A wonderful friend wrote a powerful and frightening article about the situation we humans face right now. I can’t share it here because he’s sent it out and it hasn’t, yet, been published. But I would like to share its central insight.
Most of us already know how difficult the situation is now, between climate change, the threats of autocracy, hate-manipulated gun violence, war, etc. We might be consumed by so many concerns that we get lost in fears and retreat to the usual, the safe. But what we face is not usual and not at all safe.
I sometimes wonder if we can even conceive of the challenge we face. We need our rational minds to evaluate all the evidence. But maybe we need to feel it even more than grasp it. We certainly can imagine what a small town looks like after a massive tornado; or what a city like New Orleans looked like after the flooding of Katrina. Or what burned out towns in California look like or cities when sidewalks and streets melt from the increasing heat. This is the face of the climate emergency. And whatever we’ve seen in the past, we’ll probably be seeing worse in coming days and years.
We might read about what it was like living in cities like London before environmental regulations were passed, when people couldn’t go outdoors without getting sick due to torrential smog. Or we can imagine a world without any wildlife outside zoos, no lions, tigers, and bears, no elephants, no eagles and ravens, no owls. Or no honeybees. Without bees, no honey, no fruit, no crops.
Or what happens to a nation when increasing hate fueled violence, like in Buffalo, NY fills the streets. The number of hate crimes has more than doubled since 2015, when DJT first ran for office. Or what a dictator like Putin is doing to Ukraine or what would happen if a white nationalist or Nazis became president or Dictator.
Or what happens when children are forced to read or learn about only what people driven by hate, bigotry, and lust for power want them to read. Or when women are no longer allowed to control their own healthcare options or how their bodies are treated.
My friend feels the terrifying frustration of seeing a threat so clearly yet also feeling powerless to stop it. I think he speaks the fear and concern that a majority of Americans feel. But for him, only dramatic changes will be noticed. Little changes can get lost in the storm clouds of images of what might be coming. Crying out to the world, “Why can’t anyone stop this?” can drive anyone crazy.
Yet, a democracy is all about many people doing relatively small actions together. The wheels of law and change can move with painful slowness.
A few close friends talked with him about not obsessing over these awful possibilities. And he knows this. But words do not reach deep enough to lift us out of an image of oblivion.
He spells out or shouts out a clear line of action we can all take. We need to vote. We need to defeat GOP candidates wherever and whenever they appear⎼ defeat them in running for any political office, not just for President and Congress. We need to defeat them in races for governors, state legislatures, attorney generals, as well as local mayors, voting administrators, and school boards.
To do that, we can do all we can to get the best Democrats to run for office and win primaries. We want the Democrats that are most compassionate, most concerned about protecting the environment, democracy, the rule of law, health care, our rights ⎼ not their own power. But once a candidate is chosen, we need to support them. Support every Democrat. Not all Democrats are ideal candidates, but how many of us are ideal anything? We’re just human.
Because it’s very clear. When someone’s coming at us with a weapon, we must stop them. Too many of the GOP don’t care about we the people. They care about the superrich. They won’t stop global warming but heighten it. They won’t protect or improve healthcare but take it away or make it more expensive. They won’t care about us as we age but try to take from us Social Security and Medicare. They won’t help us vote, exercise power, but make it harder, if not impossible, to exercise any power at all.
They don’t want justice or ethical behavior. Their leaders, like DJT, their judges, like Clarence Thomas, their Congress members, like George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are models of caring only for their own power, not governing, of criminal behavior, and/or narcissism, and advocating violence and hate, not ethics, not justice.
They don’t want truth, scientific or otherwise. And without truth, how do we know what to do? How do we know what might save us? Their image of the future is apocalyptic to all of us. And we can’t assist them by fighting amongst ourselves, or by attacking those who might be allies.
I would love to help my friend not ruminate over these frightening visions, but he also has a point. And I must be aware of my own limitations and fears about hearing what he’s saying. We must do what we can, vote, make phone calls, petition, send money, write political and humane plays, create visual imagery, demonstrate, sit down in GOP offices, and, of course, help get out the vote for Democrats whenever and wherever there is a vote.
And yet we must do all this without beating up on ourselves. We can do all this in ways that make us stronger, more compassionate to ourselves and others. That help us see ourselves more clearly so we can see the world around us more clearly. We must be careful not to be so judgmental of ourselves we wind up helping those who would rip the world from us.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock