Peace Hacks

During Derek Chauvin’s trial, I’ve heard from many good friends about racism in America and how officer Chauvin showed no signs of racial bias in his treatment of George Floyd. To a person, these friends are white/white passing conservative Christians, folk who live in a predominately white world, who’s ears are bent to narratives that lean decidedly to the right. Anything leaning the other way is quickly dismissed, leaving the other side of the story, and anything that might challenge their own, abandoned.

I do this too, by the way. We all do. The last thing our tortured souls need in this pandemic chapter is the idea that we might be wrong about something. It feels good to feel right, like there’s an entire cross-section of American culture that’s lost its mind, in need of our wisdom and guidance.

And let’s not forget that, for Christian America, “Feeling” right is often more important than “being” right.

So, before I get  too sanctimonious, let me confess that my ideas and perspectives could also use some objectivity.

On the other side of the coin, I spent most of my adult life as a white, conservative, southern evangelical Christian, formally trained in theology at one of America’s most conservative evangelical seminaries. I know fairly well the conservative Christian mind, and lived for many years under the values that support it. I know what the Capitol rioters were thinking on January 6th, and why, when white people riot, the conservative mind sees a much more “understandable” and far less criminial gathering than, say, that of a George Floyd protest.

I also know that this particular branch of Christianity is too segregated — ethnically, politically, culturally — to have any compassion for the plight of folk outside of their camp, or to listen to any perspective that leans non-evangelical. This is one of segregation’s most significant legacies; to keep us and our minds separated from any perspectives that might suggest a different narrative.

The process of unsegregating my life — to a degree — has helped me to see a bit beyond my own boundaries, and exposed a different facet of racism’s past and present predicament. I was ready for this — to a degree — having lived in a hipster urban context for a few years, with plenty of challenging conversations and awkward encounters that forced me into realizing that I’m not always right. I’ve had multiple conversations about race, sexual orientation, abortion, et al. that I never had in my years of living in Arkansas, or Lubbock, or the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex.

So maybe I’ve earned a bit of holier-than-them sanctimony this morning. I’ve had hundreds of face-to-face, very personal encounters while representing both sides of this fence, now ready to spew my perspective, once again, and offer an invitation into some level of the only thing that can heal our rapidly unraveling united states:

Listening.

I’ve said this before: if we’ve never sat across from a fellow human and listened with great intent to a very different side of the race story, to the point where we can articulate and defend, the truth has escaped us.

To that, I’ll offer some facts and opinions about the George Floyd arrest, along with the general state of things, that have managed to escape conservative dialogue.

If you think that what follows is going to have holes in it, you’re right, but that doesn’t make it an unworthy journey.

First, officer Chavin is not on trial for racism, he’s on trial for murder, and rightly so, as full body cam footage of the George Floyd encounter will attest. It’s awful to watch, by the way, not just because it portrays a man slowly dying under the knee of a police officer, but because this officer was invited, twice, by one his partners, to turn Floyd over; a safe and simple act that would have saved his life.

Floyd was face down, subdued, no longer fighting, but Chauvin saw fit to keep him on his face, knee to neck, for a further nine minutes.

Why? Was he angry at Floyd? Angry in general? Racist? Stupid?

What causes one human being to treat another like an animal?

The narrative among many of my conservative friends is that Floyd would still be alive today if he a) hadn’t been on Fentanyl, b) hadn’t passed a counterfeit bill, and c) hadn’t resisted arrest. What idiot would argue that? If Floyd had instead decided to be an “upstanding” citizen and do what he’s told when the cops show up, like the rest of us do, he’d still be around. Unfortunately, as this narrative goes, he chose to put himself in a bad place, and he chose to resist arrest.

The message is clear: make the right choices, like us fine white Christian folk do, and you get to live.

This ignores the fact that, if you’re white and make the same choices George Floyd did, as whites often do, your chances of survival go way up (see this Yale perspective and do the math on this Statista data).

There seems to be no evidence that Blacks resist arrest more frequently than whites, or better, that Blacks choose to give police a harder time than whites do. Numerically speaking, whites are arrested more frequently and/or have more encounters with police than Blacks. As this report suggests (again, numerically), whites resist more frequently.

The data that I’ve laid eyes on leaves me questioning: why such disparity in deaths when the police get involved?

