I have been out of words of late. I realize that is difficult for anyone who knows me or reads me to believe, but it is true. Between the worsening pandemic crisis and the horribly acrimonious political environment, I have felt flat.
I have closed my mind off to a great deal of what is happening around me just so I can survive.
Of course the closing of one’s mind is always a very dangerous task. It can lead to faulty reasoning and warped perceptions of right and wrong. All I have to do is stick my head up, like some sort of shell shocked prairie dog, and I can see everywhere the devastating consequences of refusing to look around, take in the whole landscape, and put oneself in the place of others.
So, I suppose what I normally do is the opposite: I literally feel the anguish and pain of those who feel they are not represented or that they are no longer important or understood in the midst of a rapidly changing and dangerous time.
That anguish and pain can lead to several things depending on who they infect. They can turn some outwards, towards looking for solutions for how they and others can make things better. Or, more often, these feelings of powerlessness can lead to dark places… places of fear that cause people to lash out at those who are different and to feel threatened by change. Instead, it is often easier to believe that the whole world is somehow against them and that blame can be laid at the feet of people who easily qualify as “them” and not “us”.
Understanding and embracing difference and change, which is uncertain and a little uncomfortable, is harder than being told by someone that there is a vast conspiracy, a lie, and that only one group, one leader, one faction has ownership over the truth. This is a falsehood that has been perpetuated over time by many. There is a long and horrifying list of names of people who have used a time of crisis to slip in and tell people who are hurting and confused that they have all the answers and that the other side is somehow not just wrong but perpetuated by evil.
It is a strange twist of fate that human beings seem to react the same to, time after time. Just in the last century, Adolf Hitler told a Germany reeling from post World War I poverty and distress that if they could purify the country from undesirables who were ‘taking away’ what was rightfully theirs, everything would be better. His message found its mark because it came just at the right time. The people were tired of war and tired of poverty and struggle. There had to be a solution. Hitler had a solution. Did the average citizen realize what Hitler’s intentions were and approve of them? I seriously doubt it. However they were willing to look past a great deal of wrong in order to achieve this pure state of perfection he was selling them.
Our world is changing. We are twenty years into a new millennium and finding out that the planet is only going to handle so much abuse. The temperature is rising. The fossil fuels we thought were endless are going to dry up. The floods and fires and hurricanes are going to keep coming. It is frightening. For many, the way the lived and worked is going away. Certainly there must be someone to blame for all of this.
There is. And it isn’t your political opponent.
It isn’t a ‘fake’ election.
We are all to blame for the environment. Our great grandparents and all of humanity who thought the Creation given to us by the great Creator of us all was limitless.
It’s not. We haven’t taken very good care of it.
We aren’t taking very good care of one another either. At least not in this country.
We are too busy tearing one another apart and pointing fingers. This will never work. There can be no healing when a wound is constantly worried and blame is being laid.
There can be no light in the darkness when we cannot accept one another’s intentions as good and try to proceed from there in unity. We don’t have to agree to join hands and move forward.
We will be certain to reap what we have sown if we continue down the path we are on.
We are not “Us” and “Them.” We are us. If we believe we have been lied to and cheated and someone is out to get us and only we and our little group have the ‘real’ truth; things will not get any better.
If you cannot face one another in love and hope then there will be no coming together at all. There will only be further grief and sadness.
This is why I have been unable to write and unable to voice what I have been feeling.
I am utterly frightened that we have reached a point of no return as a nation. I pray it is not so but I do not know.
Is this our breaking point? Do so many of us believe in things that have no basis in fact that we will rip apart from one another?
I don’t know but I am scared. I am scared to the bottom of my being. I realize that I have compared Trump to Hitler here.
I do not mean that Donald Trump is going to try and kill all the Jews. I would be headed out of town if that were the case.
My point is that sowing discord and not peace is ALWAYS wrong. It never works in the end. We must all accept what is and move forward, whether we are happy about it or not.
We have to look at facts, not innuendo and ‘secret knowledge’ and believe in the sincerity of one another.
I know nothing else but prayer and hope.
I cannot, on my own, effect or handle something of this size. It panics me. I feel like the ground underneath us has shifted and will never again be steady.
But it has to be.
We are all shaken by a pandemic that has been ripping through us like a war with an unseen enemy. Surely there is a way to lay blame for this, at least.
Not really. It is. We can point fingers, on both sides, as to how it has been handled, or how it is going, but nothing we have done yet has stopped it. The casualties in our nation alone have far outstripped those we have lost in war in the last fifty years. The human mind cannot even comprehend that kind of loss.
But we have to hold onto the belief that there are so many times when the light does win and the dark recedes again. Fear and prejudice are not the way.
I pray we go forward together as a nation without fear but with open minds. Minds that are open to one another, and to the future.. whatever it brings, is the only way forward.
post script: I no longer have a pulpit. I used this blog as one with this post. If you don’t agree or like what I said, that’s ok. I needed to say it. Thanks for being respectful of my bully pulpit here. I did not feel it was right for me to shape these thoughts on Facebook so I did it here on my own platform.