Vol. 5, Issue 3: The One About The Halftime Show

Do you tend toward inclusion or exclusion?

I’m going to start by saying that I’m not here to tell you how to feel about Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl.*

*If you’re old like me, you remember halftime performances by marching bands and Up With People and I’m going to tell you right now, you do not want to go back to that.

But I’m now a couple of days removed from it. And I can’t stop thinking about it.

Fighting hate with love is difficult. It requires a level of self-discipline and compassion that most of us can only aspire to - think about any occasion that you’ve been provoked or shouted down or told you’re not just wrong for thinking what you think, but wrong for being who you are. I’d imagine that in most of those cases, you escalated or shouted back or said back “I’m not wrong” in a voice that you don’t break out all that often.

And don’t get me wrong: that’s probably the right strategy sometimes. Sometimes the only thing bullies or jerks or government officials understand and cow to is strength. Sometimes, there’s a necessary use of force when combatting the wrong in the world. I’m not naive - I don’t think Ukraine (as a for instance) should just sit there and get pummeled by Russia and say something like “thank you, sir, may I have another?” But I also think it’s important to recognize that most paths in life aren’t that black and white. In many cases, we get to choose our response. And the ongoing calculus of whether we choose peace or violence is a difficult one that’s often overwhelmed by emotion.

I don’t know that I’ve written about this specifically, but most of my writing points toward one thing*: how do we sit with who we are and how we feel and use that as a guidepost to move through our lives? And that manifests itself in a bunch of different ways: how we handle our response to the unexpected, things like grief and loss, what it means to be humane and kind, how do we look at adversity and use it a mechanism to forge growth instead of shrinking in its face.

*Two things if you count these non-sequiturs and asides

There’s another big part of that as well: inclusion vs. exclusion.

And what Bad Bunny showed us more than anything in his performance is that if we tend toward inclusion, if we look around and appreciate both how we’re the same, but also how we’re different, we’re better for it. And if I’m boiling down most of what I see in the world to one fundamental issue, it’s exactly that. We tend toward exclusion, not inclusion. We tend toward drawing lines and building walls, not opening our doors and welcoming people in. We tend toward finding the places we differ and focusing on those things as dividers, not as things that we can look at and understand.*

*I always find it hilarious when people talk about how much they love to travel and then they go to Tokyo and eat at McDonald’s. The Tokyo McDonald’s was never empty when I walked by it

Bad Bunny chose peace. He chose inclusion. He chose to lean into his culture and show the beauty of it. That made his performance all the more special to me (again, not telling you how to feel). I don’t know much Spanish and he was singing quickly enough that it was challenging for me to even catch a word I do know. But what I can say is that he got me on my feet. He got me moving. And he got me crying.

The aesthetic beauty of that performance was unmistakable*. The music was energetic and fun. The celebrity cameos across the performance were fun and exciting to see how many you could find. The subtle and not-so-subtle messaging through the performance resonated. The messaging was clear, as clear as a Jumbotron in a stadium full of people, the only thing more powerful than hate is love. That’s true, isn’t it? Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. At least, that’s what it says in the Bible**.

*Whoever designed that deserves a Nobel Prize or something

**This might be John Keats in Ode To a Grecian Urn

And that message: we’re stronger together than we are apart. That’s powerful. And I think the reaction of seeing that statement as an attack says more about the person who feels attacked than it does about the person saying it. Do you tend toward inclusion or exclusion?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you what to think. This is about explaining how I’m thinking about all of this and how I’m using this to inform how I move through the world. For me, I continue to hang on that question. It’s something that’s been bouncing around my brain for a while. Do you tend toward inclusion or exclusion? The way that you behave in answering that question tells me everything I need to know.

For instance, I volunteer a lot of my time. I sit on the board of the high school’s parent’s association, I sit on the board at ASDT/Notes In Motion, I’ve just joined the board of Feeding Matters. I spend a couple of hours a week helping out at my local library. None of this is meant to do anything other than illustrate that all of those activities, all of that time volunteered focuses on one thing: inclusion. Do you tend toward inclusion or exclusion?

That will continue to be the fundamental question for me,

Bad Bunny did a lot of things during his absolutely transcendent Super Bowl halftime show, but for me, more than anything, he showed that sometimes the best way to respond to hate is just simply showing who you are and inviting the person in. Maybe they’ll accept that invitation and maybe they won’t.

But their response is a pretty easy way to figure out who they are.

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Well, I found myself sitting and thinking about what to write here. The essay came off my fingers in 45 minutes today, but this ending isn’t really coming that fast. I’m sad about Catherine O’Hara - I think we all are. I’m joyful about the coming months, which will bring needed respite and also some travel for wonderful conversations with people I deeply respect.

That’s all for this week. Until next time, friends.