Here’s another facet of this problem that frequently gets passed over by the “Blacks just need to get their shit together” crowd.

If I were to take generations of your family and incarcerate them at the levels that we incarcerate Blacks, it would crush the backbone of your family structure and inject an unthinkable level of trauma into your very DNA (see this article on the epigenetics of trauma). On top of that, if you and your community were placed square in the middle of a system that ensures a smaller paycheck, higher unemployment rates, higher incarceration rates, and the law enforcement disparities I mention above, things would get much more complicated.

How easy would it be for you to stay away from drugs, or out of jail, much less do what you’re told when the armed ambassadors of this system tell you to submit?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that there’s no data to back up the idea that law enforcement, for example, is skewed in favor of whites. The Bureau of Justice Statistics provides arrest data for the past 20 years (you can play around with their  arrest data tool here, then do a quick search for BJS incarceration data by year). According to this, whites do more crime, including drugs and violence, while Blacks serve more time. You can argue my interpretation of the data if you like, but, sorry, there’s data, and you shouldn’t poo poo it until you’ve spent some time under its tutelage.

Another nauseatingly simple example would be the unemployment statistics that we’ve been tracking for the past 60 years. These clearly indicate that Black unemployment is always 2x that of white. Why? Blacks are more educated, resourced, empowered, and motivated than they’ve ever been.

The answer is simple: we’d still rather hire whites. They’re the first to be hired in an economic upturn and last to be fired when things go south.

It’s one thing to be ignorant of the mountain of evidence that supports mass incarceration and the other disparities we’ve talked about this morning. It’s another thing to choose to ignore it, especially since we’re preaching at the Black community about making right choices.

I’ll offer one more fact about racism in America, one that would change everything if we could manage to admit to it, and one that comes to bear on Derek Chauvin’s alleged racism.

We’re beginning to open a dialogue on systemic racism, even at church, and that’s great. But we utterly and categorically refuse to deal with racism at the personal level. We’re not going to ask, am I racist? And because we’re so segregated, there’s nothing to draw our personal racism out into the open, nothing to challenge America’s personal racism problem.

On this, we choose to look the other way, and rightfully so: it’s not unlike a gun being pointed in your face. Who wouldn’t resist?

But if we don’t have the faith or courage to face our own racism, how can we be the ones who decide that Derek Chauvin was simply “doing his job,” that race had nothing to do with his choices? As someone who’s recently come to grips with his own racial bias, and the bias of his church, I’m not convinced.

The only thing that would compel me to treat another human being like an animal is the belief that there’s something about them that isn’t human.

Why don’t Black people do what the police tell them to do? I think that they’ve come to believe that too many of us, including our police officers, see the Black community with the same eyes.

Photo Credit: Clay Banks at Unsplash

By Jerry Fultz, a.k.a. “Reggie”

I’m back for part two – asking you to help me figure out if I’m walking the path of the pilgrim, the prodigal or the putz. In part one I described how my vocational significance, my personal “house of cards,” was blown into the wind.

To recap: after being forced from a career which had blessed me with a sense of transcendent meaning, I found myself entering a deep personal void akin to what anthropologists call liminality, i.e., a period of high ambiguity that exists in the land between what’s over and what is next.

photo credit: barriersman.com

Periods of liminality are common. We all “age out” of previous stages in life. We all experience big losses and tragedies. We wake up one day to the reality that a threshold has been crossed and there is no map forward and no bridge back. There is “no line on the horizon” (to quote Bono and the boys in U2). It’s as though we have been abandoned to a hinterland – an area lying beyond what is visible or what is known. It’s Tolkien’s Deadmarshes, an area of faint hope.

My threshold into the liminal came when I was relieved of my position at work. In trying to gain some understanding, I have attempted to describe this space ad nauseum in personal journals. My writings get emotional and complex. Dark thoughts emerge. Blame is cast. Demons are fought. It is a place of shame. I put myself and God on trial. It exhausts me.

For me, the liminal theme I keep coming back to is “fracture.”

Something has been irretrievably broken, something that has been baked into my DNA. I am fractured. This broken thing for me is a sense of purpose. A sense of vocation. A sense of calling. It’s a big reason why I’m on this earth – and somehow it just evaporated into the ether one day. As you can likely tell, these are DEEP waters for me.

