Doubling Down on a Lie: The State of Arizona.

You have probably seen the news. You have heard that for some peculiar and very odd reason, nearly 100 days into the presidency of Joe Biden, and nearly six months after the conclusion of the 2020 election, the State of Arizona has decided to recount its general election results from Maricopa County. The state of things in the State of Arizona is troubling and deeply concerning for the collective state of our Union. For when you double down on a lie, you force a pending conflict with reality, a reckoning that can do irreparable harm to our sense of common humanity.

The State GOP Senators have empowered this farce to feed the Hungry Ghost within its own party base. A Hungry Ghost in the Buddhist tradition is another name for “ego” or selfish desires, it is a ghost with an insatiable appetite and a pin hole for a mouth - thus it is never able to fulfill or satisfy its hunger. It is an apt metaphor for the unending obsession that the GOP and Q-Anon base has with investigating voter fraud in the 2020 election. Never mind the mountain of evidence to the contrary, when you are dancing with a lie, logic need not apply.

Forget about the Trump Administration justice department admission that the 2020 election was one of the safest and most secure elections in our lifetime.

Forget about the three other times that the ballots in Maricopa County have been recounted and found no substantial evidence of fraud or justification for further investigation.

Forget about the dozens of legal challenges mounted by Trump’s misfit band of defense attorneys - all of which were dismissed for lack of evidence and baseless claims.

Forget about the failed attempt to disrupt and overturn the election results by a treasonous mob of angry MAGA rally supporters, stoked by their leader (and later abandoned) as they stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2020.

Forget about the legitimate installation of the 46th President of the United States of America, Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris.

Forget all of that. Cognitive dissonance is a terrible dance partner. At the same time let us not be so glib and dismissive, tempting as it is to just laughoff this bizarre attempt to manufacture fraud out of thin air, rewrite history and overturn social order. We must carefully and soberly face what we are dealing with here.

Operating at the heart of this hungry ghost within the GOP is a lie.

Very often it is hard to see a lie for what it is - because we are too consumed by the fears themselves. Therefore it is best to approach a lie by first understanding the fears that the lie produces. At the end of the day, the predominately white GOP is afraid of losing power. Power is access. Power is control. Power is what white men in the halls of congress have had since the founding of our country, and it’s slipping away. This fear is what drives the gerrymandering of districts - contorting, bending and twisting their reality into something unrecognizable for the sake of preserving their seats of power. This fear is what drives states to restrict access to polls, knowing that the fewer people that vote the better the outcome for themselves. And because fear is not our natural state, it is fear that drives the manifestation of conspiracy theories such as Qanon, in a feeble attempt to quell one’s anxious state of being and adopt a narrative that makes sense of it all.

When you have ingested a lie so deeply, it becomes part of your whole being. So much so that to surrender the lie is to sacrifice your own being, and since self-preservation at all cost is an innate trait of existence, surrendering an embodied lie is not easily done. One must choose then the lie over other behaviors and actions that would allow for change, transformation and growth.

This state of consciousness then, choosing the lie that chokes you off from your own growth and ultimately survival, is what we call the state of addiction. But addiction does not just harm the one in its grip, it harms every around them as well.

This is why we choose this lens to do anti-racism work, because the addiction to whiteness harms us all.

“Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the willful blindness used to justify white supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire.” - James Baldwin

In Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book Begin Again; James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, he writes:

“..the lie is the mechanism that allows, and has always allowed, America to avoid facing the truth about its unjust treatment of black people and how it deforms the soul of the country.”

What we are seeing in Arizona should not surprise anyone and it should concern all of us. For far too long “America” has been synonymous with an identity of White Supremacy - an identity worth protecting, it would seem, at all cost. We’ve seen the costs pill up: black and brown bodies, transgender lives, clean drinking water, adequate health care and a living working wage. And now upon the alter for sacrifice to appease this Lie of Whiteness is democracy itself.

One may wonder, do these senators have no moral bottom line? No point at which they won’t stop this nonsense from continuing? The answer we must admit is no, not because they are bad people - but because that is how addiction works. Addiction stops at nothing to appease itself and in the process will destroy everything around it.

But there is hope. Recovery is possible. Arizona is the gift, the reminder that it is time for an intervention with our selves.

Click here to order your copy of Recovery from the Lie of Whiteness today. Together let’s begin the long journey to restoring our sanity.