The Slap Heard Round The World

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Hey, everybody, I just had to say something about the slap heard round the world, the slap of Will Smith on Chris Rock. You know, it's really interesting. I know people are tired of hearing about it already. But I have to say something anyway, because I find it really fascinating how different people have reacted to watching the same event. And sometimes it's hard to even understand how people react so differently. So I want to, I want to break some of that down. The first thing is, should we be discussing it all at all? I know several people on social media, I'm on Facebook for the most part, are saying, why are we talking about this when there are other much more important things going on in the world? We've got wars going on, we've got, we're on the brink of a nuclear war, we still COVID, you know, inflation, etc. This is all just a distraction. So I think my answer to that is we can do both. We can do more than one thing at a time. We can talk about, you know, various issues. But some people have kind of, I'd say, I would say oversimplified this or reduced it to the point of where it's ridiculous and saying it's just one millionaire slapping another millionaire for insulting that millionaire's millionaire wife. And it's all about celebrity, about millionaires. If you know me at all, you know I couldn't care less about celebrities. I don't talk about celebrities that much. I don't know who is married to who or who's sleeping with who or, you know, whatever. That's not my thing. I don't really care. But when something like this comes up, I think it's an opportunity to talk about the bigger thing. This is not just about Will Smith. This is not just about Chris Rock. This is not just about Jada. Uh, this is about a number of issues and just to list off a few of them. Toxic masculinity, feminism, stereotypes of Black men, should we judge people or not, violence in our society, the role of comedians, should we talk about body, you know, body types or body appearance. And everybody has different opinions on all these different things. And I, I do want to kind of tick off and go down through those and talk about them. First of all, let's talk about, you know, what I call toxic masculinity. You know, Will Smith, and I think a very old-fashioned way, thought that he needed to get up and, quote, defend his wife Jada against this perceived attack by Chris Rock. And I've heard some people say, well, Chris Rock has made jokes about Jada before, because I guess he made a joke about her in 2016 or something at the Oscars. But this idea that a man has to defend his woman, and even the way he referred to her as keep my wife's name out of your mouth. He didn't even use her name. He was referring to her almost as if she was property. I know this is a phrase we use all the time, my husband, my wife, but I just find it interesting that he used that phrase. Now, the other thing about Will Smith that people may or may not know, and I didn't know until this point, until this happened, is he watched his father abuse his mother. So I have to wonder, did he take a vow within himself to say, I am going to protect— I couldn't protect my mother. I'm going to protect the women in my life or the people in my life. And maybe something was triggered in him when Chris Rock made the joke about Jada. So I call that toxic masculinity, when you feel like you're so hyper-masculine that you've been— your wife has been disrespected and you've been disrespected, that you have to jump up on stage and slap somebody who literally was making a joke. This was— I would say it was a joke. You can say it's a good joke, a bad joke. What's off limits, we can talk about that. But it was a joke. The other thing is feminism. Now, I brought this up the other day, and I got kind of slapped down by a woman saying, why are we bringing feminism into this? But I think it's important, because I would think a lot of feminists would say, I don't need a man to defend me. And especially Jada Pinkett Smith is a very outspoken, very well-spoken articulate, fiery woman. So Jada can take care of herself in a verbal confrontation. And this was verbal. Now, if someone attacked, physically attacked my wife or my daughter, would I jump in? 100%, I would jump in because I'm a lot bigger and stronger than they are, and I wouldn't allow that to happen. But when it's a verbal attack, as it is in this case, I don't feel Will had any need to do anything. And if he had done something, it should have been with his words. You know, we tell kids in kindergarten, use your words, and that's the thing, you know, that really kind of gets me is anyone defending Will Smith's actions. If you saw two kids on the playground and you walked up and Bobby had slapped Timmy and you say, Bobby, why did you slap Timmy? And Bobby says, well, because he called Susie stupid. You would say, no, Bobby, we use our words. We don't slap people because they, they said something. So to me, this is a very clear-cut case of Will Smith being, you know, in the