I’ve tried to start
this particular blog post several times over the past week and a half, each time dropping it
mid-process—either because I had something I needed to do instead or because I
just couldn’t find a way to contain what I’ve been thinking and feeling in ordered
sentences. Sometimes a linear form just doesn’t work, like when my mind
is chaotic, more like a tangle of angel hair spaghetti than a coherent string
of words. (As you’ll see, I keep hunting for the perfect metaphor. So far,
to no avail.)
Disordered and disheveled. That's how it’s been of late, for me and a lot of folks I know. Highs and
lows stirred together in a bubbling goulash of executive orders,
determined activism, unrelenting doubt, inspiring words and deeds, politicians’
cowardice, rogue resistance, touching kindness—and always, hovering over this brew, that face and that voice. The specter of four more years of that face and
that voice. The culinary image may be a stretch, but it works to describe my state of
mind today. It'll soon seem wrong. I can’t find a way to reduce this all to words on paper. Not yet. Maybe
not for a while.
To illustrate, here
are a couple of bits from my efforts to write about this:
 |
| Photo by Lyn Ferguson, sign by Ann Noonan, ideas and materials from Resonance Chorus sign-making workshop. Music, art, and collaboration as activism |
- “I feel like I’m
tied to the end of a bungee cord. On a hope-fueled high before the election
when Hillary was polling so well, plummeting afterward as the ugly realization
hit, rebounding fairly well with the encouragement of wise movement folks (summarized in this newly released video) and the commitment to get busy, crashing into the abyss on inauguration day, springing
up again at the Women’s March, and then flailing downward in the first
awful days of Trump’s manic spate of executive orders and proclamations …
- “Some years ago, friends and I backpacked every spring in the Southern Utah desert. Each time, I had this surreal awareness: when we were down inside a canyon, living there for days on end, the canyon seemed like Reality. ‘On top’ was irrelevant—not just distant, but totally absent from my thoughts. Then, as we drove back to ‘civilization,’ I always had this head-shaking moment looking out over the desert, seeing only hints of all the canyons and washes I knew were there. Now this flat world seemed like Reality, and the living depths of the canyon we just left seemed other-worldly. That’s how this time since the election has seemed to me: two ‘realities” smashed together in a bewildering melange ...”
There have been
other, also aborted stabs at the right metaphor—roller coaster, of course, and yo-yo, among others. I abandoned all of them, out of necessity,
frustration, distraction, or a sense of flat-out futility. How could words ever
capture this experience—so painfully concrete but so amorphous? I’m sure today’s bubbling
cauldron would suffer the same fate if I left it for a bit.
In the time since I wrote the two
paragraphs above (just days ago, actually), more “moments” have been added
to the string of bungee drops and rebounds, canyon ventures and returns to the
flat. Lots of mean-spirited decrees from the oval office, their supposed author captured on camera like a child
posing with a trophy. These always interspersed with moments that remind me of
the best of us—rogue Park Service employees posting now-censored
climate data, huge spontaneous pro-immigration (aka anti-Trump) demonstrations
at airports around the country, the acting Attorney General refusing to have
her office defend the anti-immigration order. And then she got fired (of course). Up and down, this reality and that, back and forth.
On Sunday, I
had an experience that made me smile, realizing that this is exactly how it happens.
Here it is, in near-real time:
I was on an early-morning
walk, stewing about all this, and I decided I needed to settle down and do a “be
here now” exercise. I slowed my pace, paid attention to my breathing, and
looked around at the morning. The trees outlined against the bright morning
sky, “barren” and beautiful. Leaves frozen in the ice of a drainage ditch near a park. Dry
grasses looking for all the world like a painting of the tall grass prairie. It was lovely and soothing.
Until I pulled myself out of this calm moment, remembering that I needed to hustle back because we were going to
an event and needed to get there early. I picked up my pace, put away my camera
phone, and let my breathing do what it would. Perfect, I thought: just when I was settling into the moment of meditative bliss, I’m snatched back into that other, hectic reality.
Still, after the week’s torrent of ugliness, ending with Trump's executive order / decree on immigration, I knew I needed this outing.
The event was “Sunday
School for Atheists,” a program in the Warm Cookies of the Revolution
series. We sang some protest songs, heard a really excellent (perhaps because
it was so validating) talk about how non-violent protests ‘work,’ and ate cookies.
And donuts and bagels. With chocolate milk, for those who wanted it (unflavored
soy and cow’s milk also available). A bungee spring, a transition between
canyon and top, another stir of the pot. And so it goes …
So what’s my point
in all this? I guess it’s this: I have to get used to this pattern, be ready to
manage wrenching shifts that I don’t anticipate and find some sort of sustenance
in the good stuff, when it happens, because this is our reality now, and is likely to be for a long time. We can
fantasize about impeachment all we want—and it may happen. But more likely, it
won’t. So I’m reckoning that I need to find enough internal and external resources
to sustain some sort of integrity and stay engaged for four years and enough resilience to withstand the body
blows that could knock me off my pins and make me give up.
Like everyone I know, I’ve
been reading a lot of interesting commentaries through all this. Some really
help me focus on this goal of persistence. One was a piece by Lauren Duca, who wrote in Teen Vogue back in December—before Trump
had officially begun his assault on the things I most value. She invoked the
analogy of a frog that doesn’t know it’s about to be boiled because the water
gets hot so slowly. “The good news
about this boiling frog scenario,” she wrote, “is that we’re not boiling yet.
Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that
the temperature is too high. It’s on every single one of us to stop pretending
it’s always been so hot in here.”
And another, this one a New
York Times column by Zynep Tufekci
[I]t is much easier to pull off a large
protest than it used to be. … The Women’s March … started with a few Facebook
posts and came together in a relatively short amount of time. … This doesn’t
mean that protests no longer matter — they do. [But] protests should be seen
not as the culmination of an organizing effort, but as a first, potential step.
… more like Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. What used to
be an endpoint is now an initial spark. … More than ever before, the
significance of a protest depends on what happens afterward.
There’s more to activism than protest, and
there’s more to activism than only talking to friends who already agree with
you. We have to be uncomfortable, for as many years as it takes.
The
last sentence reminds me of the old saying about the role of a newspaper (repurposed to define the role of activism): “To comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable.” And “the comfortable” would include me.
I need to be prepared to be uncomfortable—swinging from that bungee cord, stewing
in that broth—for years, and to still remain faithful to the values I purport
to hold, not becoming inured to the heat in the pot. As Marshall McLuhan famously urged, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”
My
honest, heart-felt, anxious question: Can I do this?
©
Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a
link to the post.
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