Sleeping Through A COVID-19 Ill Health Revolution

 by Kenny Anderson

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle." - Martin Luther King Jr.

I'm writing this post in remembrance and recognition of the great Black social reformer Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was born today January 15, 1929.

The topic of this post addresses Black folks avoidance behavior 'ducking and dodging' the obvious need to radically change. My topic is based on a quote drawn from King's speech "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" where he stated:

"There are all too many people who in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution."

In writing this post on Black avoidance behavior I could have addressed 'politically' that we have been sleeping through a racist white right-wing backlash revolution that's been ever increasing since the election of the first Black president Barak Obama in 2008.

Indeed we've been avoiding dealing with the entirety of this racist white backlash and don't have a self-determination preparedness response agenda to deal with the full ramifications of it; by default our agenda is liberal dependency and fatalism.

I decided to address that for the most part as Black folks during a great period of change like the current COVID-19 pandemic we've been sleeping 'avoiding' dealing with the ramification of how COVID has tremendously rocked us super-disproportionately both physically, mentally, and in deadliness.

Black avoidance behavior is mental 'psychological' and it has tremendous ramifications that stifles problem-solving and prevents us from addressing our 'physical' massive chronic diseases medical preconditions that COVID has attacked and glaringly exposed.

When I first read King's words "sleeping through a revolution" years ago I immediately thought of sleeping as an avoidance coping mechanism to escape change. And for many-many of problem avoiding Black folks sleep is unfortunately the only freedom that they know.

In assessing Black avoidance coping it is a maladaptive form of coping in which our folks change their behavior to avoid thinking about our bad health conditions and the challenges of doing something to improve it.

Black avoidance coping is a quick fix but becomes more stressful and exacerbates stress making it chronic without helping us deal with the things 'risk factors' that are causing our bad health stress. Thus stress only piles up becoming problematic 'overwhelming' causing depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and over-religiosity.

Moreover Black avoidance coping causes a behavior of procrastination of constantly delaying to address our critical health issues that perpetuates stress. Regarding procrastination King said essentially waiting means you'll never do what's necessary 'required'; in other words Black folks we get sicker and die in our waiting-game.

Let us remember Black folks that Dr. King was against avoidance coping, King was a proponent of 'direct action' active-behavioral coping addressing problems directly! Yes Black folks regarding our health crisis avoidance coping is extremely 'irresponsible' contributing to enormous self-diseasing and self-mortality.

For sure Black folks our massive health problems require direct action now! We can no longer afford to be sleeping through this current pandemic exposing ill health revolution, lets us wake up and go to work now to heal and save ourselves!