SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back, everybody, to the weekly dispatch. This week, uh, my Samuel, uh Samuel. Sam Zemke.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Sam Zemke.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

No Samuel's around here. I don't know where that could came from. And myself, Reverend Joaquil, and my dear friend Reverend Ana Luisa. We were thinking about how um a lot of the things we talked about last time uh have to do with this sense that we um that we're that we have that there are others, you know, that there's this othering of that there is us and them, that whole us and them paradigm. And I've been reading recently something about it's called Where Western Christianity Went Wrong, and and it's talking about Augustine back in the the day. Um, and that was kind of where you know Rome and Greece and the people in power really started using the ideas that Augustine put forward to say there is nature and uh and humans are different, they're separate. Um, anything natural uh that that you might do, sex or or anything like that, is is a sin. Um it's a sin to have sex outside of wanting to make babies. Um and even that, Augustine was had a lot of issues around that.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Really?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Yeah, yeah. Oh it's a whole nother story, but yeah, wow, he had his own problems. Um and he just kind of hated the whole idea, you know. So he put that into the the um papal, you know, whatever they call those meetings. Uh yeah, yeah, and um and their weekly dispatch, yeah. Their weekly dispatch, which they do every hundred years or so. Yeah, anyway, that and they they made that the law of the Catholic Church at the time, of course, which is pretty much the old church at the time. And one of the things in this book he says is that that was never the idea that Christ was talking about. Never, he never said this. In fact, his was the opposite of that. We are all one being, we're here together, we have to be together, work together, love each other, have empathy and compassion for each other. Um, and that's what will make things better in the world. Um and so that was a real digression from that, and for the purpose of power. That's that's all it was about because the Romans, the Romans had taken it up as their state religion, and that was a way for them to say, you are not us, you know, you're you're you're a sinner, and um, and we therefore have the right to enslave you, we therefore have the right to uh oppress you, yeah, and you are you're not you know not good enough, you know. And um, so it's something that's very old, and that we are seeing the results of now in our ability to other the planet and to say that's not really part of us, so it's okay for us to exploit it, and it's okay for us to burn it up, and it's okay for us to chop down all the trees, and it's okay for us to mine and just all the really sad, horrible things that we've been doing to the planet for for a long time, and especially in the last few hundred years, you know. So each other, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Yeah, well, and so so by virtue of othering the planet, we enslave people to work the planet, and you know, they are less than because of this. I mean, I've often seen those really amazing photos from uh Brazil and like the the copper mines, you know, with like hundreds of bodies just digging away in India, you know, the people who are called to who are tasked to do the mining as well. Yeah, bodies upon bodies have been called to do this as work that as suffering, great suffering.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Yeah, exactly. And causing harm. Yeah, and and uh just the sense that um you know, that we when we can other the planet, when we can other each other, uh it's it's gives us permission to do all those things and gives us a permission. And so what uh this one friend of ours was had wrote a long article this week about what are we giving permission to by living the life we're living. It's really something to be aware of and thought about. So yeah. So a lot of things being done.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Yeah, and you know, and it go ahead, Sam.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Oh, just the the othering not not just of like each other in the sense of who we say it's okay to like do the do the the demanding, degrading or um accelerated death causing labor. But it's it's suffused through so like almost all of our interactions, and it's become like hypercharged in the atomization and polarization in our in our culture where like so many people can't can't even have a conversation. There's the tolerance for disagreement and conflict is at an all-time low, it seems like and so you know and there's it could go down the rabbit hole of like where and why and what, but there's been some like very, as far as I understand it, like pretty intentional pushes in that direction because it makes people easier to control when there's when there's somebody outside that you can blame all of the things on that you can say, you know, you know, uh, I'm not gonna engage with X subset of the population or I'm gonna be celebrate their suffering because they're not like me, along ideological, racial, religious, you know, whatever boundaries, then you can get poked in that place, and it's really easy to poke you around and push you around. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yeah, yeah, really easy. Yeah. There was a statistic about how many people have lost friends or family members, been estranged from friends or family members since this kind of the since like 2015, which is sort of a you know, bellwether to what's the what's been happening in the world. And um, and and it's it's a large, it's like almost 50 percent uh of people who have no longer able to talk to their family or members or to talk to their friends or talk to their neighbors um because of that, what you're just talking about, Sam. So yeah, it's a it's a real thing and it's a sad thing. And it, you know, we talked about last time mutual aid. It's hard to do mutual aid when you can't stand the people, right? Who are who are needing to help, you know. Um, and so that's another point of, you know, the other thing that's lost is and this loss that we're mourning in this episode is the loss of empathy, the loss of compassion for each other, loss of recognition of ourselves in others.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Um or even the loss of of uh not caring for subsets of our community, be it elders or young children, you know, based on you know, random issues that you may or may not have about cer have being of service to those folk. Yeah. Um, it is very apparent, like some people are really being pushed out of the safety net. And you know, who are we if that's so easy for it to happen? And it's easy for us to be watching it happen and not have a way to voice our our our like anger or disdain, like this is not okay with spare, yeah, you know, that this is not okay, and we need to talk about it some more. Again, you know, normalizing conversations that are really hard without having people get really upset. You know, and I'm gonna also say, like, you know, this weekend I was talking to somebody about death and dying, and he mentioned he's a chaplain and his own family doesn't want to talk about death and dying. So, you know, there's there are multitude of places where we are, we are, we're not, um, and I want to use the word trained, but we're not comfortable with what we're not comfortable, we don't want to have anybody else like addressing. If you're not comfortable with, you know, death and dying, or even like, you know, I have a disease that I need to talk about, well, I'm not comfortable talking about this. And there is a small, you know, there's a space for you to be like honest and say that that makes me really uncomfortable to talk about. But on the other hand, it's like if it's it's if it's making more of our community in peril, like we don't need to talk about it. You know, like it is a thing.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Yeah, yeah. And it is hard conversations to get started. We've had yeah, there's a guy up here who's a minister who's been working for years um on just getting people together to um have conversations. And he the way he's done it is he's he invites people of different thought, thought idealistics, ideals, and he says, let's go build a ramp for this person who needs a ramp for a wheelchair. Let's go um, you know, create a garden. Uh, and he gets people all together to do these tasks, and that's that's been a way through, which has helped at least to some extent. And it's another, again, good PSA, another possibility for all of us in our own communities to think how could I invite all the the people upstairs in my condo who voted for that other guy to go down and make a garden with me. And that's actually happening in my condo, which is kind of cool. But you know, just yeah, the everyday connections with each other, we've can find we can figure out that we're not that far apart from each other.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Yeah. It is really scary. Um, and I also feel like, you know, we we have this idea that to be successful and to live a great life is to not have any discomfort. And, you know, when we we immerse ourselves in a bubble that keeps us from feeling uncomfortable, it really does diminish our our humanity in some ways.

