Our National Attention Deficit’s Disorder: George Floyd, Coronavirus, Justice, and Wisdom

Watching the conversation of Coronavirus, George Floyd, and our ability to move on far too quickly.

Do not forsake [wisdom], and she will preserve you;
Love her, and she will keep you.
Wisdom is the principal thing;
Therefore get wisdom.
And in all your getting, get understanding.
Proverbs 4:6-7

One of the most powerful aspects of social media’s influence on our lives is just how much more news, information, and stories we receive on a daily basis. Our hands, and minds, are filled with accounts, news, stories, issues, complaints, celebrations, all of the above. It’s not simply because we have more things to draw our attention that we have become less attentive as a people. It seems to me that we already are plenty inattentive, so all of our technology and opportunity to be inattentive is just an outlet for what already happens inside of our minds, due to the effects of life between Edens.

The (Maybe) Disclaimer

This article will touch on more than one touchy subjects. As it does, I do not purport to write about them infallibly or brilliantly. This article is the outworking of an idea currently germinating in my mind, and I felt is was developed well enough to be helpful, so I hope it is. To the extent that you find it non-helpful, I’m all ears.

What do I mean by Attentive and National ADD

I’ll start off by saying what I don’t mean. I don’t merely mean that we as a culture like to watch a lot of fast-paced entertainment, can hardly pick up classic books to read, or even barely make it through a stoplight without looking at our phones—though those things are true. What I do mean by national ADD is our ability as people to get swept up in things passionately for a bit of time, and then fail to actually accomplish the mission we all got swept up in because the solution takes more than a few weeks or months.

What I mean by “being attentive” is the ability to sit down and think, really think, about an issue. Heck, call it mindfulness if you want to. I don’t think we are often very mindful for very long. To be attentive, really attentive, is not merely to be affected or emotionally roused—it is to be serious enough about an issue to actually grapple with it.

I’m proposing that being truly attentive to issues in our lives and in our society requires long, careful, thoughtfulness. Even more, I’m saying that you can not be truly mindful without starting from the scriptures. I think that we Christians say a hearty, “Amen,” to that, but it seems as though we struggle to actually start with the scriptures.

This article comes out of observing our cultural responses to situations that have arisen lately: some of them highly unusual and unfamiliar, others more familiar (sadly). After watching, I merely want to encourage us to do something that seems to be anathema to our culture at large: start thinking about these things deeply, and then keep thinking about them deeply until we solve them, even if the problem fades into the cultural background after a short time.

A Couple Examples

So here are the polarizing examples that brought this topic to mind. This is where I ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt instead of giving me the burning at the stake. Coronavirus (the virus, the shutdowns, the government response, etc.), and the completely unjust death of George Floyd in the hands of police in Minnesota. Chances are, just typing those two topics into the same article in the same sentence could cause a majority of people to set their computer on fire. So why bring them up?

Because I believe that both of these examples are a big deal (to understate things, of course). I believe that the situations, and the response(s) we see after them, indicate a great deal about our culture and our ability to pay attention. Months from now, years from now, we will look back, hopefully as honest citizens, and ascertain if we did our duty in reacting in the moment and responding with biblical, thoughtful change in the wake of it.

Both situations are complex, and both of them require actual thinking instead of party-based diatribes and hot take reactions. We need to actually be able to think about these things, and not just in the moment. We need to be able to think about what we though in the moment, later on. We need to assess, not just if we “did something,” but if we actually did what was right. So why don’t we?

The general formula

The general formula that I observe is that when a situation grabs our headlines, we get passionate about it, at least enough to post it to social media. Maybe, just maybe, there is enough passion to accomplish something in the short term. But, too often, that’s where it stops. We want to fix an injustice, and we want it now. That’s a good desire, but if you don’t keep paying attention, even after the “first wave” of action/reaction, then, most likely, the fixes that we choose won’t hold water for long. We are like a culture passionately patching holes in our canoe with duck tape instead of pulling off to the side of the river to rebuild the canoe. We don’t stop and ask ourselves what we hit and why it put a hole in the canoe. We don’t do a post-mortem on the trip to really see if every fork in the river we took was the right one. All well and good, we think, we can limp along for at least another quarter mile or so.

Long term change and positive growth requires us to think—to really, really think—carefully, for a long time on one subject. You can learn lessons in the moment, but you can only learn if those lessons are correct with careful thought much later. This is where we quote the line, “those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.”

We like to study history, so long as that history is now, or at most a few weeks ago.

For example, in Coronavirus and COVID-19, there are countless issues and sub-issues that are brought up, and it is childish to think that every decision we make in the heat of the moment is the absolute best decision. It is an undeniable fact that the decisions made during a time of a novel pandemic are made (at the beginning) largely out of fear and not data. Why? Because there was pretty much zero data to go off of at the start. Noting that these decisions were made out of modeling and speculating instead of data does not impugn any leader’s decisions, it just recognizes that they were in a position where decisions were made before the normal amount of data was available.

And again, it is childish thinking to believe that every decision we make in the heat of a battle is the right decision. It might be the only decision we can get behind in the moment, but that doesn’t mean that it is always the best choice the next time we see a battle. We know this, intuitively, that is the entire value of hindsight.

What I’m saying is simple, I think.

What I’m proposing is simple, and not radical, even though it doesn’t seem to be the norm for us today. I hope that months from now, even a year from now, we will look back on the Coronavirus crisis, or even a situation like the unjust, warrantless killing of George Floyd in the hands of Minnesota police.

My hope is not that we look back for mere sentimentality, but that we would look back in order to further examine all the evidence and knowledge we have gained over the course of that time. With COVID, we will know much more 12 months from now than we do today, and we ought to have the courage to then evaluate our decisions in the past using the hard knowledge, science, and consequences observed since then.

With George Floyd, though the case is horrifically open and shut (in many ways), we still need to have the courage to go back and have an attention span long enough to make sure all the knowledge we gained in the course of a year jives with the decision we made in the heat of the moment. What’s more, we need to have the conscious ability to evaluate if we are working ourselves away from more of these heartbreaking realities or navigating directly at more of them.

Why? Because, ostensibly, we don’t want tragedies to happen over and over again. We don’t want another moment where 1/5 of all Americans lose their jobs in the space of three months. We don’t want another pandemic, or at least we want to handle it as best we can when one arises. We don’t want needless death on our streets. We don’t want image bearers of God to kill or be killed by one another. We don’t want injustice, whether motivated by ignorance, fear, or hatred.

We do the best we can in the moment. I try, as hard as I can, to extend that benefit of the doubt to friends, family, pastors,…gasp…even politicians. However, if we really want wisdom, we don’t merely react in the moment to important situations and then never revisit the subject.

As I read the Bible, wisdom is personified as one who is a careful thinker, one who is patient, one who starts with God, and ends with God. If we are to be wise, and we want our experiences to actually turn into wisdom, we need to have the courage to be attentive to a situation even after the News and Media push something off our plate and drop something else in its place. If it’s important to us, then we keep thinking about it until we have a Biblical, wise, experienced, measured, answer.

Just a few guidelines for our thinking

These are just a few guidelines that I think will help us be attentive, wise, and stronger in our thinking:

First, start with the scriptures. As Christians who believe that God’s word is sufficient for all things pertaining to life and godliness, and that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, we need to relentless in the belief that all of our thinking (all of it) starts with the categories and principles of the Bible. This includes politics, police, pandemics, quarantines, vaccines, economics, families, and more. 

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

Proverbs 9:10

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

Second, do the hard work to continue with the scriptures. We don’t need vague spiritual preferences loosely gathered from the Bible to guide our thinking. We need chapter and verse. We need to be Bereans that searched the scriptures “to see if these things are true.” It is as grave a mistake to misuse the Word of God as it is to neglect the Word of God. It is our reflex to leave the scriptures behind, as though we secretly believe that the Bible doesn’t have much to say to our modern society. (This attitude may be spoken of blatantly by Liberal Christianity, but if we’re honest we can be tempted to treat the Bible this way while still maintaining its inerrancy.)

So, believe the Bible. Believe it enough to trust that it has something to say, from God, and that makes it the best possible cornerstone to build our thinking upon.

Third, pay attention beyond the news cycle. Without trying to be too cynical, it is a reality that our news media is as much interested in making money as they are in being great, unbiased reporters. “If it bleeds, it leads.” That isn’t their fault, it’s our fault, for uncritically accepting what they say, how they say it, and how long they say it.

There are plenty of issues that are swept out of the bulk of news coverage before there is any resolution at all. Even more, this whole COVID thing will likely stop being mentioned at all by the time our next flu season hits. George Floyd might just be out of the news next week. Whether or not the former Justice Department illegally and immorally spied on and then sought to impugn the current Justice Department will be out of the news,…well, it already largely is.

If issues are important, we can’t have the agenda of our minds set by whatever is getting the most airtime in the moment. We ought to keep drawing lessons and experience from “these unprecedented times” for a long time to come. Right now, everything is about scoring political points. You can be sure that the news will leave stories alone once there are no more points on the board. If you want to be a person of truth, then you must keep paying attention to important matters after your channel and your party leave them behind.

Fourth, in the moment, and in the future, we must surrender our desire to be on the winning team and pick up the desire to be wiser.

We ought not be chickens with our heads cut-off, bouncing from crisis of the moment to crisis of the moment. We ought to refuse fear and to have the courage to go back, and back again, gleaning wisdom from our experience. It’s not too much of a problem to make a less than perfect decision in the midst of a completely imperfect crisis. It is a big problem to not have the humility that we may have been wrong, and then stubbornly deciding to shove our potential mistakes under the rug over and over again.

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