Hope & Daily Help Can Defeat Despotism & Despair

Hope & Daily Help Can Defeat Despotism & Despair

 

I’m writing a new book. I don’t know that I’ll ever publish it because right now I’m telling the story of what is happening right now in America and across the globe.

 

And because I’m a good writer–a good storyteller–it’s dark, dismal and depressing.

 

It is also nothing terribly new. It’s just more apparent now.

 

Human rats have left their dark holes, emerged into broad daylight, and started preening themselves in front of us, as if proud of their murderous intentions.

 

And it’s utterly horrifying to see how many of our friends and relatives feel relieved that they, too, no longer have to hide their allegiance to racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic belief systems.

 

The gods they worship are on full display these days. (Hint: there is no need to capitalize god above. They’re worshiping false idols, not the One they claim they worship whenever you point a camera at them.)

 

What my new book isn’t, is hopeless.

 

Hopeless people don’t write at all. Hopeless people kill themselves.

 

Life without hope is a humorless, haunting existence. Usually a short one, because very few people can live without the hope of a better tomorrow…

 

And you know what? There may be no pulling of the rabbit out of this hat, no way to turn the tide.

 

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to hope, or to stop resisting the heinous incursions that are leading us all toward extinction.

 

Here’s what hurts most: I feel a little glad that humans are on the verge of self-annihilation because the ones who deserve to continue living seem to be doing far too little to head off the rabble that is sealing our fate.

 

For a species that breaks its arm patting itself on the back because of our exalted, self-proclaimed status over “lesser” animals, we certainly aren’t proving that our brains are any better at keeping us alive than other animals.

 

To the contrary: we’re on the verge of extinguishing ourselves and of taking most of the other forms of life with us when we do it!

 

None of the other animals have the ability to subdue all other life forms, and zero interest in doing so.

 

When we got smart, we got terribly full of ourselves, didn’t we?

 

Instead of becoming wise stewards of our planet’s natural resources, we’ve squandered and wasted them.

 

We’re seeing dead whales, dolphins, turtles and other marine animals washing ashore in unprecedented numbers, their stomachs filled with plastics.

 

We’ve gutted the Environmental Protection Agency and put at its head a corporate ecosystem raider. Same with the National Park Service and too many other federal departments to recount here.

 

Our planet is a dozen years away from the brink of ecological disaster and the people in power simply don’t care; they don’t believe in the science that shrieks, “Wake the hell up!”

 

They’re too busy counting their money to look up and think, “Hey, wait a minute. I have kids and grand kids.  Maybe, just maybe, we need to pay attention, here!”

 

I could go on, but if you’ve been watching, you know the story… and I’m not writing this to depress you. I’m writing it to enlist you!

 

Will you spend ten minutes every day doing something to help sidestep the disastrous path we’re on? Whatever resonates with you–recycling, holding  a protest banner, writing a  blog post, calling your so-called representatives–do it for just ten minutes every day…more if you can and feel led to do it.

 

I need to hear back from you letting me know what you’ve decided to do.

 

My gift is writing, so I plan to write. I also plan to protest, resist, and call out injustice and ecological crimes wherever I find it. I will vote. I will not be silent.

 

Turn your concern into something that can make a difference

 

If you wonder what you’d have done when Germany was being taken over by Hitler, or when Japanese Americans were being herded into concentration camps, or when black children and parents, held as slaves, were sold away from their families in the South, or when the Trail of Tears was underway, or when Native American children were being ripped from  their parents and “re-educated” into Euro-American clones, you’re doing it right now!!!

 

If you’re doing nothing, shame on you!

 

There are children in cages on our southern border, children whose parents have every right to seek asylum here because their Latin America countries are murdering them. These are fellow Americans separated by an arbitrary border; they are brothers and sisters. (The U.S. participation in destabilizing their countries should must not be overlooked or ignored; the U.S. military created the crises in their homelands, so we’re complicit in their agony and we need to make amends by doing everything we can to help them overcome and survive their ordeals.)

 

Just because they’re brown people, or black people, or yellow people, or red people, doesn’t give us white people license to ignore what we’ve systematically done to make their lives far more difficult than they had to be.

 

If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

 

DO SOMETHING, DAMN IT!!!!