1 post tagged “$11 million”
How often is it that we artists consider the future when we are creating our work?
I pondered this while reading about yet another celebrity behaving badly by mistreating a fellow co-worker. The person about who I am speaking is two-time NBA champion and Hall of Famer, President of Madison Square Garden, President and coach of the New York Knicks basketball team, Isiah Thomas who was recently found liable for sexual harassment toward a fellow executive. That the executive is a woman is beside the point when one considers karma and Thomas’s physical and spiritual future. To consider the plaintiff’s gender, would in the eyes of some, worsen the nature of Thomas’s crime.
Though divided jurors, ruled not only against Thomas, but added that the owner and chairman of the New York Knicks must pay the plaintiff more than $11 million dollars. Thomas, “…disappointed that the jurors could not see the facts [stated] I will appeal…”
Reading this my mind slipped into the beyond holding myriad of what if’s.
What if Thomas in a future life exists as himself and undergoes the kind of abuse he was found liable of exhibiting toward the fellow executive?
And what if there is no one to listen to him—no court in which he can have his day—and state his case?
What if he witnesses someone close to him undergoing the same type of abuse he has been found liable of committing?
What if he, in another life does the same thing, but suffers an illness and must be cared for by the very person his words have most injured? Or what if after committing these cruelties he is tortured as punishment?
Or what if after hurling insults such as these, those closest to him remove their presence, avoid, and abandon him to an unbearable loneliness that drives him mad?
And then I considered, what if Thomas’s actions similar to, if not exactly like so many of those exhibited by our leaders is a result of actions in Thomas’s past lives, behaviors Thomas and those like him have yet to resolve internally?
And what if our choice to look past the affronts the fire upon us, and others speak more to our desire to mimic and be liked and respected by them, rather than our fear of the consequences should we speak up and declare, “No, you can’t do this to me, or any other human. I won’t let you?”
What are we saying when we honor people who misbehave like this? Surely Thomas didn’t start in recent years using the profane words the plaintiff alleged.
The what if’s about which I speak involve not only the perpetrator, but those subjected to the vicious whims of their tongues and actions of their bodies?
What if artist’s started speaking out about these type of injustices, these types of maltreatments which have become daily signatures of human interaction that we not only accept as common fare, but in many cases expect to occur? And when they do not we become suspicious. Our loss of expecting, or requiring, respect speaks to our lack of spirit, adoration of humankind and gratitude for not only this life, but all who we encounter in it.
Tom Moore writes in his Prayer for Accepting Our Humanity, “…I am the people I have met...”
(Tom Moore, Dreams Alive, p. 24, and The Catholic Faith Handbook For Youth, p. 52)
If the people we encounter are aching, so are we. We artists must be out in the world—if only to retreat and create from the madness we experience when interfacing with those chained to the externals of the world. We must undergo this process—this transformation, transmutation of energy—if our works are to hold authenticity that touches and moves the souls of observers, readers and listeners.
We thereby touch upon the future, by leaving our thumb prints upon the present and all that occurs in it.
Both Thomas and his accuser are hurting.
And so am I.
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