The Mandela Effect and Conspiratorial Thinking

The Mandela Effect is a paranormal and conspiratorial concept that suggests that things in our history are being changed either by a glitch in existence or a nefarious reason yet to be identified.   It was coined by Fiona Broome in 2010 and has since exploded on the internet.  It boils down to being a collective misremembering of some item or event that now seems different.  This ranges from song lyrics, movie lines and how things are spelled to world events.   Broome is a paranormal researcher and writer who was struck by the number of people she encountered who remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s when in fact he lived until 2013 and became President of South Africa after the end of Apartheid.  The 80s were a significant time in the global Anti-Apartheid movement and many people became aware of the history of South Africa's racial policies and the oppression of the native population.  There were leaders who died in prison in the 70s and 80s, one of which Steven Biko, became famous in part through a song by Peter Gabriel.  I has a small role in the anti-apartheid movement when I was in college in the 80s and I know one of the chants was Free Nelson Mandela which is the closing of the song Sun City released in 1985 by Artists United Against Apartheid.  But one can understand remembering this differently.  News has a way of being a flash in the pan and has the 80s gave way to the 90s the growing internet meant that information overload was common.  

Memory is not a static thing.  We construct our memories because frankly we construct all of our perceptions.  We filter out much of the stimulus in our world and focus on what is either important at the moment or unusual.  Driving home from work you probably would not recall all the squirrels you saw running across or near the road but if it were a turtle or a vulture you may pay more attention.  But even the retelling of a memory creates not only an opportunity to remember it differently than it happened but when you remember something from your past, you are a different person with more experiences so you perceive your own memory differently.  This is why eye witness testimony can be so flawed.  Time, retelling and other people's perspective of an event can change your memory of it.  A famous experiment had people count the number of times a handful of people bounced a ball to each other.  While keeping track of all the balls the subjects didn't notice a person in a gorilla suit walk into the scene, wave and walk out.  Once people were told of the gorilla it was easy to see.  However, watching knowing about the gorilla has other surprises.  Click the link and see what you miss.  

Examples some people use for  the Mandela Effect are people believing that the comedian Sinbad starred in a movie called Shazam where he played a wizard, he didn't; that the Berenstain Bears were Berenstein Bears, they weren't; and Darth Vader said "Luke, I'm your father", he didn't.  While all irrelevant to life in general many will put up quite a fight defending their memory even when you can prove they are wrong.  Even more so are those that seek out these so-called glitches in reality sometimes finding them when there is no debate, one Youtuber, All Time Scary, has made a little cottage industry of this.  One of the silliest is from the movie E.T.   When learning to speak English, the alien character fumbles over a variety of words taught to him by Elliot and his siblings.  He learns the name they use for him,  E.T., and the words home and phone.  At first E.T. says "E.T. Home Phone" and when corrected for syntax by the kids it becomes the iconic "E.T. phone home".  Because it was the most often repeated line of the movie we forget his first vocalization.  That doesn't mean it was added or changed.  It means we remember what created as a memory.

None of this is important except that when people start to believe their memories are being tampered with there can be a problem.  We are living at a time when the leaders of our nation and several others are basically telling people what they know to be true is not.  There is a wide-ranging movement of conspiracy theorists who create outrageous stories to attack political opponents and insist that any evidence to the contrary is part of the grand conspiracy.  Birtherism, which propelled the current President into the political sphere in a real way, for example.  Time after time evidence was produced to show President Obama was born in Hawaii, but if you can believe that somehow an entire movie can be made to disappear, then why couldn't it also create a fake past?  Believing conspiracies has gone from a group debating how the CIA and the Mob worked together to kill JFK to elaborate discussions of pedophile rings that brought a man with an AR-15 into a local family pizza place in Washington DC demanding to see the non-existent basement.  While we can laugh at people who believe their past was altered by some outside forces because they don't remember something correctly, that soft minded thinking can also lead to some terrible outcomes in the real world.    

The current administration has for a long time made public statements that are completely and utterly false.  One spokesperson said that they were "Alternative Facts".  As if reality is a point of view.  This week for example, as spikes in at least 30 states in cases of Covid-19 that caused some states to roll back their reopening efforts, both the President and the Vice-President stated we are doing great.  That reopening is moving forward well.  It leads so many to believe that this virus crisis is over.  It isn't and it is getting worse.  This is life and death for many.  This is one example of many where the President states things that are so far from reality that it is hard to understand how that can be allowed to fly but there is a group of people who will always believe him.  