wrong. Which brings us to the other thing that is a big issue with this. And that's, quote, judging people. And I've been told by people, mostly Christians, but other people as well, we should not judge anyone, you know, it's— and Jesus said, judge, you know, as you judge, so shall you be judged. And we're not supposed to judge people. And, you know, someone even said, well, what is right? And what is wrong? You know, it's not for us to say what's right or wrong for someone else. I totally push back on that. I totally disagree with that. Because let's take that to its logical extreme. That means that we can't have laws, because a law says a behavior is wrong. And if you do this behavior, we're going to punish you. So that you might call judging someone. We even have people in our society, we call them judges. And we realize that's necessary. When we— when our children do things that are wrong, We discipline them as society. We say to people, that's rude. So if you say to someone that you should never judge anyone, and if judging is condemning a person's actions, that means we can never say that anything anybody did offended us is wrong. We can't, we can't write speeding tickets. We can't put people in jail for murder, because that's, quote, judging the person. Now, here's where I think the difference is between judging someone and using discernment. Judging someone is when you talk about their character. I would be judging Will Smith if I said Will Smith is a terrible person, that Will Smith is just, you know, evil. That would be judging someone. That would be judging Will. I'm very careful when I talk about this incident to say that Will Smith, what he did was wrong. I am saying his behavior was wrong. You want to use the word judging, fine. I am judging his behavior. Slapping someone for verbal assault, even if it was a verbal assault, is wrong. This is very dangerous. And this brings me to the next point I want to make about violence in our society. We are so quick to escalate in a society that you could— you have to be scared to blow your horn at somebody, or someone you're driving in traffic and say you flip somebody up because they will take it to the next level. Couple of quick examples. There was a guy that got into with an older guy in a movie theater. I forgot what the initial thing was about. But the younger man threw popcorn at the older guy, threw his popcorn at him. The older guy pulls out a gun and shoots him and kills him. That guy is now dead because of that altercation. There's an example of a patron in a fast food restaurant was getting unruly and called the person behind the counter the N-word. This was a 27-year-old guy. The guy, the 27-year-old guy punched the patron, he fell back, hit his head and died. So now he's got to live with that on his conscience for the rest of his life. Also, he's been convicted of manslaughter. In our society, we seem to think it's okay to take things to the next level all the time. So I believe in, you know, fighting right with, with, with, or fighting with, you know, with the right amount of resistance, right? So if someone's using verbal assaults on me, I can walk away. I can verbally assault them back, or I can verbally respond or verbally defend myself. Will Smith could have, you know, yelled out. He and Jada could have just sat there stone-faced and shown their lack of appreciation. They could have gotten up and walked out. Jada has a platform. She has the Red Table Talk. Jada could have excoriated Chris Rock on her platform, but no, Will chose to punch someone. I think that's absolutely wrong. So that's the violence in our society. The next thing I want to talk about is what this— the impact this has on the Black community. Now, Will Smith stood up and gave his acceptance speech for King Richard for the best actor. Which I think he well deserved. And he talked about how he's a river to his people. I don't even know what that means. But I will say this. When— the thing is, whether it's fair or not, Black people represent other Black people. It's a fact of being a minority. When we behave badly, it reflects on all of us. And, you know, sometimes I think white people don't understand why we take such pride when Black people people like Will Smith have excellence, uh, people like Tyler Perry, the stuff that he's been able to do, Oprah Winfrey, because it breaks some of the stereotypes and shows that we can be excellent to, to ourselves as role models and also to the wider community. The flip side of that is when someone behaves badly, when a Black man slaps another Black man, it reinforces that stereotype that Black men can't control their temper. Reinforces that stereotype that Black people are violent. And I don't like that. So what Will Smith did reflects on all of us, like it or whether we like it or not, whether he likes it or not. If we're going to take the positive from what he does, then we have to be responsible for the negative too, which is why I feel like I have a special, a special responsibility, I guess, to respond to this. I can't just, just ignore it. So the thing is, another