We Have To Decide What We Want For Our Country - And Go After It
Video is like one of my least comfortable things. I did a sort of practice Facebook Live last night, because we're planning to create something like a phenomenon. Starting from a couple of little seeds here.
Since the video, I had dreams about a deep threat in a town I lived in.
The solution I was told (in the dream) was to go to church. That's where everyone was, I was told.
I went to the dream-church. Yeah, there were people there for sure. People that had hurt me, or people I loved.
Some of them directly through assault. Some of them by loving the church more than their own damn family. Some of them by thinking ritual and denial and prior plans were more important than the humans obviously struggling in their midst.
It was a very personal story (and dream), but a metaphor I figured might resonate with others.
One of the very real threats this whole damn country is facing (not just one town) is a push by religious fundamentalists to have more power and control over our lives.
Even as very real humans struggle... and they're not willing to help.
Even as very real humans grow and evolve... and they don't want to hear about it.
Calling it a push is an understatement, though.
It's a decades-long, all-out campaign. Decades.
It's involved fomenting a culture war, and alliances with a whole coterie of corrupt and selfish people and groups also seeking power and control. They want the status quo, too.
They all want the alabaster-hued straight dudes to continue to run everything.
They want it all to stay the same. They're afraid of change.
They're afraid of a growing and empowered multi-ethnic, multi-racial majority where gender and religion and sexuality are increasingly varied and interesting.
But they also don't want to share.
So they keep at it. They keep at this culture war.
To keep adherents adhered, it keeps getting more and more extreme.
It's spiraling up and up and getting more and more wacky and dangerous.
So here we are. We've got a freaking mess.
We've got sky-high tension and contempt and fear all around. It's not good.
And no... the solution-finding is not going to happen in church like they told me in this dream today.
It's going to happen in civil society.
It's going to happen with us deciding collectively what we want our society and our country to look like - and then going after it. Going all-in on going after it. Aggressively. And in unprecedented ways.
That's the fight, isn't it?
It's the fight over society, and over our social contract. Our collective.
But the people fighting for power and control and heavy religion are pushing hyper-individualism as the highest, best good. It's just not.
You can't build a thriving, highly functional, competitive, flourishing democratic society when what you value more than anything is an individual's right to... what? Own wicked powerful guns? Not prevent contagious disease? Not contribute to collective society? Not learn?
You also can't build that shiny flourishing democracy when you're working to suppress the vote of the majority of voters. When you're making it more difficult for democracy to operate.
So this is the fight.
And it is a fight.
It's about whether we are up to actually doing democracy, now that we're in this reckoning. On this precipice.
I think we are. I intend to help.
We're standing up a new organization this week to help bring tools and ideas and synergy and support and solidarity and connection and community.
It's going to be messy, and we're going to make it up as we go.
We're taking leaps, and we're diving into uncharted territory.
But we're there, anyway - uncharted territory.
We might as well take unprecedented action since we're in an unprecedented moment.
We'll have a website up in the next day or two.
This is going to unfold and evolve and grow. We're planting seeds now, but they're fast-growing. Like kudzu.
We think we can grow a phenomenon this year. It's brazen and bold. It's contingent on hundreds of thousands of people deciding to dive in, too. I think we can get there.
Keep the faith - faith in democracy. We're going to keep this one.
And we're damn well going to evolve it into something better than what it has been. It's time.
Let's do it.