[rant] In Troubled Times: Still Here, Still Holding on to Hope

I first posted this in August, 2019. I'm still here, still holding on to hope. We aren't all crazy or hopeless or overwhelmed on the same day. When events are too much, we can borrow a bit of courage from one another.
Following the 2016 election, I posted a series of essayscalled “In Troubled Times.” I wrote about despair, fear, anger, powerlessness,and determination. Then the initial fervor faded. Exhaustion set in for me aswell as for so many others. Emotional exhaustion. Spiritual exhaustion. But theconstant, increasingly vitriolic litany of hate and fear, as well as the assaultson democratic norms and civil liberties not only continued, it escalated.
What is to be done in the face of such viciousness, suchdisregard for human rights and dignity? Such an assault upon clean and airwater, endangered species, and the climate of planet we depend on for ourlives? How do we preserve what we value, so that in resisting we do not becomethe enemy?
I don’t know what the most effective strategy of resistanceis. Social media abounds in calls to action. I do know that there are manypossible paths forward and that not every one way is right for every person.Not everyone can organize a protest march (think of five million protesters infront of the White House; think of a national strike that brings the nation’sbusinesses to a halt). I find myself remembering activist times in my own past.
I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and the VietNam war resistance (and, later, the women’s rights movement of the 1970s). Iwore my hair long, donned love beads, and marched in a gazillion rallies. Thosememories frequently rise to my mind now. In particular, I remember howfrustrated I got about ending the Viet Nam war. In 1967, I joined the crowd of100,000 protesters in San Francisco. I wrote letters, painted posters, and soforth. And for a time, it seemed nothing we did made any difference. My friendsstill got drafted and not all of them made it home, and those that did werewounded in ways I couldn’t understand. Others ended up as Canadians. I gave uphope that the senseless carnage would ever end.
But it did. And in retrospect, all that marching andchanting and singing and letter-writing turned out to be important. The enduringlesson for me is that I must do what I feel called to do at the moment, overand over again, different things at different times, never attempt to second-guesshistory, and especially never give in to despair. Enough tiny pebbles rolling downa slope create a landslide.
My first political memories date back to the 1950s, when Isaw my union-organizer father marching in a picket line. The 1950s were aterrifying time for a lot of folks. For my family, it was because my parentswere active in their respective unions, and both had been members of “the Party”in the 1930s. My father was fired from his job on a pretext and soon became thetarget of a formal Federal investigation. (He’d been under FBI surveillancesince 1942.) The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to take away his naturalizedcitizenship. It was a time of incredible fear: people committed suicide or “wentunderground” (now we call it “off the grid”) by living in safe houses and usingonly cash. Some of our relatives did that, and our home became one of thosehavens. The DoJ suit was dismissed in 1961, although the FBI continued secretlywatching my father until his death in 1974. I should add that it is so odd tome to regard that bureau as protecting democracy in current times, after their 1984-like behavior in the 1950s and beyond.

The point of all this is not that my family had a hard time.Lots of families had a hard time. Lots more are having an unbelievably hard,terrifying, horrific time today. The point is that we got through it. Notunscarred -- it’s still excruciatingly difficult for me to call attention tomyself by political activism. My parents never stopped working for a better,more just and loving world. They never lost hope.

In college I used to have a hand-written quote from themid-60s on my door. I searched for it on the internet andcouldn’t find it, but it said something along the lines of this not being atime to give in to fear but to drink lots of orange juice, to love one another,and to bring all our joy and gusto to creating a world of peace, justice, andequality. The same holds true today. Since we live in a time when fear, selfishness,racism, and violence are proclaimed from the very highest levels of government,then we need our own turbo-charged, heavy-duty, loud and joyous commitment to the values we hold. And drinking your orange juice isn’t a bad thing either: weof the people’s resistance need to take good care of ourselves.
This is what I tell young people today. I remember what myparents told me when I was wigging out about some minor incident or anotherduring the Cold War:
Keep your eye on what you would like to bring about, notjust what new outrage is filling the news. Persevere with unstoppable steadfastness.Nourish yourself as an antidote to exhaustion. Pace your efforts. Keep balancein your life. Make music. Dance. Drink orange juice. Love fiercely.