Balancing data and processing

I'm a fan of sci-fi for its ability to envision different worlds and ways of being. Since coronavirus began, I've been rewatching Star Trek Voyager, a space show about a team stranded a long way from home. There've been some interesting parallels with what's happening in current events. Including a pandemic. Dontcha kinda wish you could shoot coronavirus like this?

In an episode titled "The Voyager Conspiracy," there is a character called Seven of Nine who has the ability to download information straight into her brain. She engineers the system to download months of information at a time, but her ability to process the information can't be sped up. In trying to make sense of the data, she begins formulating conspiracy theories. Over and over, she adds 2 + 2 and winds up with 5. Too much data, and not enough time to absorb and process it.

So, how are you in this balance right now?

It feels to me like new information, new data, is coming at us at lightning speed. Already trying to make sense of a global pandemic and the new reality we're in, now the facts and the analysis of the antiracism Uprising are coming at us, many pieces at a time.

The events themselves are something I don't want to slow down - the white supremacy that has gripped our world is showing cracks, and I hope we can bring our weight to jump up and down on those cracks to make permanent breaks.

For us to do so is going to take our best thinking. We are no longer willing to accept only cracks, and so people are now seriously considering what it would look like to re-imagine how we do public safety, our system of justice. Individuals are considering how we have been shaped by white supremacy, and how we can work to eradicate the racism within ourselves, and learn to be more effective antiracists.

There is much data out there - books, videos, articles. And we need that data to stir and wake up the ideas in our heads.

But pause after reading or watching before diving into the next. Process the ideas. Make sense of them. Think about how they apply to you, your family, your community. Remember taking geometry? "You can't just memorize the theorems," my mother would fuss. "You have to understand them." Thinking takes some time. Make the time.

And watch out for those conspiracy theories, okay? Often, they're created with data -- but no processing.

Comments

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James. Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f

Feral Unitarian Universalists

It is an old joke, in many organizations, and certainly over(used) in Unitarian Universalist churches, that working with a designated group of people is "like herding cats." So ... what if we didn't? What if we encouraged congregation members to run free and wild, like the creative people they are, bent on loving the hell out of the world? I've written before about a collective disdain for members with " pet projects ." There are those feral cats again. Running in a hundred directions, each one on fire for something different. How awesome . I don't want to corral that energy, I want to stoke it. They say if you feed them, you'll never get rid of them. That sounds pretty good, too. Let's figure out how to feed them, so they keep coming back for the sustenance that will keep them going. And let's, all of us, find our own wild side. We can still be good upstanding responsible citizens, paying our taxes, bringing a casserole to th

Boots and Blessings

Search This Blog