In the middle of another sleepless night, I decided to give up outrage. It’s been flying around me from left and right, perhaps correctly, but it’s been burning me out.
Outrage is like a drug, fed to us by a number of sources, sometimes even well-meaning friends across the internet. The times require it, or perhaps, the times supply it.
Either way, the outrage drug appears to be bi-partisan, and it is damaging to unity, while not effective at making things happen. It also takes an emotional toll that leaves the average person weary. But we do need to speak truth, and truth to power…
If you are a grownup, do you need to be outraged to act? I know you do not. Your most effective and fulfilling actions probably occur while you are STONE COLD SOBER. We need you sober, because the problems afoot cannot be solved with the “usual” treatment of protocol or shaming reminders of hypocrisy. This game is bigger than that.
So, let’s lay it out there: things really are as extraordinary as you think. We are living in history and science fiction all at once. It is happening NOW. The Trump administration is centralizing power into the executive branch, and making hasteful, sloppy executive actions that disrupt many many lives, while sidelining experts and undermining the media.
Is this like fascism? Read the history books and you’ll see many familiar and ‘tried and true’ power-grab strategies being played out in real time. Is their goal benevolent? Who knows? That’s what they say, but I tend to look at past history of any given individual to predict future behavior. So, I am not comforted. I have been horrified, but I don’t want to ignite more horror in you. So, lets calm it down for a second.
Please, be as effective as you can be. Stay strong. Stay alert and stay sober. Don’t waste precious energy proving that the sky is falling. If your intuition meters are haywire, you feel anxious and you just can’t believe that people are capable of doing and saying the things they are: they are. And a bird just shit on my head, and it’s about to snow.
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As a side note: be sure to not only communicate your desires to your Congressmen and women, but also to SUPPORT them. Many, many of them are just as shocked, overwhelmed and quite frankly ineffective as so many of us have felt. They are not superheroes. But we each get a turn to shatter a dark force when we garner our superpowers and trust instinctive human unity. Don’t burn yourself out on the drug supplied to us in endless doses by a few. That’s exactly as they’d have it.