You keep showing up, talking head, suit pockets weighed down with blood money, Devil on your shoulder you’ve convinced yourself is God.
You think you’re hiding your disdain for us behind empty eyes as you repeat your lying words of blame, acting powerless when you’ve hoarded all the power,
your humanity so shrouded under the deceit you weave to obscure what you’re really doing, yet acts of cruelty you think you’ve cleverly sold to us as responsibility reveal what lurks beneath.
Every day more of us see through your charade. Every day more of us see we care about our neighbors more than you care for any of us. Every day more of us see we have more in common with each other than we do with you. Every day more of us see that you would not stand up to bullies when you had the chance and now you’re one of them.
It seems you have forgotten there are so many more of us than there will ever be of you.
Every day more of us see how powerful we are when we stand together in community. Every day more of us see how joyful we are when we take care of each other. Every day more of us see how bountiful life can be when we share instead of hoarding. Every day more of us see how hopeful we are when we are working together to build a world where we are all enough and have enough.
And we hope, some day, you may see it is so beautiful that you will want to empty your pockets of what keeps you separated from your own humanity, cast off your shroud, and join us.
Do not believe them when they tell you it’s okay. Let their lies pass you by like unwelcome road noise fading into the distance as you turn your heart toward compassion.
Do not believe them when they tell you cruelty is justified because of where someone was born or because they oppose the powerful. Listen to your own tender soul crying out to ease the suffering inflicted.
Do not believe them when they tell you this is how it has to be, when you know in the depths of your being it isn’t.
As someone who grew up in the Christian homeschooling movement and spent most of my time in conservative/evangelical Republican circles, who walked away from that nearly 15 years ago, spent some time in progressive/liberal Democrat circles, and who now considers myself without a political home–as someone who reads broadly on a variety of subjects because I want to understand how things work and are connected, I’ve been thinking about what I wish more people on “both sides” understood and would take some time to consider.
The Right and the Left might be opposing sides, but they are not at all organized or constructed as mirror opposites, despite many people seeming to think that they are. And in the U.S. we do not have a nation neatly divided into these two camps, despite many narratives claiming that we do. In the last presidential election, 31.5% voted Right, 30.6% voted Left, and 37.7% did not vote for either candidate. I’ve been thinking a lot about who benefits from us believing there are these two mirror-opposite sides and the construction of that “half-the-country” narrative we hear so often, when more people fall outside of the strict Left/Right divide than into it.
A massive amount of wealth and power have been poured into creating a Right that will rally around single issues and work with others who may have different opinions about other topics in order to accomplish political goals. There were architects of this as far back as Reconstruction, massively amped up after the Civil Rights movement, and then supercharged after Citizens United. The Right is so effective at getting even their most unpopular policies passed and their most unpopular politicians elected, partly because people on that side will overlook almost anything, even actions and policies that go against many of the other values they hold, in order to get policies and politicians that support their main issue–be it the 2nd amendment or abortion or whatever is the Christian-Right crusade of the hour. Endless resources have been targeted for decades to create an incredibly well-organized, Right-aligned voting block with influence and sway far outsized to their actual numbers.
And while, yes, there is a lot of money and power out there promoting liberal/progressive ideas, the Left is simply just not a powerful voting block. People on that side are often not only unwilling to set aside differences on other issues to accomplish a policy goal together, but they often devolve into ideological attacks and in-fighting over those differences and accomplish very litte. There are some exceptions, but I have read many examples of this and have seen this play out as I watched these spaces. This is a major factor in why the Left fails over and over again to pass even their most popular policies or have broadly popular political candidates. And I know that many on the Right think Democrats are super liberal or radical or leftist, but the reality is that the vast majority of Democrat politicians are actually neoliberals (like most Democrat and Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan), who, while they might promote some progressive social views, are truly incredibly conservative when it comes to the majority of policies they support. Democrat politicians, almost without fail, vote in the interests of corporations and the ruling class instead of the citizens they are supposed to represent. Because of this, many people who oppose the policies of the Right are completely disillusioned with the Democrat party as well and have checked out of national politics altogether.
I know it can be easy, if you’re on the Right, to think that the Left might be like your side, only with opposite views, but that is simply not the reality. They do not have the power and influence you are told they have. Are there Democrat-backed groups on the other side who might rally together around a cause or to call out something on the Right that they take issue with? Sure. Yes, there are. But these are groups of people, not a monolith. They are not representative of the entire other side and likely do not have the numbers to accomplish anything you are afraid that they might.
I know it can be easy if you’re on the Left, to be baffled by how so many people on the Right will support politicians and policies seemingly against their values and best interest, but that is because there is nothing equivalent to these single-issue coalitions on the Left. The ends very much justify the means in their minds, whereas the Left gets stuck in the means and barely ever accomplishes any ends.
And as much as we all like to think of “our side” as the good guys and the “other side” as the bad guys, the reality is that there are good and bad people on both sides. There are people on both sides who love their families and are trying to make it through life one day at a time, doing the best they can in their circumstances. There are people on both sides who behave terribly and harmfully and do all they can to demonize and dehumanize everyone they consider “other.” And there are good and bad people who fall outside of either side.
