My younger son is writing a paper this week about the impact of climate change on young people. Think: anxiety, despair, the refusal to have children. It got me hunting down quotes from Rebecca Solnit.
She makes the point repeatedly that hope is an active state, one we choose out of dedication to justice and the future. I wonder where we got this idea that hope floats in and out of our lives like grace? An intangible, wispy thing that comes and goes with the weather?
I can’t tell you how many women that I marched with during tfg’s reign are deflated… how many postcarding, Congress-calling, hearing-attending friends are confessing a near refusal to take in the news.
I can’t tell if this is a temporary (and necessary) resting state or a recalibrated equilibrium. They probably can’t either.
So much to point to: voter nullification (forget suppression, folks), a mystifying reluctance to dispense with the filibuster even though the GOP is not only refusing to govern, they’re refusing to let the Democrats govern. The rising militias and anti-vaxxers and talk of civil war. The absolute insanity of some of the misinformation out there is so stunning (Jewish space lasers, aliens, bamboo ballots, Democrats tearing heads off babies to drink their blood, a stolen election) that you shake your head in disbelief and wonder, how could this have happened?
Yesterday I pressed a load of freshly washed fabric. Today I will do the same. And I will walk and say Metta. And write. And wait to hear from my editor.
And wait.
sigh of frustration!
how did we get here indeed?
I suddenly realised whilst talking to brother the other day, as we were discussing politics, anti-vaxxers et cetera over here in The Netherlands, that we the Dutch people are in fact behaving like spoilt children. We run around wanting to have our cake & eat it, and the whining, OMG: ‘no I don’t want a vaccin and I don’t want te be subjected to testing nor do I want a QR code, but I do want to sit in a full theatre or go to festivals and restaurants, me me me, I want it all and I don’t really care about the hospital staff or the vulnerable, I just want to have fun, whenever I want it and the government has to take care of all that, and me me me……and on and on…….’
has national IQ/EQ dropped too?
I’m pretty sure that many, if not most, who live in underprivileged countries would queue up for free vaccins
I got the vaccin, and I too don’t know what’s in it, nor do I know what the long-term effects will be is what I say to doubters, but I do know, today I want US ALL to be able to move FORWARD.
It’s an opportunistic kind of solidarity I guess, I’m no better than the next person
This is hard to read because I’ve carried around this fictitious ideal of the Dutch as super rational and well organized society.
As for “opportunistic solidarity” it occurs to me that perhaps all solidarity is?
When I feel like ignoring what’s happening here, I think of Black people in this country. What they and their ancestors have endured. And then I understand that I don’t get to give up and hide.
It’s just harder and harder to know what to DO.
we once were, and we could still be Dee….if only people would stop listening to nonsens; easy for me to say I suppose but still….yes it IS hard to know what to do, keep up the conversation is how I try to make a contribution……
The Netherlands is (or is it ‘are’?) of course one of the best countries to live in, but these days it does feel like we are at a turning point too, where we no longer move in sync’, and it’s each to their own! I look at our boys and friends’ kids, and many other young people: they are our hope for a bright future for they do behave responsibly and with compassion
I live in HOPE
Here in Maine the November voting- in order to say yes- we must vote no. that’s how ballet questions in Maine are often written. to confuse. To say yes we must check the no box. And a Trump lover is trying for a third term as governor. He nearly destroyed Maine the first two terms. Now thinks we are primed to elect him again after having a Woman and A Democrat for 8 years.. Which is why Maine has such a high rate of vaccination. A Woman. A Governor.
Loving the BLUES.
We get those crazy inverted ballot questions here too. And look at the CA recall. Seems like half of the Dems efforts pre-election was to let people that they needed to vote NO to keep Newsome in power.
Ha. I was going to respond with the CA recall ballot question too! Makes one doubt if they even know what they are doing!
As for your words Dee, and Saskia’s too…I feel like people are just tired…and frustrated (why are the Dems getting more done while holding all the cards?)…and it comes back to my word of the Now and maybe of the Future too…sustainable. To be riled up and fighting and Doing and, and, and…it is just not sustainable for most, for me. Worn down. Is this sustainable for the planet, government, people…is this a sustainable level of interaction in tough situations, in a workplace, in a relationship. Too often the answer is no, not really. So now, when Democracy is on the line, when So Much is on the line, we are tired, we have been overwhelmed…so what to do now? how to revive that action and passion?
I have only questions or statements on what I see…or maybe the way I see things.
I have no answers.
I don’t have the answer about what to do. I don’t even have the umph to write postcards to voters since so many states now have laws that allow partisan election boards to overturn a result they don’t like.
(((Dee))) that is such a great photo of your gargoyle candle stick holder, shine on with all your deep and passionate heart!
Thanks, Mo. Thinking of you every day.
I read something to Don and darned if I can’t find it … a letter to the editor I think? … anyway, how humans are unique in not having closely related species co-existing with us, although they certainly existed in the past … it raised the question: is it literally in our genetic coding to be murderous, to destroy “others” to the point of extinction?
Interesting notion. I tend to draw all lines back to corporate greed.