SPEAKER_03 10:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Um, because we don't recognize like other people who might be outside the bubble who need, and I think about this because as many of you know, I walk in the alleys in the morning with my dog and just always thinking and praying and listening to birds. And there is um an unhoused human who I've seen for months, and you know, because I walk early in the morning, I see him gathering his things and getting ready for his day. And just this morning, though, um, he was out on the sidewalk and I walked past him and I could smell his urine. He smelled very dirty and unhealthy, and and it was it was alarming to me because usually I'm like, hi, you know, from like a distance. Hey, good morning. And, you know, as I I didn't move faster and I didn't move away, but I was like, that was uncomfortable. And then my next thought was like, you know, he he doesn't have a home to bathe and take care of himself, and he's got dirty clothes. And and I was thinking about that. I was like, you know, I recently took a big jug of warm water and some washcloths to uh a mutual aid group for downtown and you know, for people to wash up. I'm like, I need to help people wash up. It is more time, it is energy, it's sometimes a little scary. And yet, you know, me having that interaction this morning just reminded me like not everybody has access to clean water. Yeah. And I can be of service in some way, or even just like tomorrow morning take a baggie full of, you know, wet wipes or whatever or something. But yeah, like, you know, we disdain those who make us uncomfortable. We disdain family members who want to have hard conversations, we disdain people who are hungry and crossing our border and and like are desperate to change their own personal lives. And, you know, when I got divorced, people say they don't want people, you you no longer have as many friends because people worry that their marriage isn't as strong as they think it is, because you are emblematic of the potential for a downfall. And so, you know, is it our humanity that sees all these others around us and says, I can, you know, I am not homeless, I am not, you know, from another country, so poor that I have to risk my life and limb to make a better life for my children. Like, you know, it's uncomfortable. It's so uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that comfort being the litmus test for a good life, I think is a huge, also a huge part of where we've gone wrong. Soften mean. Soften mean callous. I mean, the oftentimes I I was just talking with a friend of mine the other day about this, and I think I originally encountered it through some Buddhist teaching about suffering and how so much, and I've probably talked about it here before, but the so much of the imbalance of the world has to do with comfort and insulation from discomfort. If you have if you have material abundance, you can shelter yourself and your family and your loved ones from the the discomforts of life, the natural discomforts of life. And it is but through that process of imbalancing and wealth hoarding or whatever, that that discomfort, that suffering that you won't allow yourself to experience to change and grow in a natural level, natural way, gets offset to somebody else. And so other people take on more of that discomfort, more of that suffering, more of that burden. And so balance, the like utopian vision that I personally ascribe to is not free from suffering. It's that everybody sort of shares the burden of natural, natural suffering. You can't buy your way out of failure if an idea doesn't work out. That's that sucks and it happens. Yeah. You're gonna have your heart broken. You can't buy your way out of it. You can't pay somebody off, you know, because they don't like you, or you know, pay for uh different rabbit hole. But like to share that and to for everybody to go through those natural and natural is a complicated word too, but just like go through the processes of discomfort that that allow you to to change and grow and develop in a balanced way. Because if you take on too much, if you're experiencing too much challenge, too much of that suffering, you don't have the opportunity to process. You don't have the opportunity to grow. Right. Yeah. Right. You're just depleted constantly. And it doesn't become become a transformative uh developmental process.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Yeah. Right. It's more burnt burnout, and what we're seeing with burnout in a lot of people now. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Right. And you know, I I'm gonna kind of also put a pin in this as well, because what we when we talk about people going through grief, uh the loss of a loved one, very simply. You've lost somebody you you care for deeply, and you're in grief mode. And if people around you find your grief uncomfortable, yeah, right, like they are not willing to share that burden with you because they want to keep their own comfort level up. They're like, no, no, this, you know, I don't want to think about death and dying. I don't want to think about loss. It's a, but you know, one way that we can help one another is to recognize like this is how we help the burden be the load shared, you know, like just listening or reaching out and hugging or whatever, whatever's small ways that we can impart that we see and behold the suffering that uh our our loved one is going through or a community member, right? Yeah. We help share the burden. So, so yeah, so you know, discomfort in in our land is we we just I wonder if that's why we're afraid of dying, right? We are or having we're afraid of having the conversation because it is uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_03 16:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