thing I wanna talk about is comedy, and I'm gonna talk about body— people talk about other people's bodies. I've heard some people say, well, we should never talk about anybody's body. That's off limits. So Chris Rock should not have made the joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair. Now, it's not clear that Chris Rock knew that she had a medical condition, has alopecia. Jada has cut her hair short many times over. Her daughter's hair is actually very short right now for whatever reason. We don't know, maybe in, in solidarity with their mother. But Jada's hair has been short in the past. Some women do choose a bald hairstyle, they choose a bald hairstyle. So I don't know if Chris knew what was going on with Jada or not. But Jada also a few weeks, I guess, a couple weeks before, had put out a TikTok saying that she didn't give two craps about what people thought about her head, and that she loved her bald head. And the other thing about comedy, whether you like stand-up comedy or you don't like stand-up comedy, there are these things called comedy roasts. And the Oscars are kind of like that. Amy Schumer made a lot of jokes that were borderline that night. Regina Hall, I think her name is, was a black comedian there. She made some jokes. She made a joke about Will and Jada's open marriage, which I don't think Will really appreciated. But there is a certain type of humor that you may or may not like, but it's humor. I happen to love stand-up humor. And I happen to love people that can laugh at themselves. Amy Schumer made some fat jokes, some about herself, some about other people. Some people might say that's off limits. That's your choice. But the thing is, I don't think that the violent response was right in any way. And the last thing I want to say is someone said to me today, you know, I have compassion for Will Smith. And to me, I took that as implying that I don't have compassion for Will Smith. I want to say this. I have compassion for Will Smith. I'm a big fan of Will Smith's. And I found out recently that he was— lived in an abusive home. And I understand that he's triggered by anger. I know he grew up in South Philly, which is a rough place. And maybe it's a place where you defend yourself with your fists. I don't know. I didn't grow up in that environment. I have compassion for him. But I can still say what he did was wrong at the same time. I can have compassion for Will. And I can talk about his behavior as being wrong. And I can actually want consequences for his behavior. I understand he was asked to leave the theater that night, which I thought he should have been escorted out. He should not have been allowed to receive his award. But I understand he was asked to leave the theater and refused to leave the theater. The other thing is, I also have compassion for Chris Rock. Chris Rock was abused as a child, physically abused, sexually abused. He's talked about it openly. Chris Rock has some sort of a, I guess, autism or some type of— he's on the spectrum. He has very, very low self-esteem. He was picked on a lot. This triggered him too. He had a concert where he spoke Wednesday night, which is 3 days after the event, where he broke down in tears. So there are multiple victims in this, but I think Chris Rock is a victim as well. And it's because of Will's bad behavior. Now, if Will and Jada had chosen to take the high road and to talk about this verbally, to get up and walk out, or they did, we'd be talking about Chris Rock's joke today, instead of talking about Will Smith. So that went on a little bit longer than I wanted to. But there's a lot in there. And I think this is a teaching moment. This is a learning moment. This is not trivial. This is not discussing celebrity garbage, why more important stuff is going on in the world. This is very important. These are the things that are at the foundation of our society. And these are things that we need to agree on. We need to agree on what's right and what's wrong. We need to agree on what's the appropriate response to things. This is why we have laws and have a civilized society. We need to discuss these things. So far from saying this is something that I'm tired of talking about, this is something I hope that we all learn from and we all come to our own conclusions as to how we want to moderate our own behavior going forward. So thanks for listening and have a great one. Hi there, I'm really excited to tell you about my latest ebook. It's 4 lessons that you can learn from the near-death experience without going through all the trouble of dying to learn them. I've been studying NDEs for several years now, I am completely convinced that not only are they 100% real, but that there's some very universal wisdom that we can get from the near-death experience. And I've distilled that down in this book into 4 short lessons. And I've also given you all the reasons why I believe that NDEs are absolutely real. So go to www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons to pick it up for free. www.grief-the-number-2-growth.com/NDElessons. I hope you enjoy it.