much and when, because it is eating at your soul, it is doing

great harm. I am not telling you to turn away, but what I am saying is to be really intentional and conscious about when you are choosing to take in the grief and when you are choosing not to, and what are you doing in its place also matters. Because I'm not an advocate of just tuning out. I'm an advocate of tuning in to ourselves because when we feel paralyzed and don't feel like we have the ability to shift outside forces. What we do have to focus on

is how we shift within ours. You know, I believe in the quote of be the change that you want to see in the world, and so I want to offer something to you all and share something that I If you've been listening to me for a long time, you may have started to recognize the subtle ships and changes that I am making. I have been known for and applauded for, and have grounded my work in rage.

The formation of WOKF Daily came from a place of absolute anger and disgust at this country for having the audacity, following the successful eight years of Barack Obama, to put in place a white supremist, misogynist, criminal. WOKF was born out of anger and the fact that I was just gobsmacked that this country who I had dedicated my career, whether it was as a classroom teacher, whether it was as a lobbyist, whether it was as a national spokesperson,

into creating a more just and equitable society. So when Donald Trump is elected, I feel absolutely and utterly betrayed that the work that I have been doing has been an absolute fucking waste, Because how could this country, given everything that we know, decide to elect that man and proudly so, How after so much work had been done to create an environment that was politically correct, to celebrate inclusion and diversity, that the whitelash would ensue and bring

us to the hell skate that we are currently existing in. And so yes, I was angry and wanted a place to get out that anger. As the years, though friends have progressed, I have found myself in a place of consistently having to dig and climb myself out of utter despair where my boy started to take on and hold energetically.

The rage, The anger and the sadness, the sleepless nights, the poor eating, the over consumption of alcohol all started to become my reaction to holding so much grief and so much rage while I was trying to create space for other people to be able to air out their

rage and their grief. But what I've come to really understand about myself through therapy, through the personal work that I have been doing, is that I I am deeply an EmPATH, which means that I take on the emotions of people and things around me and when it is only negativity that I am ingesting, that my body holds onto that and starts to become a center and a place of disease where I'm no longer emotionally, mentally, and physically capable of providing analysis with clarity. Because I myself

am moving through the cloud of rage. I will offer to all of you that I am not Buddha on a mountaintop. I'm not that fortunate. But what I do know over the last few years is that if rage and anger were the tool that we needed to have change,

then we would have changed for the better already. And the fact is that for me, while you will still hear me express my anger, what I am working on is disconnecting that anger, that frustration from my body, so being able to be in a place where I can air it out and then detach from it and not consume it. There is a practice in Buddhism and other Eastern cultures that is about letting go detachment not just from material things, right, but from emotions that do not

serve us. All emotions are valid and necessary, but holding them is not where I am in my own personal journey, which will be coming through and has begun to come through in this show is that I am interested in moving towards a place of our shared humanity right and not defining myself by what I am against and instead defining myself by what I am for. I am for an abundant mentality that says and states that there is more than enough for us on this planet for everyone.

It is greed, bigotry, discrimination built into and baked into our capitalists economic philosophy that has people move from a place of scarcity rather than from a place of abundance, that has them believe that they have the authority to subjugate and oppress those that do not subscribe to their deficit thinking. We have a deficiency right now of empathy

in this country. We are deficient. We are sick because just like I have shared the posts that have gone around and spoke about it yesterday with Jonathan, that when you see the devastation and degradation and utter brutality and violence that we are witnessing, and yet you find yourself only holding empathy, compassion and grief for one side and not the other, that is not your humanity. That is propaganda.

That is a government's propaganda and political propaganda that has you believe that we don't all come from the same source, that we are all not deserving of lives that are safe, free from violence, right and deserving of our basic necessities

like clean water, housing, food. And so when I see these things that are playing out, and I'm looking at people posting, and I'm truly disgusted by some of the things that I'm seeing, like folks that were who I thought were reasonable human beings promoting genocide because they have succumb to the brainwashing that tells them that everyone is

in deserving of life of freedom. So, folks, what I want to offer and create an invitation too, is a more abundant mindset that does not have us focus on those that are lacking and that want the rest of us to live in lack, and that want the rest of us to live in fear, that want the rest of us to live in struggle. We live a life of du ally. There will always be darkness where there

