Schrödinger's Verdict, Chauvinism, & Radical Acts of Love

NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram

How we process collective trauma, the tricks our memory plays, and a call for radical acts of love in the face of all this hatred.

Dear friends and fam,

I wrote this a week ago, on April 20th, while awaiting the verdict of Derek Chauvin. Since I was already in writing mode, and cloistered away in the middle of nowhere writing, I didn't realize the verdict would even be read that day until an alert surfaced on the home screen of my phone. I had previously thwarted distractions from writing with great success, but this one led me to immediately log in and watch the live stream. What follows is the thought experiment I did with myself, to help pass the time, my own attempt to minimize the gap between not-knowing and knowing the guilty verdicts that we all now know:

I couldn't help but note the perfection that is his last name: chauvin

How apt, the dictionary.com definition: *noun* a person displayed aggressive or exaggerated patriotism.

But perhaps more to the point, is the Wikipedia definition, which, if not for anything else, is a good cultural weather vein to indicate a general consensus.

Chauvinism: "the irrational belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people, who are seen as strong and virtuous, while others are considered weak, unworthy or inferior. It can be described as a form of extreme patriotism and nationalism, a fervent faith in national excellence and glory."

And what a display the world's best known white nationalist gave us. As I refreshed the livestream of an empty podium, waiting for the judge to arrive to read his verdict, I realized just how unbearable it is: to be suspended between knowing and not-knowing. Between a guilty verdict and a not guilty one.

For those of us who need a fresher on quantum mechanics (me prior to writing this): Schrödinger's cat is a 1935 thought experiment from our main man Erwin Schrödinger posited in a discussion with Albert Einstein about some stuff I literally cannot even fathom.

It goes like this: A cat, flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed boxed. If the Geiger counter detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. In what is called the “Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,” the cat is *both* alive *and* dead before we look. Both possibilities are equally true. Only when one looks into the box, and one either sees a cat who is alive or one who is dead, is the final reality rendered, well, final.

It's 4:39 PM EST when I start watching the seal, the state of Minnesota, an angled reflection of what must be plexiglass, as real looking as the Times’ insignia in the lower right, and not much else. This is the *Times*’ Time. Here too, the cat is both alive and dead. But now we will all know. Soon.

I seem to be frozen in time, part of me wishing this indeterminacy would end, for me to know. But of course, I also already know. Just as I already do not know. In this moment then, in this interstitial gray space, it’s possible to imagine time expanding infinitely out in every direction until the moment of rupture—which will be the announcement of the verdict. This will snap us back into what we conceive of as linear time. And this moment will be lost to us, forever. An aberration that proves the norm. Never quite forgotten nor remembered.

So perhaps it’s prudent to mark, to archive, to attempt to explain this moment as it happens. In this space, we can imagine what justice would look like. What accountability would look like. What a single white man taking responsibility for his actions would look like. Here, floating like a half-formed amoeba are our future(s). Both good and bad, this future(s) bleeds into oblivion, in the infinite space of this finite parcel of time. An aberration, a counter to the norm that only exists in our minds, in the psychological reward of noticing it and taking it all for itself and exactly what it is: the unknown.

What is the role justice places in our psychic healing process? Surely, as healing portrays, it happens in spite of and regardless of whatever relationship the original event has to justice.

But we are all suspended here, just as the very idea of justice hangs mid-air. We just didn’t know it until this instance. It is in clarifying moments upon which we mark major life changes, and what clarifying moment can take place now? What possibly could change about our world view in a matter of mere moments?

We can ideologically burn him at the stake and spew poisonous curses at him, but still, his legacy will never be written as one of justice. George Floyd is tethered to this murderer, which in a matter of moments, we will learn what the law says we should know. Both verdicts are tethered in opposition to each other, but they also exist beyond each other, in all those paying attention, right now, tuned in and waiting.

We are all waiting. We have all already been waiting. We will always be waiting. We have existed here this whole time, we realize, just as we also understand we never have existed in this space because it is psychological. It is not The Real, either then.

George Floyd is not the sum total of his death, just as Derek Chauvin is not just the sum total of his murder, even though, we all saw it happen. We saw that smirk on his face and his hand shoved deep into one pocket. Nonchalant murder was his vibe, the surface of which offered a more pleasant version of the hatred cursing through his blood. But here, in this gray space of in-between knowing and not knowing, George Floyd and that murderer both exist, strangely yet not problematically co-existing here with us, in this ill-defined space of time, a pocket perhaps, which will surely rupture at any moment, thus ending, definitively, this moment.

And just as we know that this moment will soon end, so too will the memory of this ill-defined feeling. The feeling of the uncanny, as if we have been here before, in this same spot of not-knowing, but somehow, we know this just as we know this is not real. It is nearly as if we have actually been here in the uncertain more certainly than we have been in our own perception of the Real.

We feel unease because here we recognize ourselves, we are in dialogue with ourselves: what will you do? What will we do? But most importantly, phenomenologically speaking: what will we feel?

As we all wait, rationalizing the various possibilities, we are trying to predict a feeling that you cannot know until you experience it, and as soon as it is over, its elusive definition, and its relationship to what you consider to be stable and real slips just back out of reach. We experience it, but we never know it. We feel it but never feel it again. This repetition is different every time, but always with that same strange undercurrent of the uncanny.

As if we have been here before, many times before, and that this is a loop for which there is no end. Such is this country's relationship to white supremacy; it is seemingly boundless, knowing no end nor beginning.

Five minutes have passed, at least according to the clock, and the gold seal still stands. It says live but it very much does not look alive. The silence buzzes too loudly for it to be the Real, you now understand. You’ve never known. It will be a hung jury... it will be both. We will be forced to extend this present state of anxious un-knowing into the future, for an un-knowable amount of time.

Such is the pocket of time posited in Schrödinger’s cat. The original text of this writing, will, if it ever does see the light of day, will necessarily be altered (and if I’m being honest, finessed) but always with the filter of already-having had this knowledge, the notion of knowing how it comes out. This moment is lost in time and exactly on time.

Which is precisely why this feeling, this one right here in this exact moment, we will forget as soon as we experience it, we wait with baited breath, yearning for it, for it to be over. Yearning for it to begin again. For a decision to have been made that we can all now react to. As if we are not allowed to have anything but conflicting feelings in this moment.

He is still both. It is 4:58 PM

It must be any moment now. Like fireworks fading, we will only know for sure that this moment ever existed in a fleeting look at the smoke plumage after the firework has already gone off, its moment of rupture long over. But we will just be getting to it. Understanding those strangely beautiful clouds of grey smoke are no longer our home. Because we are in the Real, now.

Soon, we will wonder if we were ever really here to begin with. Or worse, did we ever really leave?

And just like that: it is. Over.

I'm left wondering: why don't I feel any better? Why has this not lessened the pain of police brutality? Have they not just offered up a scapegoat, bleating as stupidly as he looks, with that bad buzz cut and feigned surprise as one guilty verdict after another was announced.

When did it sink in for him? The bemused puzzlement of his slightly furrowed eyebrows above his masked face only betrays slight surprise. Nothing more. What will come of him in prison? Where, most assuredly, he will be taken up by the neo-Nazis as one of their own. Enshrined and adored... for killing a Black man. This, I think, is America. Not that courtroom, nor that verdict. But rather, what awaits him in prison.

I hope this perhaps shed some light on your own forms of thought experiments as we all reel from trauma, the pandemic, and the cruel reality of justice. More than anything, we should be surrounding ourselves with radical acts of love.

Until next week,

Allison

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