And you know, it's scary to think like there's no way I'm gonna be able, like I'm gonna die, I'm gonna leave my family or whatever. But I don't know. It's it's I think this is a really interesting and rich topic because I it is our the discomfort that we feel when seeing others around us and predicaments that we hope to never encounter can make us callous and turn away and leave children in detention homes and leave trees that are having a hard time and leave you know elders who are suffering by themselves in homes and they'd have no idea what to do, right? Like it's too easy to just churn away and just be like, nah, nah nah.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

And on the macro level, it kind of contributes to the greed um of just you know that that's one way to keep stay comfortable, is like keep hoarding, hoarding money, like you mentioned earlier, Sam, and um and hoarding space and hoarding uh uh uh resources.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Um or even knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah, yeah, and yeah, exactly, yeah. So that um you get to the point where you you you know you just have to keep hoarding more and more and more. It's like this disease um that you have to keep hoarding more and more and more to feel um comfort and be sure your your gang is gonna be comfortable. And that's what leads to these, like we've just talked about earlier, these um corporate-owned uh elder care or funeral care and funeral homes or hospitals or hospices that um have no interest whatsoever in uh making lives better for their patients. Their only interest is in making money, and so um that leads to statistically leads to more deaths, more infections, more falls, uh, more people um just dying because there's no reason to live any longer. I mean, you know, just just all this these things that we watch and and see and notice and feel horrible about that maybe on a basis, one-to-one basis, we can do something. But again, this this weird, strange greed disease that um somebody needs to have a trillion dollars, or somebody even needs to have a billion dollars. I was thinking about this the other day, you know. What do you need a billion dollars for? Who needs a billion dollars? Yeah, you know, um, so yeah, it's just it's not necessary to be comfortable to be alive. You can certainly do with a lot less. And if you have more than you need, then the next thing to do is like find ways to give it away and help people. And that doesn't ever seem to occur to the majority.