To be clear, the core issue in liminality is not the bitter taste of loss. It’s not grief (although grieving is an important component of the process). For me, it’s been the evasive inability to successfully reinvent – to come out the other side. In my case, it’s been the inability to reinvent around a new career “north star”. And what’s been doubly confusing to me is that career reinvention is something I used to be great at (see previous post). Even this skill, it seems, has abandoned me.

I know what C.S. Lewis means when he describes what it means to be a man: “Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut when you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run: all earths are staked.” Letters to Malcolm chapter VIII

As men everywhere can attest, what we do for a living – our vocational roles in this world – ARE wrapped up in who we are as a husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, providers, friends, neighbors, etc, etc, etc. Shrinks and sociologists debate over this, but being untethered from personal vocational mission – WHATEVER THAT MEANS INDIVIDUALLY TO US – amounts to oxygen deprivation. We’re on life support without it.

So let’s move on. Successfully navigating the liminal is a highly complex emotional skill. My highly evolved approach has been to play “Whack-A-Mole.”

Maybe you know the arcade game. Players use a mallet to hit toy moles, which appear at random, back into their holes. The idea is to pound enough moles to eventually win the game.

In my journals, I have listed over 20 tactics, techniques, seminars, books, strategies, classes and initiatives I have completed to successfully emerge from the haze of vocational disruption.

Moles.

They are all the fads, tools and tricks I’ve tried to whack in reinventing the game of vocational significance. In short, they have all been of limited help. You’ve probably heard of many of them. But so far, and again in the words of Bono and the U2 boys, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

So, I made a decision awhile back. I’m done chasing everyone else’s “take this pill and call me in the morning” solutions. That doesn’t mean I’ve closed my mind to outside resources. Far from it. But it does mean that my answer, my “singularity” exists “in here” and not “out there”.

And “in here” is where I’ve gained some traction. I have struggled for months in attempting to articulate this, but if I have anything to offer those looking to make sense of vocational wanderlust, it’s this: look for a Who, not a What.

I have not found what I am looking for, but, unexpectedly, I am rediscovering WHO I am looking for. As it turns out, the answer to what ails me is not a what – as in what I’m meant to do. Instead, it’s a who – as in who can infuse this mess with meaning.

Since my college days, I have professed to be a Christian. By that I simply mean that I have tried to be more like Jesus. I’ve had my “born again” encounter and have always considered myself to be an evangelical. But who cares? The grind of the past 4 years has been so completely soul-wrecking to me that those labels lack much definition for me now. That guy has died a thousand deaths.

There is so much to say here, more than will fit into a 1,200-word blog post. In this process of navigating the liminal I have lost my faith a hundred times, yet my fidelity has remained intact. Pre-covid, I’d already back-burnered church attendance for the better part of a year and, instead, am now part of a meaningful fellowship that’s not really counting gold stars for attendance. I’m part of a Bible study that has expanded – not narrowed – my thinking. I have friends that process life without prescribing some religious pill. My kids have a dad that’s authentic, who no longer tries to force them into youth groups, Christian clubs or mission trips.

Stripped of all the trappings, I have found a larger God – the one who I missed for decades. He’s well-equipped to sort through my baggage and craft it for higher purposes.

That said, life continues to be kind of a restless anthem for me these days. I’m still whacking a few vocational moles, with only incremental success, and certainly no prizes at the end. In my search to reframe what vocation means, I’ve done what we all must do in the interim – bow to the needs of necessity. I’ve done a number of things in the past four years to keep things afloat. There is absolute nobility and dignity in doing what’s necessary. I’m not discounting that, and I’ll continue to count it a blessing to be able to participate in fruitful endeavor. But’s that’s an entirely different area code from being at peace with it.

So, am I a pilgrim? A prodigal? A putz? Whatever you decide is fine by me. The only path I’m pursuing now leads farther up and further into the grace that is reemerging in my life. It’s my search for meaning.

To whatever end…..

By Jerry Fultz, a.k.a. “Reggie”

What follows may be the story of a prodigal, or that of a pilgrim. Maybe a putz. You’ll have to decide for yourself. Personally, I think it could be any of the three…

I’ve never had to interview much for the positions I have held throughout my career. My first corporate job (an internal auditor) was pretty much secured by my mother at the Fortune 500 company she worked for. The job relocated my wife Lisa & I to Denver, and we set up shop as newlyweds in a new town, ready for the adventure. A couple of years later I jumped briefly to a different corporate gig, and from there I was able to launch out on my first real opportunity – small business ownership.

