It's MAYDAY!
The US Is In A 5-Alarm Fire: We Need All Hands On Deck + We Also Need Community & Kindness
First things first — we’re doing Zoom calls today for May Day at 3 pm Central and 8 pm Central:
I’m fascinated by May Day and its double meanings, and here we are on another one.
As a kid, I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in a small town. Most everyone was friendly, and my mom made a practice every year of doing May baskets for the neighbors and for us to take to school. Usually with popcorn and some kind of wrapped candy or M&Ms or similar. Maybe with flowers. Often with ribbons. We would make sure to include elderly neighbors who didn’t get out a lot, and we received some May baskets too.
It was kind of sweet and uber neighborly. As a little kid, of course, I thought that’s how everyone handled a) their neighborhoods, and b) their May Days. Then I grew up and forgot about it for a while.
As an adult, I got trained as a wildland firefighter. Wildland firefighting is a crazy field wherein you have to be in fabulous physical shape to do really hard physical labor that most often involves hacking around in mud and ash for extended periods of time in really rough terrain… alternating with sleeping outside and eating terrible food. It can be a total blast, though, if you’re up for that kind of thing. Also because from time to time you interact with real and serious wildfires.
Of course, firefighting can go south because of the real and serious wildfires. Like fire can get really dangerous really fast — no matter what kind of firefighter you are (structure fire, too). When the worst-case scenarios happen and it looks like a firefighter is in life-threatening trouble, the call that goes out over the radio is a “MAYDAY.” I wrote more about that on this May Day post back in 2017. Sailors and also other types of first responders use MAYDAY as an all-out, life-threatening emergency call, too. It’s deadly serious. People who work in any of these areas treat it that way.
This country is in a sort of extended MAYDAY. Or like the tornado sirens have been going off for a while. I heard a quote on a show called Pretty Hard Cases the other day:
“We normalize things so we don’t spend all our time in a rage.”
That’s not a revelationary insight into trauma — but it is a helpful one to remember as we seem to be in a sort of crisis haze.
It never ends and it’s definitely getting worse, but we seem frozen in shock, too.
There’s not mass protest. There’s not a mass movement. There’s not a massive phenomenon. There’s pushback here and there, and there’s talk that perhaps a new civil rights movement is coalescing… but then the new outrage blends into all the other outrage and we maintain a state of outraged stasis.
Only it’s not stasis, because there is an aggressive move to push intolerance and bigotry into law; to decimate institutions; and to weaken democracy.
It’s happening before us and it’s too damn much to keep track of but it’s happening fast. It’s happening aggressively. The majority of Americans appear to be against the fascist moves, but also not sure what to do about it. So talk TV talks about a few alarming bits and pieces. Pundits pundit about it. Authors write a zillion Substacks and analysis pieces.
And the intensity continues. We watch. We comment. We share our surprise and alarm.
The smoke is filling the country… so is anyone going to actually pull the fire alarm?
Who calls the MAYDAY?
Would anyone even pay attention when it seems like the tornado-siren-democracy-fire-alarm has been going off for years?
I think we can collectively raise the alarm, but we have to go about it differently than what we’ve been doing… because some kind of democracy alarm has been going off since 2016.
We have to raise a ruckus. We have to get louder and more courageous. We have to get creative; to try new things. We have to help elected leaders and other leaders get more attention, speak out more, and use the media differently. We have to get attention and use the media differently, too. All of us. We need to work our real-world social networks too; there are ways we can do that.
We can change the moral direction of this country — we can have a moral outcry. We can push a different narrative. We can shift the Overton window back away from the far-right where it’s moved to.
But to do all that we need to do things a bit differently.
We can grow connection (Thing 1), do more with community & coalitions (Thing 2), pressure businesses (Thing 3), empower moral courage (Thing 4), raise a ruckus, & drive the narrative (Thing 5)… to reach & energize Americans in innovative ways to get people more engaged at every level in changing the direction of this country.
That’s it. That’s the Shift the Country approach. It is kind of a wild idea, and if you read here regularly you’re not surprised.
Only we’d like to actually start getting more engagement in our events, more shares, and more people signed up here on Substack to get this shift going. If you can help out in those ways, that would be super fabulous.
Plus, this can be fun. We can do dead-serious stuff, but we can also have super awesome events that are good for the soul. The other side is offering fear and abyss. Hate. Intolerance. Backsliding.
What about if we offer joy and neighborliness and celebrations of humanity and democracy and flourishing communities and families and life and possibilities and a future we want to build?
What about if we bring some of the happy spring May Day spirit of giving and being nice to neighbors into the mix? We can create the space for awesome. We can create the space for connection and community. We can create small and then growing groups of people working to champion a different future than the dystopian hellscape some are trying to create up in this country. We can be so much more.
I think we can do it.
We’re going to need a heck of a lot more people, though, to get this shift going. And money too as far as that goes — donations are essential (via website or ActBlue) as we’re funded by individual donors so far.
Anyway, thank you for supporting us so far. Some of you have been absolutely critical to helping us to get this going, and we’d not have made it here without you. THANK YOU.
I leave you with this absolutely hilarious look at what may or may not be meant to look like a May Day celebration including with a Maypole in this priceless Safety Dance video.
Maybe we don’t have to go this wild with what we create, but people would definitely notice…
Here’s the extended club mix that Americans might be most familiar with —
PS: We advertised on Facebook for today’s May Day Zoom calls (afternoon here, evening here). 542 reactions and 65 shares of this post so far. Something is resonating, and that part is great. More to come.
Saw the "sponsored content" on Facebook. So glad to see that it's working! I can't join today...hope the events are successful.
Would spectating the zoom calls be okay to start?