People will always want to remember what fits their narrative, but what is troubling is when evidence is produced to prove them wrong when they are the evidence is ignored.  Someone recently told me that a message from the CDC that was on the news has been scrubbed from the internet because it didn't fit the agenda of someone or something.  The Mandela Effect may seem silly, and fun.  But in the end when people can believe their memories can be scrubbed from the world they can believe their worldview is being manipulated.  That is scary.  

President Mandela did not die in the 80s.  Sinbad didn't do a wizard movie.  No one is changing movie lines.  And no one is erasing from the internet things you want to believe.   So in the end, don't think your memory is a video recording,  if challenged research and be willing to accept you are wrong, and please, if you go out, wear a mask. 

Whose History is Black History

Many years ago I attended a lecture called Whose History is Black History.  One of the things that struck me was when the speaker said something surprising to me about Crispus Attucks.  As I recall she said that many schools in the country, in Black neighborhoods are named for him but he fought for the wrong side in the Revolutionary War.  You see the thesis of the talk was that so much of American History's view of African Americans was from a White perspective.  She went on to say that there were many more people of African descent who fought for the British and many of them went free after the war.  At the same time George Washington didn't want black people in the Continental Army.  It is ironic that one of Washington's slaves from Mount Vernon was one of the men who joined the British, after the war was free.  Harry Washington went to Nova Scotia with many more freed people from the colonies and later moving on the Sierra Leone, where he used not only the agricultural knowledge he learned in Mount Vernon to produce more crop, he led a revolution about the British company and leadership that he was working for based on what he learned from the American revolutionaries.  

i think it is important to think about this. The speaker was saying that we don't learn enough about black history in this country because we don't listen to black people who write it, we read history books written by white people.   In the last few months a lot of white Americans learned about parts of our history that didn't make those textbooks.  It took an HBO series about a DC comic adaptation to inform many people of the attack on Tulsa, OK's Black Wall Street where literal bombs were dropped on a section of an American city to destroy the business district of the highest concentration of black wealth in the country.  It was a racist attack that people were never fully held accountable for.   There was also a significant number of people who never heard of Juneteenth.  Both of these stories which are important to American history for many reasons are often ignored because they are relegated to what is called Black History.  But today those artificial boundaries should come down and I think they will.  But there is still such push back.  The President was amazed to learn about Juneteenth.  That is criminal level ignorance, not only because he had planned to schedule his rally on that date but that the rally would be in Tulsa.  What is also funny is that every year the White House mentioned Juneteenth in a message to the nation.  He just never seemed to care about it enough to learn until it became a problem for him.  And that is the issue with how we have dealt with the segregate history in this country.  Important dates, events and people are moved out of view in favor of a more generic and white view of the country.  It has led to systematic racism and a long standing ignorance of the vast importance people of color have brought to the develop of our nation.  I believe we have met a new milestone and we will not go back. 

The country is being forced to face the systemic racism that is part of our past there is outrage.  Outrage that Confederate monuments put up to intimidate black people during the Jim Crow era are coming down.  Outrage that companies who have had racist icons for products are changing their company image.  Outrage that companies are looking to better understand who they have benefited from that racism and undo their past sins.  And outrage, at the highest levels of government, that a sports league may have been wrong to punish those who tried to race the very issue that has set this sea change in motion.  

All people have trouble facing their own sins.  We work to justify, look to deflect, and sometimes just ignore or worse blame others.  We as a nation can no longer do that.  We must learn what we don't know of our past, listen to those telling us what is wrong right now and work together to bring about a future where we are all truly distinct and together.  Western culture is not a monochromatic one and really never has been.  We are a tapestry but we have allowed some of the threads to be hidden, let's bring them out into the daylight and where they are frayed or broken, let's fix them.  One way is to learn.  Many people more educated than I have taken the time to write about what was left out of the history books, or set aside out of context for a few sessions in February.  Social media and by extension several informative websites have been filling in the gaps in our knowledge sharing first person stories of today's plights and of a history that is richer than you can imagine.  Look for them.  Educate yourself.  Expand your knowledge base.  You will be surprised and delighted and maybe even a little angry about what your formal education lacked.  But you will be a better person and we will be a better nation.  Bigotry of all forms is a disease and knowledge and experience is the medicine that fights it.  Take your medicine. 

   

Despite The Fact the GOP Doesn't Think So, There is Racism in the US

 This morning while driving to my office I heard a quote from Jalen Rose, former NBA star and current analyst for ESPN.  He said, "I Wish America Loved Black People as Much as They Love Black Culture".  That reminded me of something that happened more than 30 years ago.   In 1986 the movie Soul Man came out.  The movie was the story of an entitled rich high school graduate whose parents decide not to pay for his college education after he got into Harvard University.  So he takes tanning pills to pass as African American to obtain a dedicated scholarship.  This comedy was supposed to be an anti-racist attempt to create a conversation.  It didn't, it was bad, it was poorly written and poorly executed.  One of the lines of the movie as the main character C. Thomas Howell is talking to a friend about his plan says "It's the Cosby generation, America loves Black People".   A critic of the movie at the time wrote in an op-ed that I truly wish I could find, "America doesn't love Black people, America loves to be entertained by Black people".  That was true then and is true today.  