A retiring friend had tapped me on the shoulder, curious about my interest in acquiring his business. Lisa & I did the due diligence and took the dive into business ownership a few months later. Revenues grew year over year, and I took a lot of satisfaction in the knowledge that we had beaten the life expectancy of most small businesses. Lisa & I faced all the common challenges confronting business owners as we launched, maintained, and grew the company. We sacrificed many things along the way and, ultimately, were blessed to have a 12-year run at it. But a new opportunity came calling, so we made the decision to sell the company and launch out in a completely new direction – local church leadership.

Our church was looking to do a building expansion to accommodate the growth we were experiencing. They tapped me to join the team in a fundraising and project leadership capacity. Always up for an adventure, I jumped at the chance to learn and grow into new areas of leadership. The position – Director of Development – came with a decent salary, but as I soon discovered, it afforded something unanticipated and vastly more profound – a real taste of vocational calling. I learned that a person can derive deep meaning from one’s work, and it’s possible to experience a daily, palpable, deep and transcendental sense that work can be purpose driven.

Frederick Buechner defines vocation as “the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” I can now bear witness to the fact that this level of vocational significance is addictive in every sense of that word. It’s better than ice cream & chocolate, Scotch & cigars, the day you were married & the day your first child was born. It’s better than those good drugs they give you when you’re having outpatient surgery. I was living, feeling and breathing this “calling” every day.

Work = joy.

Each day was a high – even when the project change orders started flying, budgets had to be revamped and the neighbors were complaining about the noise. It all added up to fun and deep relevance. 2 ½ years later, when the entire process from concept to completion was finished, there was a foundational and moving sense of satisfaction. In its wake, the project had permanently reframed my vocational DNA around the elusive, ambiguous and transcendental concept of significance. From that point forward, salary, benefits, achievements and all the other career markers would now be subservient to significance. I had been forever changed. The next thing worth doing needed to be worth doing.

The French have this word. It’s ennui. It means a feeling of listlessness & dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.

Once the building project ended, the vocational high I had been experiencing started to wane. I hung around for a while in a programming role that was graciously extended to me, but there came a point where I knew I had to start looking for my next thing. Ennui was metastasizing.

But then, almost providentially, there it was again. The shoulder tap.

A vendor had heard that I was looking, we had a conversation and soon I was joining a nonprofit in a fractional leadership role (translation: part-time development role leading to a permanent senior leadership role). The part-time thing didn’t concern me. I was able to fill in those gaps with other work, including a stint in the corporate IT world. The important thing was that this was a return path to significance.

And again the shoulder tap proved beneficial. Revenues grew significantly as we dedicated my time and energy to locating new opportunities for growth. In hindsight, it seemed like it took very little time at all to move into a full-time position, then into a VP role and ultimately to serve as an interim CEO.

Spoiler alert – “interim.”

In actuality it took seven years. We operated informally on many of the LEAN principles that are now so familiar in the workplace. We tried a lot of cool things, failed at many, reloaded and ultimately gained some really decent traction with our mission. I had great rapport with board of directors, and was honored to step into the interim CEO role while our founder took a much needed sabbatical at the 20 year mark of our organization.

But here my story melds with so many others. Changes on our board led to new directions for the organization. Past understandings were revisited and I was let go from my position.

The details leading up to this somewhat unexpected turn of events are not important, although they have kept me up many, many nights in a futile attempt to come to terms with them. What IS important, however, is that there has been no shoulder tap. 4 years. No tapping. My “significance” turned out to be a house of cards that was easily blown away in the winds of organizational change.

Anthropology has this word. It’s liminality. It means the ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a right of passage. It’s the wayfinding that occurs between the “no longer” and the “not yet.”

I’ve been doing a lot of liminality. A lot of figuring out what happened and what’s next.

So I started this post by asking: Prodigal? Pilgrim? Putz? You don’t have enough information yet to make a determination. It could be, however, that these ideas of ennui, liminality and significance resonate with you. If so, I’d invite you to come back next week to get a better view of how I have navigated these topics.

Thanks, Mark, for the bandwidth.

Photo Credit: Giuseppe Famiani at Unsplash