They are counting on your grief and sadness to paralyze you. That is their final move—to break your resolve, your spirit. You will be tested. We all will. And you know what?
We will be midwives to this long and bloody and painful process of birthing what will turn out to be a beautiful world on the other side.
Taken from “pancakes dinner”.
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We have what appears to be evidence that stimulation of the limbic system en masse will always yield more electorally positive outcomes than stimulating the frontal cortex.
This lesson is not lost on the people who will experience the greatest amount of suffering under these truths, but whether it will be lost on the Americans who aided and abetted one another's individualistic pursuits while MAGA metastasized is yet to be seen.
This is the end of the Republican Party as we know it, the final swipes and strokes and violent bursts of DNA that has plagued our species with the ghosts of ancestors whose thirst to replicate the pain and suffering of their childhoods never did and never will make up for the holes in their adult hearts-no matter how much pain and suffering they inflict.
There is no solace in hate, no recipe for void-filling. There is only the void, a kind of hollowness inside one's heart, a mirror to the simultaneously horrifying and prescient universe of emptiness we find our little rock we call home hurling through.
We are witnessing the MAGA Spring. There is an end to this, but the end will be built day by day, brick by brick, one courageous step-one breath—at a time. It is fear that captures insecurities, it is ignorance that feeds it, and it is hopelessness that allows it to grow. We must grieve the future that has not come to be, and steel ourselves for the future we find ourselves in. First we grieve—and then we believe.
Compassion is the groundwork; compassion for ourselves and our communities, resolve for one's principles and a heart beating for a world that we know will exist in the future. We must plant trees that will grow and provide shade which we will not enjoy; WE must feel the effects of the rain and hail while we build good shelter for our children and their communities to thrive in. They will grow and become adults. They will have their work of love and light cut out for them, too. We all will, and we all do.
James Baldwin's words are as relevant as ever, now: "Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you.
What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be."
There is clarity going forward in knowing that those who voted for what is to come will get exactly what they voted for-whether they know it or not. The clarity comes from the fact that this is not our lesson to learn.
“The frightened individual," Erich Fromm wrote in Escape from Freedom, "seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self."
"Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort."
-Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
"When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak."
-Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
"The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality.
Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but "information" alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it."
-Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
