Of hope. Really, the audacity.

But to survive, can I really go without it? I have been thinking a lot about the various posts, podcasts, and extensive media out there that I’ve been listening to cope as horrific executive order after horrific executive order is made. I imagine scenarios when I’d have to protect the people around me, many of them more vulnerable than me, and jump between despair and rage.

One thing that has stuck with me is from an episode of “It Could Happen Here” podcast, the epidsode “The Age of Cowardice”. As someone who, I think above all, value my freedom, this is the episode that opened my eyes and cleared my head. Robert Evans talks about the possibilities of the future – we need to come up with something new. And the thing that liberals, left-wing, democract, whatever seem the worst at is trying new things: throwing anything and everything at the wall, and then hoping something sticks. Those conservatives sure are persistent.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what that means – for me, and for the revolutions to come. I still have hope that violence can be avoided, but when people are threatening violence on you – how can you avoid it? Still, I’ve been thinking deeper and deeper into the foundations of western, specifically US, culture. We are all raging, and we are all hurting. We’ve been told shush – don’t express your outrage, your hurt, your pain. When we all finally exploded from the pain, trauma, and hardships of the last few years – we all did it in different ways. Some of us voted for a horrible bigot because at least that person has the freedom to say what they want. It’s not what that person says that’s appealing – note how most of Trump supporters don’t care what he says! It’s the appeal of the freedom to speak your true feelings. Some people said fuck it, I am not voting. Others said fuck it, I am campaigning behind Kamala – the woman of color whose odds are slim because our country’s worst instincts kick in when we are in pain.

I just recovered from a stomach flu – and if anyone has experienced it, it is painful. As I was growing up, in the traumatic confines of a poor household with parents full of their own childhood traumas and toxic habits, the name of the game was to silently endure. I took pride in holding everything in, and how I could last just about anything someone put me through – and incomplete silence most of the time. Then, during the pandemic, something broke and now, years, later, I am still processing all of those emotions that I had bottled up for over three decades.

During this last bout of stomach flu, and in the last few years, I made the decision that I was no longer going to repress any emotion. Sure, I developed ways to manage it – after all, I spend a lot of time with kids and one of my worst nightmares is being the one to put them through what my parents put me through. However, one of my main goals in life these days is that I always make time and space for my emotions. And during this stomach flu, when things hurt bad enough, I let myself cry and moan. And the pain was lessened. There are even studies out there that show when we cry, it may deteriorate mood in the moment but it helps up find balance in the long term. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26500382/)

I believe one of the things that can revolutionalize western culture is a new honesty. Not one where we are cruel, not the one where we rub things into our faces, but the one where all of us has the freedom to say “I feel”, “I am”, “I believe”…and then invite people into dialogue. This is work to be done by EVERYONE. The traumatized, the broken, the rich, the poor, white, black, brown, red, male, female, trans…

I believe with truth can come trust. I believe we can develop the skills to speak truth, and also develop the skills to listen. Probably one of the things I hate and love the most about my own self – my neurodivergence, my non-whiteness, my trauma and diagnosed CPTSD – is that I truly can’t help but be myself. And so, I’ve had to learn to navigate what that means for me. Being yourself, in a way that’s present but kind, grounded but open, is hard. People do want to judge you – because they are also struggling with being themselves.

There are sociopaths out there. There are true unredeemable narcissists. They used money and power to seize control of the most powerful government in the world. But that’s not most of us. Be cautious, but speak truth firmly with kindness. When you are sad, say you are sad – and why – and allow others to react authentically. Make mistakes, and be sorry and make amends, but the find a path back to grace.

I was talking to a teen recently about cancel culture, and I realized that we’re struggling to adapt to all these new frameworks of our world. I think when we lived in smaller groups, we had more of a need to forgive and make amends because where else are you going to find enough someones who can help you hunt and carry that deer back to your camp? As our society got larger, things perhaps shifted – if you made a mistake, and became ostracized from one society, you could make amends to those people and if they still didn’t want you back – you could go elsewhere and start anew with people who haven’t been wronged by you.

With social media, it’s different. You make one mistake, the WORLD condemns you, but now nobody needs to welcome you back because there’s always someone new to talk to, but you can’t escape to a new beginning because the world saw what you did – and felt the offense. So, there must be a new paradigm where we can find it in ourselves to forgive those who’ve made mistakes. That is on ALL of us to make that shift – because we will all make mistakes, big and small. Epstein the pedophile ringleader is one thing. But, a kid who feels like their future is gone, because they did a stupid edgelord racist remark and now thousands of people are bombarding their socials with repudiation, shouldn’t be lost. Their only avenue of acceptance shouldn’t be fucking Andrew Tate, because seriously FUCK that guy.

I was talking to a black man, who was telling me his stories growing up with a bunch of white kids. He remembers once when, one of his best friends, started spewing racist things about black people out of nowhere. He reminded his friend that he was black, and that the things they were saying applied to him and he was hurt. His friend apologized, and never did anything like that again. I asked him what he thinks is the difference between that story, and the callouts of so many people these days against racism. His answer was shame. The guy was his friend, this was a private moment, and that was all.

We must find a way to be honest – and kind. We have to call out the wrongs of others, but it is instrumental to give people a way forward into community. One of the reasons things are the way they are now is, after feeling the shame of wrongness, people feel the only community left available to them are the ones run by grifters – who then weaponize and use people’s vulnerabilities to further their own gains.

The grifters, the greedy, the sociopaths, the narcissists – those have always been the true culprits. And if we are ever going to hope to bring those people back into community, we have to start with the people that they’re grifting first. And to do that, we need compassionate, grounded, open, loving truth.