Does the world really need more love? I do not think so. I think it needs more understanding, and they are not the same.
You can love a baby and still not know what it needs. Love without understanding is guessing. I am not black, so I do not carry what that carries, but I am disabled, and I have sat in enough meetings with social services to know what it is to be talked about rather than heard. In 2003, thirty six million people marched against a war across three thousand protests, and it changed nothing. So when people say now is not the time to talk about it, my honest answer is, then when. These are not bad people. They are unheard people.
One thing to try: Take one group you have an opinion about and go and understand them before you love them.
In this episode
(1:19) I meditate to understand myself first
(2:54) You can love a child and still not know its whims
(5:15) What I do know, from being disabled
(6:27) George Floyd was the catalyst, not the cause
(8:01) Thirty six million people, three thousand protests, 2003
(10:33) When is the damn time to talk about it
(11:15) They are not bad people. They are unheard people
(14:14) Love has to listen, or it is just a phrase
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Does the world really need more love?
I do not think so. I think it needs more understanding, and they are not the same thing. Recorded in June 2020, a fortnight after George Floyd was killed.
The heart of it
Love without understanding is guessing.
Peaceful protest very often does not work, and the people who ignore it are the reason.
These are not bad people. They are unheard people.
Think about a baby. Everybody says a baby needs love. It needs its nappy changed and it needs feeding, and to do either you have to understand the cry.
Somebody who has looked after that child for two years knows what each noise means. Somebody covering for a week does not. Same love. Completely different amount of use.
That is what I mean about the world. Love is not a feeling you broadcast. It is what you do once you have understood.
I cannot speak to what it is to be black. I do not fear being pulled over and I have never been asked where I got the money I just put in my wallet. What I do know is what it is to sit in meetings with social services as a disabled man and feel like a second class citizen being discussed rather than heard.
And on all lives matter. Nobody saying black lives matter is saying anybody else's do not. When one house on the street is on fire, that is where the water goes.
Now the part I found hardest to say. In 2003, thirty six million people took part in about three thousand anti war protests around the world. We got more war. Nearly a million marched over Brexit. Three quarters of a million over the NHS. Two days later none of it was on the news.
I do not advocate violence, and I want that stated plainly. But governments know perfectly well that peaceful protest does not move them, which is precisely why they prefer it. Otherwise we would have sent placards to Iraq.
And when people say now is not the time to talk about it, my honest answer is: then when?
One small thing to try
Ask how they feel about it rather than how you feel about it.
That is the whole practice and it is much harder than it sounds, because your own view arrives first and fully formed.
I got this wrong myself while recording this. I had posted something calling a comment racist and several people told me there was not enough in it to justify that. They were right. I thanked each of them and took it down.
Being wrong is not the disaster. It means something got through.
Questions people ask
Are you saying love does not matter?
The opposite. I am saying love has an action attached. You make the person comfortable, you work out what they actually need, you listen. Announcing love and doing none of that is a feeling with no delivery.
What about the police?
I do not believe most of them want any of this, any more than most soldiers want a war. I also believe that what happened should never have happened and that justice matters. Both of those can be true.
Is this too political for this podcast?
Waking up is understanding, and understanding does not stop at your own front door. Disconnecting from the world and calling it peace is not what I am here for.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
politics · love · compassion · empathy
Read the transcript
Hey, this is Stillness in the Storms, and I'm Steven Webb, and oh, boy, isn't the world a storm at
the moment?
2020.
Who would have ever predicted 2020?
If anybody had predicted 2020 last year, or even in January, they would have been taken away. I'm sure
they would have been put in a straitjacket. It's just. It's one of those years where whenever we take
a moment and we look backwards, we can see how it happened, but we just cannot see what's going to
happen next. We have no idea what's whatsoever is going to happen next. And I see everywhere that the
world needs more love. The world needs a group hug. The world needs this wonderful love energy, what I call
bs. I'm sorry. You know, I. I've
got a big open heart, I think, and I give the world love, and I try to hold space for
people so they can. But I don't think love is what the world needs or not. In the
same way that in the spiritual sense of love, we need the practical sense of love. And
let me tell you the difference on today's podcast. You know, I meditate to understand myself. I sit. I
sit quiet to observe my feelings, observe my emotions, my thoughts, to observe the feeling in
my thumb. What's going on in my thumb and my fingers and my toes. Seems a bit odd when I
cannot feel my body because I'm paralysed just below the neck. But I still do it anyway because it's still
attached to me and it still has an influence on me.
And I think it's important to know what's going on,
to know where our thoughts are coming from, where our feelings are coming from. And when we understand ourselves, when
we understand what's going on within, we can have some kind of peace. We can have we can deal with
the problems that our body's telling us. You know, we can deal with that poorly. Knee months before it actually
gets beyond repairable. We can deal with the emotion when it's arising, before it
gets too bad. So does the world need love? No. You know is it's much
like having a baby. When we have a baby, we go, well, it just needs love. It doesn't. It needs
its nappy changed. It needs food. It needs looking after. And to do that, you need to understand the cry.
