Don't Give Up
Alex Pretti and hope in the face of terror
On Monday, when I sat down to plan out my week, it all felt a little pointless. What good is my measly writing in the face of government goons murdering citizens in the streets? Is anyone going to show up to my meeting about racially segregated schools while ICE is abducting people?
It feels like there’s no point in meal planning or going to the gym in the face of state-sponsored terror.
After the horrifying murder of Alex Pretti, anything I could do feels impossibly small. Nonviolence and community care seem inadequate to the task of preserving democracy for our children.
Trump, like a all wannabe authoritarians, manufactures emergencies. Fear is his preferred method of manipulation—he creates a problem (a so-called “migrant crisis”) then manufactures a solution (violent, often illegal deportations) all while distracting and dividing the American public from the things most of us actually care about (affordability, the Epstein Files.) Like a skilled magician, he controls us by keeping us focused on whatever latest threat he’s dangling before us.
That’s not to say the threats aren’t real. We’ve seen the videos. We know that innocent people have lost their lives. But how do we respond in the face of such constructed emergencies?
It feels like I’m walking a tightrope—on one side, there’s hopelessness and terror, on the other denial. Surely, things can’t be that bad, right? Probably people are overreacting and our government is still trustworthy??
Part of the problem with Trump is that he is basically a chocolate bunny—all surface, hollow on the inside. He is not animated by personal integrity, morality, or any coherent system of values (other than his own greed.) He seems incapable of self-reflection or even testing his ideas beyond their ability to draw cheers at rallies.
To avoid being sucked into his madness, we need to go within ourselves and connect with our own sense of integrity/values/purpose.
And that’s because fighting back is tough. It’s inconvenient to boycott, to show up at rallies, to try and organize a motley crew of neighbors into a safety watch. But knowing our cause is just gives meaning to any suffering we may undertake.
What is our cause, or purpose, here? We may define it differently, but I want to offer up two images that have been helpful to me.
The first comes, incidentally, from The White Lotus. When wealthy patriarch, Timothy Ratliff, asks a Buddhist monk what happens when we die, the monk replies:
“When you’re born, you’re like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one, giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down. You die, you land back into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated, no more suffering, one consciousness. Death is a happy return, like coming home.”
The second, what is referred to in Christianity as “The Greatest Commandment,” is its complement. For me, thinking of ourselves as part of one great consciousness has breathed new life into Jesus’ commands to love God (or we could say the One Consciousness) with all our hearts and to love others as ourselves.
Because while our hyper-competitive, macho, capitalist society tells us to look out for ourselves, the road to wisdom is being able to look into the eyes of someone who’s very different from you and see your shared worth.
Alex Pretti’s final actions were to shield a woman from the border patrol agent who was trying to pepper spray her. That’s love in action.
In these troubling times, this is the challenge: to neither turn away from the suffering of others, nor to let it consume us. To hold onto our purpose and let it sustain us. To resist using violence or dehumanizing language towards our enemies. To continue to exercise and call our friends and eat our veggies in and among our emergency preparations. To know we will mess up, and to try and fail and try again.
In the prophetic words of Dr. King, “If you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving."
May we keep crawling towards a more just world.
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The chocolate bunny analogy is so good, but sad. I am mourning the shiny surfaces we hold up and call variously "leadership" "stature" "prominence" "importance" when in fact they deserve no such honor.