Today would be a good day to take a long walk, if you can. Get out in nature. Do it alone, or in the company of a close friend. Start a new self-care routine. Exercise and eat well.
Last night, after I’d satisfied myself that the bad news was indeed bad news and was not going to be reversed by some miracle—this was about 8:00 San Francisco time—I turned out the light and lay in the dark and waited for sleep. It’s important to let yourself feel grief, to feel it fully. That’s not easy for me, as it isn’t for many of us, but when I manage it, I always find some healing wisdom in it.
What came to me, as I lay quietly, was the memory of a conversation I had some years ago with a friend of a friend. Barry’s a few years older than me. He’s practiced meditation lifelong. We were sharing a dinner I’d prepared. Barry told me a story from his life—something about his father—and after a while came around to some advice for me. “Let your misfortunes humble you,” he said. “Let them wear down your edges.”
Losing is humbling. It’s all the more humbling when you know you’re in the right and you thought you’d win. For now, I’m not going to shake my fist and vow to fight another day. I’m letting myself feel the loss.
For now, that will be enough. I do expect to get something from it, to carry me forward. Humility, when it’s genuinely felt, opens up compassion, and if you accompany that feeling, if you go with yourself on a journey inwardly, you’ll find that in time the same feeling turns outward, inexorably. I intend to extend more kindness to those close to me, and to reach out to others who I meet who need or offer kindness. This will be the expression of my grief.
For me, this is the right preparation for resistance. The time for that will come soon enough. By resistance I’m thinking not only of political resistance. Fascism is a totality. Cruelty and indifference—those human failings—come in countless forms. They seep into every aspect of life and social relationships. For this reason, cruelty and indifference can be resisted in everywhere, in art, and music, in building social connections, in every aspect of one’s behavior toward oneself and others. In every moment.
To resist, however, requires having one’s feet planted firmly on moral ground. There is good news here. When I think of the campaign just ended—Kamala Harris’ campaign, a welcome expression of one woman’s personality—I think of the people who supported it, joined it, worked for it, and how what we did together was a high expression of social ideals, of social cohesion, of a mass movement toward a better society on a healthier planet. What strikes me most about our country’s division is not the grab-bag of policy differences, as important as those are. It is the stark difference between a spirit of inclusion and social trust on our side vs. the countervailing idea, on the other side, that society (and politics) are transactional.
The latter idea, along with its cynical illusion of what human beings are, is an expression of the capitalist epoch. The former ideal of inclusion and social trust has been expressed in all epochs but can only come to realization through our long and painful transformation to a society organized through the conscious intentionality of its participants.
So I’m grieving the loss of my child’s future, of the planet, of democracy. Perhaps most of all I’m grieving the loss of my illusion of where this country was at, when taken in total. We are more sick and more self-destructive than I’d feared in my worst moments.
In resisting, I’m preparing to give the fascists no quarter. Our side, with all its divisions and differences, has the main part right: It’s about inclusion, and trust, and being secure and vulnerable enough to reach out toward a common destiny. When we talk of unity, it is on this basis only: Everybody in, nobody out.
As to their side—and “they” are every person who, for whatever reason, endorsed or worked for or voted for fascism, and especially the cynics who pretend to be neutral but provide moral cover for fascists—our invitation is always there, in each and every moment, for any one of them to change their mind and join the human race. However, as long as I live (and I intend to go on living) I will fight their cruelty and indifference with everything I have, including, when I can muster it, my love and compassion for you, my comrade in arms.