You need to understand what's wrong with the child. You know, you take someone that's looked after a child for
two years, and suddenly somebody else walks in to look after the child for a week. They don't know what
that child needs. Yes, we know it needs food. And we know it needs a clean nappy and we know
it needs dressing and washing, but we don't know the whims. We don't know what the child likes, what the
child needs to be nourished. We don't know how the child feels comfortable, feels comfort.
And that's what the world needs. The world needs that kind of love. And to give that kind of love,
what you need? You need understanding.
Understanding. You need to understand what's going on, or at least the best way you possibly can. And to understand
anything that's going on, you've got to look at it from more than one angle.
You can't just look at it from one angle and then go, oh, I know. Black lives matter. Yes, of
course, all lives matter. Of course. Ants matter, bees matter, trees
matter. And and I really get really tired of hearing every time black lives matter comes up,
you get a whole wave of people, all lives matter. And I'm not going to go into the metaphor, the
burning building and the broken leg and you've seen them all everywhere on the Internet. You know, in short,
you know, it's like there's one house burning, I'm going into it now, aren't I? One house burning. The fire
brigade comes up and he starts spraying the house that's not burning. Okay, technically they do do that to stop
the spread of the fire, but that's as long as they're putting the fire out as well. But in general,
you need to deal with the problem at hand. And just I know you're not dismissing it by
going all lives matter, but you are lessening the problem. Because when someone looks up and says black
lives matter, they're not saying white lives don't matter. You know, the only way I can relate to
walking out of a shop, putting money in my wallet and a policeman saying, where did you get that money?
Or being pulled over. Well, I cannot relate to fearing losing my life, my life being
pulled over by the police, because I just don't, I don't fear a policeman. I don't live in a place
where I have to, I'm not, I haven't got that colored skin that is, has connotations that go with it,
unfortunately. But what I am, I'm disabled. And I've loads of meetings with social services and I can remember going
into those meetings really feeling like a second-class citizen because I'm disabled
and my life doesn't matter. My life is not important, as important as somebody
else's. And with this COVID-19 at the moment, you know, everybody's well, my freedom and my liberties.
I want to go out, I want to do all these things. No. We're currently trying to look after the
vulnerable and the elderly that cannot fight this virus. We should have had the hashtag old lives matter
Disabled lives matter. Now then, this isn't lessening the black lives
matter because I personally think the Black lives matter should be the biggest hashtag right now, along with Old lives
matter. Regarding the other COVID-19 and this is what understanding does, it puts it in context.
You know, we're seeing this year, nothing's ever black and white. You know, the protest happened
not just because of George Lloyd. George Lloyd is the catalyst. It's been happening. People
have felt like their lives haven't mattered for a very, very long time. And it's just happened to coincide with
a couple of months of lockdown where people have been locked down for this COVID-19 and now they're suddenly
coming out and. Or even if they're not allowed out, they're kind of coming out for the simple fact that
they've had enough. Then you suddenly hit them with one of their own dying in such a horrible way, a
horrible video. One of our own I think you know he's one of us. But he's certainly I certainly feel
he's one of us. I cannot breathe. You know, the right to breathe surely is the the
first fundamental right of anything. Nobody owns the oxygen, nobody owns the right to
breathe. And those words just echo so much. So you add all of that
together and with coming out of lockdown the world slowing down and now suddenly speeding up, the weather getting warmer,
people wanting to be out, people wanting to feel make a difference, people wanting to um
find connections again and they felt their connections over this. And then you get the protest now. Then, you know,
the world's biggest protest, 2003, 36 million people estimated took part across the world
3 000 different anti-war protests across the world just let that sink in. That's 36
million people in the world protested what happened. We have more war. It doesn't
make a difference. And I really don't advocate violence in any way. And I really don't. And
I want to make that point really clear. I don't think violence is ever
the answer. But if you've tried everything else, you possibly know what else is there left.
If a guy come up to my daughter or me and
he threatened me and I said no go away, otherwise I'm going to punch you. And he carried on and
I said, go away, otherwise I will have to punch you. And I give him so many warnings. What do
I do? At some point?
Okay, it's a metaphor for me, because my punches wouldn't. Wouldn't do anything to anybody. But the point I'm making,
at some point, they took to the knee and they were ridiculed. They protested and they were ridiculed.
We had nearly a million people protest Brexit. Didn't listen, didn't care. Two days later,
it's not even on the news. I believe we had 750 000 people protest against privatizing parts of the
Nhs.
My cat's snoring in the background. If you can hear her
um even my voice puts my cat to sleep um What happened? The government carried
on as usual. Peaceful protests rarely work. And that's really unfortunate. It's really unfortunate.
And I blame the people that don't listen to the peaceful protests. You know, there's people out there crying out
to be understood, and we're not understanding them. We're not listening. That's what the world needs. The world needs to
be listen to a little more. We need to feel the pain they are feeling and not just in some
beneficial Bs way. Oh, yeah I can I understand your plight, but really, it's not the time to do it.
