Confronting My Values
The Initiate: Confronting My Values
One of the first things I remember hearing when I came to The Earth Center in 2009 was that I have to confront my values. I had a visceral reaction to this notion and it really bothered me. I wondered, “Why should I confront my values”? I was not sure what my values were? I had never thought about my values before. I had to ask myself, what are values? Value is the worth or importance of something it could be a material thing or a quality that is considered desirable or worthwhile. Now for the first time in my life I am hearing that I should come face to face with my values. And I felt deep in my heart that I did not want to look at these things. I suspected that to confront my values would reveal my insanity. In other words come face to face with all the stuff that I am carrying, the value of having a big house, a car, expensive clothes, a modern education, a lover, a lot of money, friends, and so on.
This was the beginning of the process of coming face to face with my own insanity. I call my way of thinking and living before the Earth Center, insane because it was a self-destructive way if thinking. Insanity causes a human being to value the things that lead to his or her own destruction. Some of the self-destructive behaviors that I engaged in before I came to the earth center were drinking alcohol for the purpose of getting drunk, smoking cigarettes, having sex just for fun, and compulsive shopping. These are the most obvious things but the more subtle things are the job, the car, and the degrees - all of which have value in the modern colonial society but when we confront these values do they really hold up? Are these the values of a survivor?
The Maakheru starts by asking us to find out where our values come from? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of history knows that the values of people in the Diaspora are the values of our slave masters and colonizers. One of the reasons this challenge bothered me so much in the beginning is because I did not think that I had values. Certainly my mother had never explicitly sat me down and taught me any values. I picked them up subliminally from school and church and television but there were no values taught to me in any direct way. And if they were passed down to me it was in secret. My values came from the society that raised me and this society values money and power.
I was raised to serve the slave master and to serve him better. The slave master instilled values in me that aligned with what was best for him and the system he created. I was taught these values and I held onto them for dear life because of the small privileges they afforded me. I went to college so my job, while it is still slavery is a little better than most and so on and so on. A wise man once said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. It has all been said before. Malcolm X asked in the 1960’s “Who taught you to hate yourself”? Tom Burrell has a new book called Brainwashed and he talks about how we have been taught that we are inferior, that we do not have any culture, no ancestral values that were worthwhile, and no history, therefore we are the lowest of the low. And this propaganda campaign has been going on for two thousand years. It did not just begin in American slavery and Jim Crow and it continues to this day in the modern Media. The message is clear and consistent.
I acknowledge that for the last five hundred years my ancestors did the best they could to survive. They tried to make a life out of a horrible situation and at every turn they did their best so that I could be here. They left the south and came north after slavery looking for a better life. In the 60s, they stood up against the violence and hatred of the south to prove that they were equal to white people. They got degrees and mortgaged houses in the suburbs only to experience white flight and debt peonage. They struggled every day to hold onto whatever dignity they could. And none of this has worked; we are still struggling to get some dignity and respect. We are still enslaved, under the illusion of freedom. There are more Black men incarcerated in America, right now then were enslaved at the height of slavery. We have continued to fail because the values we have embraced are not our own. We are trying to win a game that is designed for us to fail. We are trying to make it in a system that is founded on our destruction.
When we take an honest look at the values we have embraced, the money, property and prestige, we have to ask, “do these values serve us”? We are basically now a copy of our slave masters and colonizers, with an ingrained pathology, an inferiority complex and suicidal tendencies.
It was clear that my values were not serving me. In fact my values were not mine. They did not even belong to me. I did not know what was mine and it was there that I could begin to get myself up and clean myself and go out to learn what are my values. What are the values of a survivor?
With drug addicts and alcoholics it is sometimes said that the addict has to hit rock bottom before they will be ready to change. It seems that as a society we have hit bottom. As a society lies, corruption and evil are pervasive. Animalistic behavior is the norm. It is certainly time for a change. We start by letting go of the values that we have been holding. We do the work and reclaim what’s ours. The initiate walks with humility because we acknowledge that we do not know how to live. We have to learn everything, how to live, how to talk, how to eat, how to sleep. We are coming back home to learn what we lost and that is everything, our culture, our language and our ancestral values. We will not survive as spiritual panhandlers, trying to fill the void within us with other peoples’ values. We survive only if our values survive. Only then can we stop shopping, shuffling, jiving, cooning, pretending, hating and killing ourselves slowly.
