YES
Resilience
I can bear this.
When the unthinkable happens and despair lurks about my throat I can repeat my mantra: I can bear this.
I want to be upbeat always. I want to be all jingle bells; this need is implanted in me. It is required of me by family, society, the system.
While I yearn to shake off the heaviness of the times and be lighthearted, it would not be authentic. I feel that it would shun and betray compassion for the other.
The news has always followed its own mantra: what bleeds, leads. The negativity of the news has always been there.
But there is something extra sticky in the bad news of today.
War and oppression have always been around. But, in the sea of past injustices there seemed to be a “cause”, an ideal, however controverted, that gave me something on which to cling, to float.
Nowadays, pretense is gone, we bomb and strafe others coldly and on a whim.
Nowadays, we watch our treasury being raided.
Nowadays, we watch the wanton exploitation of the disadvantaged by powerful oligarchs oblivious to the pain and suffering that their actions bring.
Nowadays we witness relentless cruel wounding and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the stealing of their land.
And all the harm is done in our name.
Almost all the weapons that inflict the atrocities are purchased, transported, and/or activated by our tax dollars.
The vastness of the harm by our government is at such an unfathomable scale that, although at a distance, we are sprinkled and even doused by the blood of others.
We are “washed in the blood of the lamb”, the Palestinian lamb, the disadvantaged lambs in America and abroad.
Maybe the repugnance, the heaviness that I feel is caused by the horrors from a government that we have failed to oversee and restrain.
Maybe the sick feeling is healthy, appropriate, necessary, to stir us into action and use our powers to elect compassionate, responsible, responsive government officials that use the resources of the nation for the good of all people.
Maybe we are approaching a post-empire period propelled by the unraveling of the lies we have been fed and believed. Maybe we can start moving beyond self-interest.
I accept the comfort of that last thought. I smile and renew my personal commitment to do all I can to change things for the better. I will not wallow in indifference or inaction— the stakes for us and our descendants are too great. Our souls are being weighed.
Resist. Work for justice and peace. Repudiate the inhumanity of the POTUS regime. We vastly outnumber the minions of the empire.
💪🏻
I feel that we are reaching an inflection point. Do you remember in Back to the Future when Marty McFly’s dad finally curled his hand into a fist because he had enough of Biff and his boorish behavior? I feel we have reached that point.
Such a powerful statement. Americans need to wake the fuck up, Manuel.
"Almost all the weapons that inflict the atrocities are purchased, transported, and/or activated by our tax dollars.
The vastness of the harm by our government is at such an unfathomable scale that, although at a distance, we are sprinkled and even doused by the blood of others."