Raw
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Today feels raw. Some days that happens.
I was looking through my favourite downloaded photos for the perfect illustration of the day, and this is it: the LEGO Space Guy, crying. An iconic early 1980s symbol of hope and childhood and science and possibility and vision and “the future”… sad. And also somewhat alarmed.
The sad Space Guy just fits. It fits the moment in the country. The zeitgeist. He certainly fits my own mood. It fits a Father’s Day where American families are under active attack, criticism, and laws legalizing intolerance by other American families. It’s personal, too, because the LEGO Space Guy was definitely a player in my own childhood; symbolic of a future I thought we were working toward as a country.
Now four decades later in the early 2020s… what are we working toward?
What would symbolize this time? What are kids learning now about what kind of future we can build? Wait… are kids learning that what we’re doing now is normal? What do they see as a possible future?
This is a funny kind of a blog page because it’s for a nonprofit to help us counter authoritarianism and shift this country toward a healthier democracy… but it’s also personal. It has to be.
We have to bring connection and community and our humanity into our politics more.
We’re getting far-right extremism and hyperactive racism and unabashed bigotry because of so much… but part of it is that our social fabric has rotted. It’s threadbare. So many of the structures of our society have stopped helping Americans have a healthy, thriving, flourishing society — or stopped many from ever thriving — that now we’re in a critical mass where we’ve lost touch with what’s important: our humanity. People. Taking care of people. Embracing and accepting people. Welcoming people. Looking after people. Investing in people. Training and educating people. Keeping people healthy. Getting people jobs. And on and on.
We need to bring our humanity forward.
We need to grieve — out in public -— about what we’ve lost. About the social mores that have somehow evaporated into thin air as it’s become acceptable to be a public bigot. We need to grieve openly about the progress and rights and freedoms that we’re losing weekly in some states up in this country. We need to be angry and outraged louder and out in public, too. We need to declare that it’s not right… louder, and in more ways.
We need to get a whole lot louder about the future we actually want, and that we can realistically build… if we could get more Americans fired up and believing that it’s possible.
To do that we have to shake folks out of our collective trauma freeze; out of our collective stupor.
We’re in a state of persistent, thorough, pernicious, creeping shock.
We’re in denial. We don’t know what to do. We’re emotional. We’re overwhelmed. We’re ticked off. We’re angry. We’re outraged.
Yet we’re wandering around… not sure of the next best move. People are spending time figuring out how to move to “safe states,” even while those of us not in safe states work to figure out how we can navigate life where the neighborhoods sometimes look like this:
It is good that some people who are able are moving and finding security where they can. It’s hard to fight any fight when you’re in active danger and when you’re in defense mode. That’s a fact. You need to find some grounding; some folks are in a position to although certainly not everyone. We can recognize both situations and work with those realities.
In wildland firefighting, the basic concept for fighting fires is first to find a safe spot to work from — an anchor point. Something that won’t burn or that already burned, so you know you’ve got a safe spot adjacent to where the wildfire is burning. You don’t run at the wildfire head-on. You find that safe anchor point, get set up, and fight the fire from the back along it’s flanks. It’s called “anchor and flank.”
Honestly, all of us need to do that.
We need to find grounding where we are… so we can work out from a safe space. We can do that by more intentionally growing connection and community in our political work as a starting point. As a key, grounding feature.
We’re not going to magically end up in a country where the danger is gone if we don’t fight for it — so we’re going to have to fight for this country from the middle of the disaster. It’s not ideal.
Some of us are going to have to fight from a space of being in trauma and being at risk. Some have been fighting from that space already since Trump got elected. Many have always operated in that space — because that’s how life works sometimes… but also because our country has been increasingly making it more difficult for some Americans to thrive and flourish for decades. And for some — US policies have always made American life difficult and/or traumatizing.
We will be better able to fight from the middle of the trauma and overwhelm if we build serious connections with other people and fight together. We will be better able to fight from the midst of rising chaos if we do more with the groups, communities, and coalitions we have… and together take them to the next level.
We have options for large-scale action that we haven’t collectively tried, yet. Some of those options are the 5 Things pushed by this nonprofit. We could go after this big stuff. We need people to get engaged to get it going, though.
We are so, so, so close to becoming something like the dream that this country is supposed to be: the world’s first, biggest, most powerful superpower of a democracy with a government run by it’s diverse multi-racial, multi-ethnic majority.
But we’re not there… and the pushback to that possibility is off the charts.
The current Republican party is doubling and tripling down on holding on to the status quo, where wealthy white men hold the power and run the policies and the government that makes decisions for the rest of us.
Is that seriously the future we’re going to concede to live in? Do we give up the big dreams? The technology? The possibilities? Science? History? We’ve already given up on public health. We’re in the middle of losing women’s health rights and access nationwide; they’re already gone in many states. We’re in the middle of losing science and history and so much else, too.
Every week it’s worse.
Every. Damn. Week.
Every week we’re watching…………
And then what?
We’re watching?
This past week, we watched a former US president get indicted for stealing US national security secrets and for refusing to give them back… even after he’s gotten all the rich, powerful, white guy privilege in the world in the form of chances to make it right. Only he’s not capable of making it right. He’s a selfish, scared dude in it for himself… and he’s got an army of sycophants of other selfish, scared people (including politicians) willing to back him because they want the future he’s selling — which is one where they get to keep the power and the privilege and the sadism and the bigotry.
What about the future the rest of us want? Where we get some of the power and the privilege and the rights, too?
The entire US Republican political establishment made the decision this past week to raise the stakes. They’re now not only backing a far-right political movement that includes Donald Trump and other rising demagogues… but they’re now way more actively undermining and eroding both US national security and the institutions that uphold the rule of law in the US than they were before.
The Republican party and its actions are weakening the entire United States — and they’re doing it to curry favour with what amounts to a “base” of supporters that are actively pushing for the US to become less competitive worldwide, less smart, less innovative, less diverse, less healthy, less well cared-for, and less secure. The whole party has voted against investing in these United States for decades, and even recently. For one example… the American Rescue Plan Act included more local community economic development money than the US has seen in 5 decades — $2 Billion — and Republicans voted against that.
Yet so many rural and other Americans keep supporting the Republican party that keeps that minority party in power because of the structures of the US Senate and the Electoral College… because who is countering the narratives they’re putting out?
Who is countering the far-right Republican narratives? Who is talking about national security in a reasonable way? About the weakening of our country? About our plywood-covered factories and downtowns? About our weakening social fabric?
We can counter the narratives. We can drive a refurbished, renewed vision. We can engage and inspire Americans… and fire them up to actually vote for that future.
We don’t have to stay in this raw, dangerous, shocked space for perpetuity. And honestly — we won’t. But who gets to drive the future is what’s not yet determined.
Anyway, we’ve got ideas. Come and join us and bring yours. We will do amazing things together. We can and we will.