is light. There will always be places of lack. But what we can control is how we are contributing to those systems, and be really mindful of the language that we are using, of the energy that we are exuding. And of what we are allowing ourselves to ingest. Because I will tell you that I was that person that had this television on behind me eight hours, nine hours a day, just feeding me negativity. If that was the way through, y'all, we would have gotten, we would have

broken through already. It's not. My job is to analyze what is happened so that we can find solutions. It isn't just to point to this bad thing and that bad thing, and the next bad thing and that bad thing, because who is that survey? I want when people finish listening to my podcast to feel full, to feel like you have gained more insight and more information, and feel like you have more access to your own personal power

than you did before. And I have found myself struggling because what I feel like I have been putting out is a lot of negativity. And why is that? Because there's a lot of negativity. But I am going to move in a direction where it isn't just about highlighting what is wrong, but also providing pathways to what is right. Friends, there has always been war, there has always been aggression.

There has always been subjugation and oppression. We just have more cameras and drones now, But we also have more access to information than we ever had before. So what are we doing with it? Other than sharing negative articles with one another? What else are we accessing? What are we trying to build? And we can't do that from a place of fear. We can't do that from a place of rage. The dreaming and the building only come from a place of accessing love and really embracing this

idea of shared humanity. What does it mean for us to live free? Because, like I have said, we cannot pray for peace and disconnect that from justice. That's not how it works. Peace only comes through justice, and justice is not about inflicting pain on the people that have inflicted pain on you and saying that your right to inflict that pain is righteous because you were pain first. We are a bunch of wounded souls here walking around.

So the fact is is that what does it look like to clean those wounds out, to air those wounds out so that they can actually heal. But it doesn't look like, oh, let me pray for peace. We will always live in a place of duality and paralyty. That's the universe. But how are we working towards justice? And when we say justice, what does that actually mean? I want to use an example from this week because this goes along with both my feeling and my fuck it right,

which is this. The Republican Party continues to show America who it is right, continues to nominate and speak on, behalf of and advocate for people who openly embrace white supremacy, people who openly have allowed folks to be victims of sexual assault and abuse. People who continue to believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen. People who want to embody and embrace an ideology of lawlessness because they believe

that they are the only law that should exist. What they think, what they believe, what they want, what they value should be everyone else's value. The Republican Party is nominated Steve Scalise, of all people, to be the speaker, the voice, the gavel of the Republicans in the House. This is a man that voted to overturn the election. This is a man that sworn oath to the Constitution.

This is a man that has attended white supremaist rallies and referred to himself not the media, defining him for himself. He defined himself as David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK without the baggage. It is our responsibility to air out that truth. On the flip side, what are we actually trying to create here by airing that out?

Because that's the real question. The Republicans are people that are value lists at this time, because don't get it twisted, right, I truly believe and have believed in bipartisanship, but that was when the Republican Party was an actual political party who had different ideology as it pertained to fiscal responsibility

and what have you. They've always been racist, right, like, let us understand counterintelligence program that murdered black people, black leaders in this country, turning intelligence programs that were built to deal with our foreign adversaries them were utilized in order to decimate black liberation movements. So don't get it twisted. I'm very aware. But there was still an opportunity for collaboration.

That opportunity that ship has sailed. So what are we looking for Because what the media will tell you that we're looking for is somehow, somehow, some way a return to the Republicans of yesteryear. The fact is, friends, we do not have the ability to go backwards. That ship has sailed. So the only thing in front of us is what we can imagine in our future that we may not see, and it's more likely that we won't. So what does it mean to dream of and work

towards a future that you won't actually experience? But it isn't by just consistently falling for the ropodope of getting sucked into the lies and the hate and the smallness, the narrowness, the scarcity that these people exude. That is the place that I want us to start to think in and be in. We're never going to experience utopia because there is a lot of evil in this world. As we are experiencing, it moves to the margins and

then it moves forward. But who we are and how we show up is going to determine what the future looks like for the next generations. We can't define ourselves by what we're against longer. We have to define ourselves by what we are for. And that is where I want Woke af to go. That is it for me today, dear friends on Woke AF as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.