Let’s start with our feelings… because they’re really BIG right now.
I know that talking about our feelings isn’t a solution or a path forward, but let’s just start here with Daniel Tiger, and then we can move on to like, Solzhenitsyn or something.
The point is that it’s completely imperative that we start somewhere. NOW.
We are on the slippery slope toward authoritarianism. We are sliding very quickly. Yes, it is very hard to stop the sliding once it’s gotten going. And in order to stop it, we’re probably going to break some bones in the process. But that has to be way better than falling all the way off the cliff.
So right now, we’re all sitting around in our houses or at our desks or in our cars or walking down the street, looking at our phones, reading the news, being angry and hopeless and afraid and confused. The consensus seems to be that there are TOO MANY THINGS to be angry about. Protests aren’t being organized because nobody is sure which thing to protest.
But surely if ever there was a time to show up and express outrage, it is now.
If you look out your window and see a tornado heading toward your house, you run into the basement closet and drag a mattress over your head.
But what if you look out your window and you see FIVE tornadoes heading toward your house at the same time? You don’t sit there and say, “There are too many tornadoes! I’m just going to sit here and watch them kill me.”
No. You run to the basement closet and, if anything, you pile on MORE things to try to protect your head
The amount of action taken to save yourself is in direct relationship, I would say, to the number of tornadoes.
If you had seven mattresses available and enough strength and time, you put them on your head. You would do everything you could to keep those tornadoes from destroying your world.
Now, I understand that some people want their worlds to be blown up right now. Intellectually, they might have an inkling of a point. I get it. Some stuff really really sucks. But in reality, you just need to read some fucking history books and see what the options are when shit gets to this point: They’re not good.
Yes, we have a system that’s built for inaction. We have a system that needs to be fixed. You can disagree with so many things that this country has done, but for a good long while, we have been TRYING to be force for good in the world. George W. Freaking Bush saved, like, a zillion people from HIV, for god’s sake.
The question now is what do we do?
I’m just someone sitting at a coffee shop at 4:30am writing this because I keep waking up with this one phrase in my head: THIS IS NOT OKAY.
I’m not a leader. I don’t have any specialized knowledge or power or skills aside from typing stuff like this. But if we don’t have any leaders who are telling us what to say and how to say it, then we have to figure it out ourselves right now.
What we need right now is for regular people like us to stand up and say that what’s happening is not okay. This is not what we want. This is not who we want to be.
I woke this morning up thinking about the resistance during Nazi Germany:
Obviously you had the evil people who planned and carried out the atrocities, and obviously you had the innocent humans who were killed by the evil people.
It’s easy to boil it down to just that: the evil people and the innocent people they slaughtered.
But what about the people like who were horrified and disgusted and scared and ashamed, but were somehow fortunate enough to avoid being slaughtered?
They existed and were certainly having the types of feelings we are having right now. They, too, surely experienced a slippery slope (yes, yes, I know our crazy leader isn’t at the point of senselessly slaughtering people, but who the f knows where things are heading? He just treated a brave head of state like a child and his shame knows no bounds).
Yes, of course there was a resistance. It was real and the people were working so hard, but essentially when we think about the people in that period, what we’re really thinking is, “How could they have let it happen?”
Most of what those people were doing and thinking and writing and making and caring about was essentially erased from history. Because who cares about the art a random non-Nazi German was making at that time right before the shit was going down? Was someone doing landscape paintings or writing love poetry? Was someone cooking amazing meals or tending a beautiful garden? Training for a marathon? The privilege of normalcy is erased when evil (temper tantrum-throwing) authoritarians are allowed to take control and ignore the rule of law.
It feels embarrassing to go about my daily life right now. I’m supposed to exercise and shower and, dear God, FLOSS my teeth when our entire system of government is being dismantled in willy-nilly non-fact-based fashion by billionaire bullies with no sense of empathy, decency, or logic. When humans are dying of HIV and Ebola and tuberculosis (and f-ing measles) because of the destruction of USAID, when Ukrainians are fighting for their lives and homes while our our president is berating their president. When people in the Congo are being wiped out. When Gazans are dehumanized and talked about like infestations to be cleared to make way for beach resorts… When extremely important specialized government workers who are trained to keep up SAFE are losing their jobs. When contracts are being reneged upon and this country is no longer seen as trustworthy. When the people who literally warn us about literal tornadoes are being fired!
YES, there is a lot of shit going on right now. YES, it is overwhelming.
The longer we allow Donald Trump and Elon Musk to dictate where our money is spent (and ignore the laws we voted for to tell them where that money is spent) and to ignore the rule of law and destroy our system and singularly sow the seeds of war, increase suffering, support other authoritarian regimes, and destroy the scaffolding of science that we’ve built over decades, the more our lives will, historically speaking, be forgotten. We will simply be reduced to those other people who were surely alive but just watching all the shit go down.
On the most personal level, if this is allowed to continue, YOU and your life’s work, whatever it may be, will be forgotten. Even though you are one of the ‘good guys’.
Because surely there were just as many outraged good guys in Nazi Germany as there are outraged good guys here in the United States.
We need to use our voices even though it feels very hard and hopeless right now.
This is a tipping point. Maybe it’s already tipped. But hopefully we still have time to run to the other side of the ship.
We’re waiting for someone to tell us where to go, how to help, what to do. We want someone to tell us one specific unified thing. We’re all sitting here feeling this way and waiting. We have to start. We have to be doing something NOW.
You have a phone, so you have a voice.
Send a simple text: THIS IS NOT OKAY.
Text people in your contacts. Text people in Canada and Ukraine. Text your relatives. Text your PTA. Write it on postcards to your representatives: THIS IS NOT OKAY.
Right now let’s just start with our voices and that one simple sentence over and over again to show the world we exist and that we’re trying and that we don’t support this. Show the world that we are here and we feel awful and we are decent, caring, logical humans. Show the world we are not people to be forgotten in history because we couldn’t stop the madness. We can’t lay down and do nothing.
No, sending a simple text is not an answer to a really complicated problem.
Yes, we need REAL solutions in a big way, and fast.
But we also need to feel less hopeless and less alone.
Every time you see those words you will know that you are not alone. You are among people who feel the way you do, and the fact that you exist is important.
So type it over and over again everywhere. Let’s start there.
THIS IS NOT OKAY.
#thisisnotokay