I'm tired of hearing now's not the time to talk about it. Well, when is the damn time to talk
about people dying when they don't need to die? You know, if peaceful protest worked, why didn't the Us and
UK government sit on the border with Saddam Hussein and go, hey, Saddam, we got placards here? See,
governments know peaceful protests don't work. That's why they want the peaceful protests. But they also know
peaceful protest makes them look bad. So they also want a protest to turn violent very quickly, because if it
turns violent, then they can sort them out and then they can say, there you go. They're the bad people.
They're not bad people. They're unheard people they're people that are fed up, tired
of this yelling the same message and people not getting it. Why did we elect Trump?
Or why did the um the U.s Elect Trump? Because there was a huge wave of people that were not
listened to and they were fed up. Think about how many times in your lives when you're not listen to
either by a partner or by other people. Yeah. At some point you come out fighting.
And we also got to understand the police, that that not all police are racist. Terrible, bad
people in actual fact I don't believe anybody's bad people. I believe bad people have experiences in life that turns
them doing Actions that are not so great and some actions that are outright terrible and
horrible, and we need to have justice for them. Yes, but then you have the police that have to do
the government's work. They don't want to be doing that. I'm sure it's not. You know, it's like the soldiers,
when they go to war, they don't really want to go to war. There may be a few that do,
but I I just don't think they do. And I'm kind of answering for them now. And I realise I
can't because I'm not a soldier. So I just think we need to understand all sides a little more.
We're battling with ourselves. We're battling with the wrong people. You know on my on my timeline at the
moment, it looks like a squabbling fest on Facebook. I'm pointing out my side, they're pointing out their
side, and we're both right. You know, not one person that's replied to one of my posts have been totally
wrong. And
I posted a post the other day um and it said about a racist comment and on it, and
several people called me out on it. And I read it back and it I did it wasn't racist,
or it might have been racist, but there wasn't enough information in the post to come to the conclusion it
was racist, so therefore it should not have been used. And I replied to each one of those people saying,
thank you for enlightening me on this. And I let them read my comments back, and I deleted it today
you know I'm wrong a lot of the time, which is good because it means I learned something.
But we need more understanding we need more We need to be able to see their perspective. We
need to weep. Just as Jeremy Putman, Reverend Jeremy Putman, I asked him the other day what would Jesus do
if he was here now? I think he would weep. But then I think the next phase, he would ask
us to understand, to listen. You know, love is to listen. You know, we can band around all the
lovely phrases of world needs more love, but love has a different side. It has an action to it.
And if you love your child, you make it comfortable. You understand what it needs in that moment. If you
love your partner, if you love your parents or somebody else in life, you listen to them and
you try to create the comfort and security that they deserve in life. That's what the action of love is.
So that's what we need to do. You know, if you're advocating more love for the black lives,
we need to understand them. We need to create a world in which they do not fear a policeman.
You know, somebody that's causing criminal damage, somebody that's committing a crime needs to fear a policeman.
Not because of the colour of their skin. That's. We all know that. There is a
one person listening to this podcast now that doesn't know that. And I'm sorry if I'm sounding like like as
I'm preaching here, but, you know, we need to wake up. And waking up is understanding. It's not
disconnecting. It's not some kind of utopian, wonderful, beautiful life it's You know, waking up is understanding ourselves
first. What's going on inside of me, how am I feeling about this? And then waking up is. The wider
picture, is seeing things from whole perspectives. I don't think that policemen wanted to kill
George Lloyd that day. I really don't.
But I do believe in my heart that the way the way he sees the world, the
experiences he's had in life, created a situation that could have been prevented
and should be prevented and should not happen. And justice needs to be done. But just coming back
with the World Needs Love or All Lives Matter, that's not gonna fix shit and I just wanted You know,
this is a bit of a heavy podcast for me um but I just wanted to address that. I just
wanted to address the fact that I don't like the fact that peaceful protests don't work, but they very rarely
do work. And I don't know the answers I I It's easy to sit here and point out the problems.
I can do that all day, but I don't have the answers. But I do know that, yes,
all lives matter but right now. We need to sort the shit out. Where blacks feel that their
lives don't matter, that's what we're working on right now. Last year, we worked on the Me Too Movement. That
didn't that didn't mean that many people that didn't have the Me Too movement that or weren't involved in any
kind of um What do you call it? Oh, I'm trying to think of the word now. I can't think
of the word in any kind of events that were part of the me too movement it doesn't mean that
we were dismissing those people that weren't suffering from it. No, we didn't have a hashtag me, me, me too.
It's just ah I'm Steven Webb, and this is Stillness in the Storms. And
you'd really help me if you could become a patron that would help me to,
hey, spread this word a little more. You know, help build the podcast, build the listener base, and
get this message out to the world. Because, yes, the world needs love, but above love, it needs understanding
and it needs. It needs us to open our hearts and see it from their perspective and not
just ours. That's really important perspective. How do they feel about it? Not how you
feel about it. Thank you. Head over to StevenWebb.com there's a link at the top to become a patron of
my podcast and support the work I do. Take care. Love you guys. More understanding. Thank
