Every time I see the latest affront to human decency perpetrated by this administration and its dark legions of slavish devotees, I make a point of doing something kind for someone else. I practice kindness.
Anonymously, if possible.
Practicing kindness doesn’t have to be a big thing, or involve money, or even a lot of time. The point is not self-aggrandizement or warm fuzzies; the point is to pump an antidote and practice kindness to combat a pathological campaign of destruction, bigotry, and vile greed back into the body of this nation.
The point of practicing kindness is to actively resist an agenda that others women and minorities, strips hungry children of food, destroys families, and trades respect and decency for jingoistic greed and willful ignorance about our shared existence on this precious earth.
My kindness suggestions are always simple, but they are also effective:
Feed someone who’s hungry.
Help someone who’s struggling with work, their kids, with transportation.
Support artists, writers, and other creatives who are generating the beauty we need to combat fascist exploitation and dehumanization.
Refuse to leave unchallenged the propaganda and bigoted views you encounter on the daily, especially if they’re being used to actively attack, demean, or insult someone outside of the oligarchy’s CisHet Anglo Ubermensch paradigm.
Remember that you have far more in common with every day citizens of all races, sexual orientations, genders, and creeds than you will EVER have with a cadre of planet-crushing exploiters and fear-mongers eager to add more filthy lucre to the golden beds around which they coil like the dragons of old.
I used to agonize over who could possibly save us from this slide into brutish dystopian horror.
But I have come to realize that the light we need to banish the darkness comes from within each of us, and it is only by combining that light that we can combat the torrential flow of poison and bile.
So yes, absolutely call your elected officials. Definitely vote. Volunteer your time and resources to causes you care about. March, protest, resist.
But remember, too, the smallest acts; those tiny daily affirmations of our shared humanity, kindling a light to push back the dark.
There is no spectacle—no empty, gaudy, tin-hammered mockery bedazzled with tanks and star-spangled jingoism—that can bring honor to the honorless. There is no parade that can instill leadership, or merit, or ethical, rational thought.
There is no amount of desperate, flop-sweat vamping that can erase the knowledge of crimes perpetrated against the American people, or the seemingly bottomless well of sexual harassment and bigotry, or the concentration camps that stand in brutal, ironic contrast to the very notion of Liberty and Justice for All.
There is no shimmering fireworks display that can outshine the glaring lack of empathy toward the rights of women and minorities in our sociopolitical landscape. What sparkler can hope to compete with the blazing trash fire of constricting rights, expanding violence, and vanishing erudition?
Two hundred and forty-three years after this country was founded in pursuit of lofty ideals supported on the backs of the oppressed and displaced and exploited, we find ourselves with much to consider and little to celebrate.
If we would seek Independence in the manner of our forefathers and foremothers, then I would invite you today to seek independence from greed. From capitalist exploitation. From broken, hateful policies and standards that minimize human dignity while seeking to maximize profits for the inhumane. I invite you to declare your independence from the vision of the United States as either the world’s policeman or its enterprising overlord.
I invite you to declare your independence from “fuck you, I’ve got mine” and embrace mutually beneficial collective endeavor as a virtue. Participate in your political process, by all means, but break away from the idea that these grasping, puling monsters are meant to be our masters. Say no to bigotry. Punch a Nazi in the face, because when you stand up with capital-E EVIL, a face punch is the least you deserve.
Say no to equivocation and good-little-cogism. When you see the jackboot descending onto the neck of someone who’s not your color or sex or gender, don’t sigh in relief that it’s not you and look away. Use your voice and your hands and your heart—your raw, wounded, beaten-but-not-dead-goddamnit heart—to lift them up and cast the boot into the sea.
Look away from the scampering puppet show, there in the dark and the muck, where tanks roll like pilfered dollars and anyone too queer, too brown, too female, too empathetic is simply fodder for the beastly machine that feeds and feeds and feeds.
Break away, and look to the light of a tomorrow worth living.
