In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.
Every day people are kidnapped by masked men in unmarked cars, taken to hidden sites and left in deplorable conditions; starving people in Gaza are slaughtered as they clamor for a bag of flour; public officials and leaders humiliated and murdered; the T erased from LGBT; brain-dead women forced to give birth; the glib language of hate and cruelty and easy thoughtless threats of world war, assassination, and dehumanization circling like invisible poison. What feels most perilous is the steady evaporation of the boundaries of what seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. Morality, compassion, care – slashed and burned.
And yet I think of Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”, “The world is essentially over. I will fight for another day”, “I have lost my faith in humans. I commit to love them more.”
To live as Jung said – with two existing opposite thoughts at the same time. Survival right now depends on our ability to swim in this duality. To not linger in the pain, but to allow ourselves to be moved by it. To not whitewash reality, but also not to take up lodging in the house of despair. This is the dance of our times.
We must become agile and flexible. To feel responsible but not so guilty we are immobilized. To feel rage but to learn how to direct it into action and passion and purpose. To lift ourselves to a more existential absurdist place where the fascists cannot touch us. Not disassociation or numbness, but finding the grace, energy and humor that come when we commit ourselves more deeply to one another.
Before “No Kings” Day there was a part of me that frankly was tired of marching, wondering if these demonstrations really add up to anything. But then on 14 June, with anestimated 4 million to 6 millionpeople in the streets of America, I realized something profound. Marches and demonstrations are not merely acts of resistance and refusal, but they are community events in which we meet and strengthen our resolve and bonds with our own tribe of like-minded people.
They are public moments to show the rest of the world that we are the majority and we do not want and will not accept a king, or genocide in Gaza or precious immigrants being dragged off and separated from their families. They are places to let off steam and make great art and music and network and ultimately they are what we have, the expression of our collective sorrow and outrage, thereby saving our own souls.
So how do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible.
I think of my sisters at the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who give me inspiration and direction daily. The center is literally in the middle of a war zone. When the M23 militias invaded Bukavu in February, they made a radical decision to keep the center open despite the madness outside – gunfire, bombs and sometimes dead bodies on the road. They refused to stop building the world they dreamed. Instead, they developed strategies – coming to work on scooters, changing cars to avoid being noticed, keeping their hearts tuned to the work of healing survivors. It is now June and the 27th class of City of Joy is about to graduate and a new class is on the way.
I think of one of my great inspirations, the former congresswoman Cori Bush who saw that in St Louis, after the recent tornado no local or national Fema had come or were coming. The majority of people had lost their homes or had huge holes in them. So she joined with local groups to provide tarps and food, cleaning products and formula. They formed hubs of care. They went to the senior homes who had lost electricity so there was no refrigeration for food or medicine and gave them both.
She told me, “It’s my community. I believe that we take care of us. I learned through the Ferguson uprising that we can’t wait on politicians or leaders. We have to dive in and get to work. We have to talk to one another and know our communities. We need to organize in our living rooms, local businesses backyards – find out who amongst us are doctors, nurses, chefs, teachers. Knowing your community and what skills they can offer.” This is what we need to understand now more than ever.
It is so clear something essential is dying. The illusion and seduction of the American dream is over. Neoliberalism is dead. There are huge cracks, openings in the old structures and narratives. These are opportunities to plant the seeds for the new world as we protect those suffering now.
What the fascists want more than anything is our fear, exhaustion and despair. Or they want us angry, reactive, cruel and violent like them. In Cherien Dabis’s staggeringly brilliant saga about a family in Palestine, All That’s Left of You, (one of the best films I have ever seen), a married couple comes to a moral crisis and they turn to an iman for advice. This wise and very gentle iman tells them: “Your humanity is also your resistance. Don’t underestimate its power. It’s the only thing they can’t take away from you.” Every action matters now. Every effort small or large counts. And moving – movement is the essential key to dispelling despair. How we care now, how we love, how we come together, how we build and protect each other is in itself the building of the new world.
V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls