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Watching the FireAid (music benefit for those affected by the LA Fires), with my wife, reminded me of that beautiful feeling of togetherness I so miss.
I really do care, don’t you?
When we come together after a loss, when we come together in genuine feeling, empathy…we create love out of sadness. That’s magic.
When we lie and blame around tragedy, we divide, we create further pain and hate grows where healing could take root.
If you watched, listened, felt the LA Fire benefit concert the other night…interspersed with documentary anecdotes about the fires…it was heartening and beautiful. It reminded us of the goodness of human nature, overshadowed these days by Trump’s drama hiding Trump’s agenda.
Watching the FireAid (music benefit for those affected by the LA Fires), with my wife, reminded me of that beautiful feeling of togetherness, of caring, that all Americans—all human beings—can fall into after a tragedy.
Trump, in so many ways, has taken that feeling of love away from US. He’s distracted us from this feeling, has replaced solidarity…with division and hate, blame and lies.
We shall overcome. We are one nation, indivisible.
We are not powerless, though all the power sits with MAGA, in the three main branches government. We, the People, have judges, both Republican and Democratic, who care about the rule of law and fair justice. We have local and state governments, some of whom care about others, about public service over partisan hackery. We have journalism and journalists, at this very moment pushed out of the White House reporting room in favor of Breitbart and the like…who will try to find a way forward to keep reporting facts, truth, news in the face of cowardly bullies. We have ourselves. Our wallets.
We can, this moment, go vegan. If we all did so, climate crisis would fast begin to calm.
We can boycott Amazon, Whole Foods, META, Google, as much as we can…and invest in Elephant (get our free newsletter) and Blue Sky, shop at a local grocery (I love Nude Foods, here in Boulder), and we can bike or walk or bus or train instead of driving. And if we must drive, get an EV. There’s cheap ones available, and used ones, these days. We can support local bookshops and even better used books vs. Amazon.
We can take collective action, which all taken together is powerful. But if we don’t, yes, we give up our own power to cynicism and convenience and fear. As AOC recently reminded us, all we have to do, all we can do, is slow them down. Is invest in community and kindness and loving action and activism. Remember to breathe, to spend time in nature, to hug one another, to laugh a deep-throated laugh once in awhile. Enjoy your coffee while you drink it. Relief of stress is found in the present moment, but the present moment is not an excuse to hide from our responsibility to one another, and to basic goodness.
So do not despair, for long. It is okay to care and to hurt, for that is the only real route toward making real change. Let us bend the arc of history toward justice, again. While it may not be easy, it is far more fun, and easy, and gentle on this earth and animals and one another than the alternative: hate, division, blame without responsibility or honesty.
Make Love Great Again.
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