And I write all of this to ask, who is benefiting from this? Who benefits from us seeing the other side as though the worst of them is all of them? Who benefits from the Right, whose views and policies are often not supported by the majority, being such a powerful voting block? Who benefits from the Left being so disorganized and unable to accomplish anything, even implementing popular policies that have broad support across the political spectrum? Who benefits from the Right being so focused on only the areas where they disagree with the Left and the Left being so focused on only the areas where they disagree with each other? Who benefits from us thinking that our politics can be simplistically viewed as half the country vs. the other half of the country when the reality is that many have stepped away from both parties? Whose power and influence might be eroded if people on all sides focused instead on the areas where we agree and demanded policies to support those things?
These divisions are deliberate. They are crafted to keep us fighting each other so we will not fight for each other.
I don’t think it would be a bad idea for all of us to take some time for introspection. To perhaps step away from social media for a few, to go outside, to reconnect to our own humanity and values and evaluate who our beliefs are serving and if it might be time to make some changes.
At this point, I think finding our way back to ourselves and each other may be our only hope.
Cycle-breaker. Earth-shaker. New-way maker. Whatever you’re calling it, you’re not alone in that ache of isolation, the pull of temptation to become mirror opposite– just as dogmatic, but from the other side. And yet. You know, you know, you know. Your heart says it all has to be different, well up from a different place.
So you replace your armor with boundaries, lovingly held. Replace your reactivity with responses, carefully considered. Replace your binary thinking with questions, welcoming complexity. You replace control and punishment and shame with understanding and help and empathy. Even when it’s hard. (And yes, it can be so, so hard.) And yet. You know in your bones, nothing will ever be as worth it.
Image Description: Narrow green leaves branching from the stalk of a plant. The largest in the center of the photo has a tiny green and gray tree frog perched near the top.
Today there was a Gray Treefrog tucked away in the Late Boneset leaves, gorgeous and tiny and fragile, like most living things, when you think about it.
The strands that weave us humans into the web of life are, perhaps, less delicate than those of tree frogs or butterflies or humming birds or fireflies, depending on where we live.
Perhaps not, depending on how much value our lives are seen to hold as potential for extraction by rich and powerful people who couldn’t possibly know the sheer joy
of spotting a tree frog in your favorite shady spot on a hot July afternoon, of observing butterflies flitting between plants you let grow wild that others might discard as weeds,
of standing inches from a hummingbird hovering over blossoms you grew from hand-me-down seeds, of pausing to marvel at a resting firefly illuminating flower petals in fading summer light,
of knowing the value of each life, everywhere, is immeasurable and connected, far beyond what the atrophied hearts of oppressors can understand.
You were the girl who read and read, would rather sit with your book in an out-of-the-way corner and lose yourself in its pages than join with the other kids’ chaos.
And from a very young age you found books on Anne Frank and Corrie ten Boom and continued for decades reading all you could find about people who resisted fascists and hid targeted neighbors to save them from concentration camps even though it meant they increased their own danger and had less for their own families to eat.
And while these seemed important historical stories to commit to memory, you had this sense– which you now know to be false– that there were safeguards to prevent such things happening within your own country. You were taught that we have guarantees to freedom, checks on power, enshrined in founding documents.
And now you watch, horrified, as those perceived safeguards crumple in a crush of supremacy, power-grabs, and executive orders. Protections and information destroyed, a clean sweep of dissenters, planes falling from the sky, people rounded up. And you wish for the days you thought this could never happen here.
Content Note: Mention of cancer, medical situations, parental illness
I read somewhere that a woman develops all the ova her ovaries will ever produce while still in the womb of her mother,
so for a time, the woman’s mother carries within her body both her daughter and the spark of the next generation.
I do not know if this is medically accurate, but I recall it now as I take a turn sitting next to my mom in the oncology unit, as they pump her full of IVs that will potentially both sicken and save her.
My body, once within hers, now beside, would not exist if not for the places in her body where they found the cancer.
It makes me think how discussing mothers, daughters, women’s bodies, can be double-edged.
Joy and pain, hope and grief, love and uncertainty– emotions so often within each other, beside each other.
I wonder now how I hold them, along with my mother’s hand and her hot tea, here in this room on a rainy December afternoon.
I remember the election cycle prayer vigils of my youth. The fasting. The fear.
Scared people in church sanctuaries passing terrified glances instead of peace, begging God not to let destruction fall on the United States in the form of a Democrat winning the Oval Office.
I now know not all churches, but the ones that formed my first understandings had these fears as blocks in their foundation.
Many cycles later, I sat in community with dear friends in a different kind of church and held space for our own anxiety and concern.
Not because we believe one party holds the key to bring about the world we want, but because there is so much fear, so much division so much hate and we know there are some trying fan those flames into an inferno.
Holding space in silence, I couldn’t help but think of all the other people in all those other churches still holding their vigils like a presidential candidate could take the place of Christ as their savior.
How can entire churches praying to the same God as me be filled with people praying for such different things than me?
How are our only choices a neo-liberal conservative woman and a fascist man?
How is this where we are?
How do we stop looking to political parties as though they represent us, care about us, can save us?
How do we bring about anything different from what we’ve always had if all we are is afraid?
How do we let go of the fears ingrained in us and see with clarity?
How do we remember that we are not separate from each other no matter how much those in power want us to behave as though we are?
How can we find the courage to be “us” and not the “me vs. you” they want to maintain?
The Forest and the Trees 