As we have seen with protests rise up to police killing of unarmed black people we have seen probably the most controversial figure Colin Kapernick berated that he is paid to play football not protest.  When others like NBA superstar Lebron James called out political leaders over issues of racism, he was told to shut up and dribble.  When the cast of Hamilton took a post-show talk opportunity to speak to the Vice-President in attendance calls for them to stick to the script were heard. In NASCAR, driver Bubba Wallace, the only full-time driver in the premier series has asked to have the Confederate flag banned from racing.  People told him that he doesn't belong in NASCAR with that attitude.   African Americans have been told many times to not speak up just go along and that is how you get along.  Now we are seeing that silence is not an option.  

Systemic racism exists, it is difficult to root out, it has killed people.  Watching a man die for eight minutes on camera has lit a fire  and people are responding.  We as a nation must face fully the reality of our past and if we are going to embrace those who bring us joy and excitement through art, music, sports and drama and if we are going to benefit from those who invent the items that make us safer, healthier, and make our lives better.  If we are going to learn from those who discover and uncover new things about our world and the universe we all live in we must acknowledge not only their achievements but their humanity.  It is not simply okay to not be racist.  (BTW we are probably all a little racist in our own way, even if not aware)  We must strive to fight racism when we see it, we must not make it normalized in private conversations and public displays.  We must find a way to learn where we fail and try to do better.  

I am not saying we have to be perfect tomorrow.  We all grew up in a culture that taught us directly or indirectly to carry prejudice.  Making mistakes is how we learn to be better.  There are people in the streets and they are angry.  Listen to the words they are saying and not focus on the fires and looting.  Think about where in your life you encounter people who are different from you and how you can engage in meaningful connections where appropriate.  READ  ASK QUESTIONS  BE COMFORTABLE WITH DISCOMFORT.   Remember everyone is a work in progress.  The important thing is where we put our energy into where the progress will take us.  George Floyd is dead because 4 human beings didn't think it was worth listening to his cries for help as he lay dying.  We can all start there, if you listen closely there are many cries for help.  We must find a way to respond. 

All Lives Matter

Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington DC has won the gold medal in Trump trolling.  Thursday night she got volunteers to paint BLACK LIVES MATTER across 16th Street near the White House.  The letters are as tall as the street is wide and easily seen both driving down the street or as the helicopter takes the President to Andrews when he travels on Air Force One.  Of course the message has been met with the typical response from the right wing saying ALL LIVES MATTER.  I really don't know if those who say it are so caught up in their own bias to not understand how offensive that is or if they really don't want to have a light shone on the on-going systemic racism that permeates our culture and in the last few years has found a voice in the highest seats of power. 

There are many metaphors for what All Lives Matter sounds like.  The most often cited one is that it is like complaining that the fire department is spraying water on the neighbor's house which is on fire and not yours which isn't.  However for me the more important metaphor is more like someone who sees food being brought to the home a family where a parent has died screaming "All Parents Die".  It is myopic at best, hateful at worst.  

The phrase Black Lives Matter grows from the idea that for too long black people were seen as second class both in perception and in some cases law.  The list of unarmed black people killed by police is too long and too often historically the consequence of those killings were minimized by a system that shared a view that black people were somehow inferior.  The idea that black people have to be careful performing everyday activities because of their skin color.  The fact that black parents need give what is called "The Talk" to their children is something that should make us all angry.  No group should have to worry at this level.  

Another argument made by people is that black on black crime kills far more young black men than the police do.  That is true.  But the difference is that when ordinary people kill each other there is no implicit or explicit societal support.  But police who kill are doing it in our name.  Police are hired by us as a community to act to protect and serve.  Holding a knee on the neck of man until he dies is not protecting or serving anyone.   

