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The world needs more understanding, not just love. I’m Stephen Webb, and today I dive into how the chaos of 2020 has shown us that we can’t just slap a “love” label on everything and call it a day. We really need to understand what people are feeling and why they feel that way. Just like a baby needs more than just love—it needs food and care—people need us to listen and to understand their experiences. It’s about seeing the world from different angles, feeling the pain others feel, and realizing that true compassion comes from understanding what’s really going on. So, let’s talk about that.

So if the world doesn't need more love, what does the world need? When it comes to black lives matter there is a lot more the world needs than a group hug, some loving compassion. In this episode Steven Webb discusses what the world needs more than ever.

The podcast dives deep into the tumultuous events of 2020, a year that has turned our world upside down. Stephen Webb reflects on the unpredictability of the past year, highlighting the overwhelming need for understanding and compassion amidst the chaos. He emphasizes that while love is often touted as a solution, what the world truly needs is practical love—one that involves understanding people's needs and feelings, much like a parent caring for a child. The episode challenges listeners to think about whether simply spreading love is enough or if we need to dig deeper into understanding the complexities of the human experience. Webb uses powerful metaphors and personal anecdotes to illustrate his points, reminding us that understanding is the key to creating real change in a world filled with storms.

As Stephen navigates through the challenges of 2020, he brings to light the protests and social movements that have arisen as a response to long-standing issues of inequality and injustice. The episode stresses the importance of listening to marginalized voices and recognizing the pain that individuals go through. He draws parallels between the Black Lives Matter movement and other societal issues, emphasizing that we cannot dismiss the struggles of any group. Instead, we must strive for a world where every life matters, and to achieve this, understanding and empathy must take center stage. The discussion prompts us to reflect on our own experiences of not being heard and how that can lead to frustration and desperate actions.

Towards the end of the episode, Webb invites listeners to consider what real love looks like in action. He suggests that love is not just a feeling but a commitment to understanding and addressing the needs of others. This understanding requires us to look at issues from multiple angles and to recognize the complexities of each situation. The podcast wraps up with a call to action: to become more attuned to the struggles of others, to listen actively, and to engage with the world in a way that fosters understanding rather than division. It’s a powerful message that resonates deeply, urging us to take a moment to reflect on how we approach love and understanding in our own lives.

Takeaways:

• 2020 was a year nobody could have predicted, with surprises at every turn.
• The world needs understanding rather than just love to truly address its issues.
• We often fail to listen to the pain others feel, which we need to change.
• Peaceful protests rarely lead to real change, highlighting a need for deeper understanding.
• Understanding different perspectives is crucial in creating meaningful connections and solutions.
• The call for love must be paired with action and listening to genuinely support those in need.

Hey, this is stillness in the storms, and I'm Stephen Webb, and oh, boy, isn't the world a storm at the moment?

I'm sure they would have been put in a straight jacket.

It's just.

It's one of those years where whenever we take a moment and we look backwards, we can see how it happened, but we just cannot see what's going to happen next.

We have no idea whatsoever is going to happen next.

And I see everywhere that the world needs more love.

The world needs a group hug.

The world needs this wonderful love energy, what I call bs.

I'm sorry.

You know, I. I've got a big open heart, I think, and I give the world love, and I try to hold space for people so they can.

But I don't think love is what the world needs or not.

In the same way that in the spiritual sense of love, we need the practical sense of love.

And let me tell you the difference on today's podcast.

You know, I meditate to understand myself.

I sit.

I sit quiet to observe my feelings, observe my emotions, my thoughts, to observe the feeling in my thumb.

What's going on in my thumb and my fingers and my toes.

Seems a bit odd when I cannot feel my body because I'm paralyzed just below the neck.

But I still do it anyway because it's still attached to me and it still has an influence on me.

And I think it's important to know what's going on, to know where our thoughts are coming from, where our feelings are coming from.

And when we understand ourselves, when we understand what's going on within, we can have some kind of peace.

We can deal with the problems that our body is telling us.

You know, we can deal with that poorly.

Knee months before it actually gets beyond repairable.

We can deal with the emotion when it's arising, before it gets too bad.

So does the world need love?

No.

You know, it's much like having a baby.

When we have a baby, we go, well, it just needs love.

It doesn't.

It needs its nappy changed.

It needs food.

It needs looking after.

And to do that, you need to understand the cry.

You need to understand what's wrong with the child.

You know, you take someone that's looked after a child for two years, and suddenly somebody else walks in to look after the child for a week.

They don't know what that child needs.

Yes, we know it needs food.

And we know it needs a clean nappy and we know it needs dressing and washing, but we don't know the whims.

We don't know what the child likes, what the child needs to be nourished.

We don't know how the child feels comfortable, feels comfort.

And that's what the world needs.

The world needs that kind of love.

And to give that kind of love, what do you need?

