We Don't Need to Wonder
“Be not solitary, be not idle.”
Lying in bed early this morning reading news and social media posts and facing the chilling reality that a large percentage of our government and populace don't want an end to gun violence.
Guns, for them, are a necessary component of the war they are fighting. This war does not want to save democracy but rather perceives democracy as the enemy. This war does not want safer public spaces or broader, more equitable access to mental health care. They want to secure what they see as their way of life, by any means necessary.
This way of life entails what they believe to be a fully legitimate right to hegemony. It is a worldview in which men are men and women are women, where only men and women may marry, where whiteness is under threat and must be protected, where fetuses have more rights than schoolchildren, where liberals and communists and leftists and the gays and the Jews and those terrorist racial justice groups are out to indoctrinate our children and lead them astray, where the land is just another body to pillage, where babies who can barely sit up unassisted fondle AR-15s but parents who affirm their children's gender are groomers and child abusers.
This is a war where projection knows no limits. It will not respond to legislation or well-developed arguments involving facts and statistics and reason, nor will emotion, grief, or outrage nudge it away from its sole purposes: Power. Profit. Domination.
It is not new, this war. It is the origin story of the country so many Americans believe still holds the promise of something beautiful, a belief and a promise that holds so many of us hostage while at the same time driving us forward. We live inside of this contradiction.
At 5:30am, I read my friend's question. He is a veteran, nearly 80 years old. He has seen things. "If this were Germany in 1939, what would you do?" I scroll through the comments. "We don't have much time, do we?" one poet asks. Another – a woman who has extensively anthologized poetry of war – responds, "No, we don't."
At 5:45am, I read a long piece about the period preceding the Civil War. Institutions crumbling. It draws a parallel, of course, to where we are today. The parallel is undeniable. History doesn't repeat itself because time isn't linear. It loops, folds over itself, recedes and surges forth like a tsunami that will flood everything familiar to us.
Does our holding on matter – holding onto cherished values, holding onto beloved bodies, holding onto practices that restore and heal?
It must, my soul cries, even as my mind atrophies in the face of more terror.
Anyone who has held a small hand, looked into the eyes of a joyful child or a frightened one, has seen what is worth fighting for. Anyone who has slowed down to bury their face inside of a blooming peony, been offered a seat at a stranger's table, knows that this has long been the struggle.
We don't need to wonder how bad things will get – we need only to look at the memorials for the murdered, the casualties of violence driven by a way of life that eats its own, that destroys, that rips apart bodies, that poisons the water, that builds more malls and mansions in an endless manifest destiny that will stop at nothing.
Sue Ann Gleason's words come as both balm and instruction: "The breaking does not make us stronger." And Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, "In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world."
How are we not to break? Maybe by acknowledging all the ways we are already broken. How are we to move beyond fainting? Maybe by acknowledging the ways in which we are whole.
What lies between is always the paradox. We must reach for something intuitive – an urge so strong towards justice that cannot be interrupted, that has withstood centuries of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and supremacy. We must listen to those who know this fight.
And we must not discount the importance of, in the words of Dr. Pinkola Estés, "stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach."
Don't be lulled by the illusion of personal safety; we must not relegate resistance to those most impacted by it but rather use whatever protects us most to protect those more vulnerable than us. As Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote in his 1946 confessional:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me