Don't Wait for Rock Bottom
During
a staff lunch at Earth Island Institute earlier
this week, a Latinx colleague talked about how
she had spent several days anxiously hunting for
her misplaced US birth certificate before
finally locating it. “Imagine if someone who
looks like me can’t produce it when asked,” she
told a group of us, grimacing. We shook our
heads silently, at a loss for words.
That
same evening, at my kids’ gymnastics class, I
overheard one mother saying she had lost her job
as an international public health expert, the
direct result of the Trump administration’s
dismantling of USAID. “It’s so weird to have to
keep going as though things are normal,” she
said, as I offered her my sympathies.
Meanwhile,
my neighbor across the street, who works in the
federal government, is watching the axe fall on
colleagues and wondering if she will be next.
And a scientist friend who works on women’s
health tells me her research grants are on hold
and might be canceled.
It
has not even been a full seven weeks, and
already evidence of the pain and suffering
Donald Trump and his gang have unleashed is
reaching me not only through the headlines but
in people’s lives around me. I’m surely not the
only one worried about where this leads.
“We're
not at rock bottom yet, but we are certainly
falling towards it very quickly,” sociologist
Dana Fisher, who I interviewed on Terra
Verde today, told me. Having studied social
movements opposed to tyranny, she said she knows
that the darkest times, when the sense of
personal risk becomes near universal, create
solidarity across the social spectrum. “That's
when we do our best work as a people.”
It
was meant as a message of hope, but it pained me
to hear that more people will have to suffer,
and more damage done, before we can find our way
through these awful times. Still, like Fisher,
I’m holding out hope that each of us will find
in this moment an opportunity to build power
where we are, and build it fast. The sooner the
better.
|