You need understanding.

Understanding.

You need to understand what's going on, or at least the best way you possibly can.

And to understand anything that's going on, you've got to look at it from more than one angle.

You can't just look at it from one angle and then go, oh, I know.

Black lives matter.

Yes, of course, all lives matter.

Of course.

Ants matter, bees matter, trees matter.

And I really get really tired of hearing every time black lives matter comes up, you get a whole wave of people, all lives matter.

And I'm not going to go into the metaphor, the burning building and the broken leg and everything like that, you've seen them all everywhere on the Internet.

You know, in short, you know, it's like there's one house burning, I'm going into it now, aren't I?

One house burning.

The fire brigade comes up and he starts spraying the house that's not burning.

Okay, technically they do do that to stop the spread of the fire, but that's as long as they're putting the fire out as well.

But in general, you need to deal with the problem at hand.

And just I know you're not dismissing it by going all lives matter, but you are lessening the problem.

Because when someone looks up and says black lives matter, they're not saying white lives don't matter.

You know, the only way I can relate to walking out of a shop, putting money in my wallet and a policeman saying, where did you get that money?

Or being pulled over.

Well, I cannot relate to fearing losing my life, my life being pulled over by the police, because I just don't, I don't fear a policeman.

I don't live in a place where I have to, I'm not, I haven't got that colored skin that is, has connotations that go with it, unfortunately.

But what I am, I'm disabled.

And I've loads of meetings with social services and I can remember going into those meetings really feeling like a second class citizen because I'm disabled and my life doesn't matter.

My life is not important, as important as somebody else's.

And with this COVID 19 at the moment, you know, everybody's well, my freedom and my liberties.

I want to go out, I want to do all these things.

No.

We're currently trying to look after the vulnerable and the elderly that cannot fight this virus.

We should have had the hashtag oldlivesmatter.

Disabled lives matter.

Now then, this isn't lessening the black lives matter because I personally think that Black lives matter should be the biggest hashtag right now, along with Old lives matter.

Regarding the other COVID 19 and this is what understanding does, it puts it in context.

You know, we're seeing this year, nothing's ever black and white.

You know, the protest happened not just because of George Lloyd.

George Lloyd is the catalyst.

It's been happening.

People have felt like their lives haven't mattered for a very, very long time.

And it's just happened to coincide with a couple of months of lockdown where people have been locked down for this.

COVID 19 and now they're suddenly coming out and.

Or even if they're not allowed out, they're kind of coming out for the simple fact that they've had enough.

Then you suddenly hit them with one of their own dying in such a horrible way, a horrible video.

One of our own, each one of us.

But he certainly, I certainly feel he's one of us.

I cannot breathe.

You know, the right to breathe surely is the first fundamental right of anything.

Nobody owns the oxygen, nobody owns the right to breathe.

And those words just echo so much.

So you add all of that together and with coming out of the lockdown, the world slowing down and now suddenly speeding up, the weather getting warmer, people wanting to be out, people wanting to feel make a difference, people wanting to find connections again and they felt their connections over this.

And then you get the protest now.

3000 different anti war protests across the world just let that sink in.

That's 36 million people in the world protested what happened.

We have more war.

It doesn't make a difference.

And I really don't advocate violence in any way.

And I really don't.

And I want to make that point really clear.

I don't think violence is ever the answer.

But if you've tried everything else, you possibly know what else is there left.

If a guy come up to my daughter or me and he threatened me and I said, go away, otherwise I'm going to punch you.

And he carried on and I said, go away, otherwise I will have to punch you.

And I give him so many warnings.

What do I do?

At some point?

Okay, it's a metaphor for me, because my punches wouldn't.

Wouldn't do anything to anybody.

But the point I'm making, at some point, they took to the knee and they were ridiculed.

They protested and they were ridiculed.

We had nearly a million people protest Brexit.

Didn't listen, didn't care.

Two days later, it's not even on the news.

I believe we had 750,000 people protest against privatizing parts of the NHS.

My cat's snoring in the background.

If you can hear her, even my voice puts my cat to sleep.

What happened?

The government carried on as usual.

Peaceful protests rarely work.

And that's really unfortunate.

It's really unfortunate.

And I blame the people that don't listen to the peaceful protests.

You know, there's people out there crying out to be understood, and we're not understanding them.

We're not listening.

That's what the world needs.

The world needs to be listened to a little more.

We need to feel the pain they are feeling and not just in some beneficial BS way.

Oh, yeah, I understand your plight, but really, it's not the time to do it.

I'm tired of hearing now's not the time to talk about it.

Well, when is the damn time to talk about people dying when they don't need to die?

You know, if peaceful protest worked, why didn't the US and UK government sit on the border with Saddam Hussein and go, hey, Saddam, we got placards here?

See, governments know peaceful protests don't work.

That's why they want the peaceful protests.