SPEAKER_03 19:26

Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Well, let's go back to those the elder care, too. It's like, you know, so many people always like those places smell bad. Yeah. Right? Like that is a thing. Like, ugh, I don't want to go there because it's stinky. And you know, so it's uncomfortable. If you have an elder in those places, then there's that's the only place you can be, you have to show up. You cannot abandon ship, right? And you have to recognize like, uh is this place under uh underserved by you know the people who work here? Are they getting paid a living wage? You know, what like find out more information and and call it out and say, you know, and and unfortunately happens in this acute situation where you have somebody, because otherwise we don't go around and like chick in on elders that are not our family members, right? So we don't know. But every aspect of our community requires that we as humans like lean into these moments of others having their own lived experience that are difficult for them. Makes us uncomfortable. Like, how can I be of service for this just one moment in this person's life? Be it elder care, you know, in a place where money is not being used to help people in their end of life or, you know, children in detention centers or you know, what have you.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Yeah, yeah. It's hard. I mean, we do regularly go visit people, and I would love to go sing in these places, you know, and sing with them. Um, but uh, and that's not impossible. I mean, it's totally open. I don't I don't know if people even know that any elder care place would just love to have you come and visit with a you volunteer, visit with some of the people there, they don't have anybody coming to visit with them. Volunteer for hospice, volunteer for these things, you know.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Hospices, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you you may find like I did that it's very frustrating volunteering for hospice that's corporate owned because they don't care so much, but you still will be contributing. You'll be giving, you'll be changing the paradigm just by showing up, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:26

So yeah, and especially it's one of the things that I had to for my hospice work was um show up for people who have no family. Uh and and honestly, there are a lot of people out in the world today who, you know, loss of a spouse or never had got married and had children, and their community has passed it away and they're really left all to themselves. Like, you know, just walking into a room and saying hello is really lovely. So that is a way for us to not turn away from these moments of discomfort.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

you know and on the other side of that uh I also like to bring up when it moves beyond discomfort into this is a total I'm gonna jump tracks into into actual like questions of safety and where like uh fear has materialized isolation and alienation polarization has materialized into real threats right into real danger like uh like say the mental health crisis and homelessness and how some folks who you see suffering on the street that you would really like to help are not safe for you to approach. Right. Right. Or which is like I'm not the happiest that that's my first example. Um but your neighbor, you know, your upstairs neighbor who voted differently from you more now than ever may actually be a dangerous person to you depending on your skin color depending on your outward identity or how you you know signal to like which which identity groups you belong to you know if you have uh unnaturally colored hair you know approaching approaching your Trumpist neighbor or going you know trying to do do that work or you know be uh even being kind can be seen as a threat. And so how do we you know meet those moments um you know speaking out in a systemic way about some of these things that we're seeing uh is actively an unsafe thing by design. Yeah. And so how do we balance that? You know where where does the like discomfort and risk and fear and danger how do we navigate those things you know uh in in institutional callousness and what what happens if you make a stink at the at the nursing home where your parent lives and and the the board says you're out and it's the only nursing home that you can afford.

SPEAKER_03 24:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Yeah yeah or even more subtle things where they just you know quit treating your parent well you know um and I think that you know those things call for a lot of courage on our parts but they also call for discernment and they call for listening to your gut you know listen to your heart uh really attention yeah yeah and community and having somebody else come with you yeah yeah thanks Sam that's important stuff yeah yeah well it's not easy and like we said last time take care of yourselves um we love you we care about you we want you to continue to do the work you're doing we want to hear from you um anything else before we say adios keep on talking about everything that's just uncomfortable yeah we're we're here to back you up yeah find our sub stack page and get on the chat with us we we'd love to continue this conversation so like us love us subscribing we love you and we are tell all your friends all right much love everybody adios see you next time adios conversations at the end of life