Meditations in an Emergency

03/01/2025

No one knows what will happen in this suddenly destabilized country, but I do know we can choose to have a role in what happens, and it’s possible we can determine what happens. “Don’t ask what will happen. Be what happens” I once got a few hundred climate protestors to chant. To be what happens means that millions of us need to start organizing to participate, gathering up our friends to form affinity groups, joining the kind of organizations and actions mentioned above, or staging our own protests (a handful of people with signs in the right time and place can have an impact). To create pressure as shareholders or employees or congregations or members of the public or experts who can speak up on the impacts.

Speaking up is part of building momentum–to your elected officials, in letters to your newspaper, online, and conversations with the people around you. Speaking up to affirm human rights, the rule of law, the value of NOAA and the FAA and the other federal institutions under attack, to speak against the corruption and destruction. Using your voice to not let this stuff get normalized or forgotten, to encourage others to stand up and speak up, to remind them we don’t have to accept this and we do have power. Courage and hope are as contagious as their opposites. As the idiots in charge crash the economy, people who are affluent and consider themselves safe will be impacted. Many who formerly supported the administration or ignored politics are reeling from the impacts to themselves, to people they know, to services they depend up, and we have a choice about whether to recruit or revile them. In a sense the breadth of the attack is offering the possibility of the broadest coalitions this nation has seen. If we build them.