But they also know peaceful protest makes them look bad.

So they also want a protest to turn violent very quickly, because if it turns violent, then they can sort them out and then they can say, there you go.

They're the bad people.

They're not bad people.

They're unheard people.

There are people that are fed up, tired of yelling the same message and people not getting it.

Why did we elect Trump?

Or why did the US Elect Trump?

Because there was a huge wave of people that were not listened to and they were fed up.

Think about how many times in your lives when you're not listened to, either by a partner or by other people.

Yeah.

At some point you come out fighting.

And we also got to understand the police, that not all police are racist.

Terrible, bad people.

Natural fact.

I don't believe anybody's bad people.

I believe bad people have experiences in life that turns them doing Actions that are not so great and some actions that are outright terrible and horrible, and we need to have justice for them.

Yes, but then you have the police that have to do the government's work.

They don't want to be doing that.

I'm sure it's not.

You know, it's like the soldiers, when they go to war, they don't really want to go to war.

There may be a few that do, but I just don't think they do.

And I'm kind of answering for them now.

And I realize I can't because I'm not a soldier.

So I just think we need to understand all sides a little more.

We're battling with ourselves.

We're battling with the wrong people.

You know, on my timeline at the moment, it looks like a squabbling fest on Facebook.

I'm pointing out my side, they're pointing out their side, and we're both right.

You know, not one person that's replied to one of my posts have been totally wrong.

And I posted a post the other day and it said about a racist comment and on it, and several people called me out on it.

And I read it back and it wasn't racist, or it might have been racist, but there wasn't enough information in the post to come to the conclusion it was racist, so therefore it should not have been used.

And I replied to each one of those people saying, thank you for enlightening me on this.

And I let them read my comments back, and I deleted it today.

I'm wrong a lot of the time, which is good because it means I learned something.

But we need more understanding.

We need to be able to see their perspective.

We need to weep.

Just as Jeremy Putman, Reverend Jeremy Putman, I asked him the other day what would Jesus do if he was here now?

I think he would weep.

But then I think the next phase, he would ask us to understand, to listen.

You know, love is to listen.

You know, we can band around all the lovely phrases of world needs more love, but love has a different side.

It has an action to it.

And if you love your child, you make it comfortable.

You understand what it needs in that moment.

If you love your partner, if you love your parents or somebody else in life, you listen to them and you try to create the comfort and security that they deserve in life.

That's what the action of love is.

So that's what we need to do.

You know, if you're advocating more love for the black lives, we need to understand them.

We need to create a world in which they do not fear a policeman.

You know, somebody that's causing criminal damage, somebody that's committing a crime needs to fear a policeman.

Not because of the color of their skin.

That's.

We all know that.

There is a one person listening to this podcast now that doesn't know that.

And sorry if I'm sounding like as if I'm preaching here, but, you know, we need to wake up.

And waking up is understanding.

It's not disconnecting.

It's not some kind of utopian, wonderful, beautiful life.

You know, waking up is understanding ourselves first.

What's going on inside of me, how am I feeling about this?

And then waking up is.

The wider picture, is seeing things from whole perspectives.

I don't think that policeman wanted to kill George Lloyd that day.

I really don't.

But I do believe in my heart that the way he sees the world, the experiences he's had in life, created a situation that could have been prevented and should be prevented and should not happen.

And justice needs to be done.

But just coming back with the World Needs Love or All Lives Matter, that's not gonna fix shit.

I just want.

You know, this is a bit of a heavy podcast for me, but I just wanted to address that.

I just wanted to address the fact that I don't like the fact that peaceful protests don't work, but they very rarely do work.

And I don't know the answers.

It's easy to sit here and point out the problems.

I can do that all day, but I don't have the answers.

But I do know that, yes, all lives matter right now.

We need to sort the shit out.

Where blacks feel that their lives don't matter, that's what we're working on right now.

Last year, we worked on the Me Too Movement.

That didn't mean that many people that didn't have the Me Too movement that or weren't involved in any kind of.

What do you call it?

Oh, I'm trying to think of the word now.

I can't think of the word in any kind of events that were part of the MeToo movement.

It didn't mean that we were dismissing those people that weren't suffering from it.

No, we didn't have a hashtag me, me, me too.

It's just.

I'm Stephen Webb, and this is Stillness in the Storms.

And you'd really help me if you could become a patron that would help me to, hey, spread this word a little more.

You know, help build the podcast, build the listener base, and get this message out to the world.

Because, yes, the world needs love, but above love, it needs understanding and it needs.

It needs us to open our hearts and see it from their perspective and not just ours.

That's really important perspective.

How do they feel about it?

Not how you feel about it.

Thank you.

Head over to stephenweb.com there's a link at the top to become a patron of my podcast and support the work I do.

Take care.

Love you guys.

More understanding.

Thank you.

I can't breathe.

Sa.