The latest attacks on the protests is that George Floyd, the murder victim that sparked them, was a felon and had drugs in his system.  Virtually every time a person is killed by police who is either in custody or unarmed there is a torrent of people who either make up or highlight a criminal past.  Let me be clear, a society should be judged by how the authorities in charge treat the worst of us.  Convicted or simply arrested, when in the hands of an agent of the government people should be treated with dignity.  Police must show restraint when encountering the public and it shouldn't matter if the person is an innocent charity worker or a ruthless killer.  The reason is that when you give police or others in power the ability to harm those they are charged to serve the line of where it stops is difficult to find.  We have seen in the last week police step outside of what most police think is appropriate behavior, egged on by the President who once called for them to rough up people when arresting them.  From college students pulled from their cars because they get stuck in traffic, to a woman who was beaten with batons after she pulled away from an officer who was groping her, to an old man who approached heavily armed police to be pushed to the ground causing him to bleed from his ears, and then at least one officer wouldn't allow a comrade to help him, each time the actions of officers, which is against policy and procedure, should never be tolerated.  Those were the ones caught on video, what else might be going on. 

The country is reaching a point where we have to define who we are as a people.  The justice that is part of the narrative of our nation's mythology must be upheld.  That means we all have to be seen as equal before the law, that means that government officials charged with maintaining order should be held to a higher standard and it means that we must do better in electing people that understand that and don't retreat to partisan nonsense and speak truth to power, even if that power is the leader of your own party.  If you truly mean that All Lives Matter, then you too should be in the streets, calling your elected officials, looking for reform when needed and elevating those who are striving for justice.   The Book the President so awkwardly held up in front of the church charges us with the words "Justice, justice you shall pursue", it is a call to action.  Pursue justice today, because if we don't then perhaps it will get to far away to find for a long time.

Remember Why People are Angry

I can't give credit to the creator of this meme but would love to, it addresses a few things.  This of course was a response to the destruction in the cities across this country in response to the killing of George Floyd and so many others by police when lethal force was not only not necessary, but criminal.  Some have argued that this is not the same thing.  That Jesus wasn't destroying public property just cleaning up the Holy Temple.  I would argue in a way some of this graffiti that we see on monuments around the country is similar.  

While I claim no expertise over the Christian Bible, what Jesus did in the Temple with the commercialism was to destroy not only the acts of the merchants but the symbolism of what it meant. Jerusalem, at the time, was in turmoil and his anger did in fact boil over because of it. The Temple itself was a symbol to many of an oppressive society as it seemed to be in cooperation with Rome. So if one defiled the Temple merchants that was an act of revolution against the powers in charge. The statues that venerate a history that some find is one of oppression would make symbolic targets. Jesus' attack was on the establishment the merchants were a symbol. 

Now, of course, this is wrong and there is some indication that some of the worst of the vandalism and looting that took place was less about anger at oppression and more from radical extremists both on the right and the left.  In my experience with protests over the years there is always an element who thinks destruction is the necessary.  Many times the issue being protested is not relevant to them.  In fact many times they derail the message of the protesters, I believe that this is happening here. White supremacists have called for more violence in the streets to reach their goal of a race war.  Many anarchists have been using these tactics to sow discontent not in positions of government but in government itself.  People who destroy and deface public and private property should be arrested, should be held responsible and should pay the price.  But we are more and more seeing the broad brush being used to paint all protesters with the same stripe.  That is dangerous, last night in Washington the President of the United States ordered a street cleared for a photo op and tear gas was used to move people off public property where they were legally and non-violently calling for change.  One police department that was there from a county surrounding DC has said they can no longer, in good faith, participate in this kind of crowd control.  I wonder how many of those peaceful protesters will give up their non-violent stance now out of anger when met with violence of the authorities. 

The idea that people could get so angry that they smash windows, vandalize statues and symbols of power etc. can easily be understood by anyone who ever punched a wall because they were just so fed up with something. The something that some people are dealing with is decades of being seen as black before being seen as citizens.  That being black in this country means you grow up skeptical of police not in community with them.  Recently on Twitter a man ask African Americans "When was the first time a police officer pulled a gun on you?"   Not if that happened, not the only time, the question assumed that it happened and that there was more than once for a number of people.  People responded from every station and age of life with answers, some as young as 10 years old.  This is a horrible reality and I see no real end in sight.  This isn't about more training, this isn't about black communities cleaning up their streets, this isn't about using the military for law and order.  This is about a change on hearts and minds of people who carry weapons to protect and serve who shouldn't.  Police have a difficult job, they should be paid well to do it, but they must be held to a high standard and bad individuals and the system that allows they to flourish must be purged.  It won't be easy but if we are going to survive as a republic with "Liberty and Justice for All" it must be done.  We can do it.  

In the meantime there will be anger.  Black people are dying at the hands of their government.  I will never know what that is like, I will never be able to fully grasp the anger.  My skin tone and standing gives me a great deal of immunity to the horror some have to face.   All I can do is try to help find a way to repair the broken world. And looking to the Bible, Jesus, Moses, Nehemiah, Judith and Tamar all acted out of anger to change people's minds. I do wonder where they would have been on Saturday night..