First, I apologize to my BMG community friends for being AWOL as I’ve been immersed in my local Wakefield April 27 town election, consulting/volunteering/organizing for our progressive slate of four candidates for Council/School Committee and a ballot question. This following essay by John Pavlovitz best sums up where my head, heart and soul is at these days.
I am a collector of stories.
I watch people, I listen closely to them, I eavesdrop on their conversations in person and on social media, and I look for patterns to try and understand what’s happening to us as a nation.
I’ve tried to put my finger on how I’m feeling lately, how I think so many of us are feeling out there.
It isn’t outrage. We’ve been there for a while now if we’ve been paying attention at all. It isn’t anger. That’s familiar territory for people whose eyes have been open to the ugliness. It isn’t grief. We have collectively and individually mourned for years at this point. It’s something else. I think it’s exhaustion.
I sense a corporate emotional weariness in kind people these days, the accumulated scar tissue created when you’ve absorbed more bad news, predatory behavior, and attacks on decency than your reserves can manage. Sustained cruelty will do that to the human soul.
There’s only so much contempt for humanity our minds are able to process, until one day something snaps and we lose the ability to respond with the same urgency and resilience we once had. A low-grade hopelessness sets in, slowly replacing our activism with apathy and one day rendering us immobile : cruelty sickness.
Prolonged exposure to this kind of seemingly tireless barbarism begins to rob us of energy, to dishearten us to the point that we stop caring and opt out. This is of course, by design. That is what those manufacturing this incessant enmity are counting on.
The fatigue of decent humans is the plan: inundate us with a million tiny crises, assail us with countless daily culture war battles, and batter us with endless legislative assaults — until we are gradually but decidedly crushed beneath the weight of it all. Eventually, we succumb to the numerous wounds of their boundless hatred, the suffering of those they victimize, and a steady stream of the unanswerable questions about how and why human beings can be this perpetually cruel.
Maybe it’s a bit of necessary resting after the last four ferocious years, perhaps an understandable emotional letdown afforded by the arrival of an adult human president and the feeling that we are not in a continual state of imminent threat from our government, or maybe it’s the welcome distraction of passing through the worst of a brutal year in isolation — but it feels as though our collective passions are waning and we cannot afford this.
So what do we do? What do kind people who are sickened by cruelty do to get well? We tether ourselves to one another.
Now, more than ever, good and tired people need to cultivate community, to stay connected to our tribes of affinity, and to carry one another through the fatigue when it comes. We fill in the gaps among us and we let those of us who feel strong enough today to engage the fight for those who need to catch their breathe and renew their strength. We surround ourselves with people who value us not only for the work we do and the causes we support but for the inherently vulnerable beings with finite resources that we are; those that demand that we rest and encourage us to play and give us space to pause — so that we are not consumed by the brutality of the day.
Community is an elixir for the soul and we need such good togetherness medicine more than ever because we are exposed to more toxic trauma than we’ve ever been, and because the war against disparate humanity isn’t going anywhere.
Injustice, inequity, discrimination and suffering are hazardous to the hearts of good people and they should be. They will make us rightly sick and so we have to keep one another well.
Stay together, stay alive, and stay kind, friends.
It is important to recognize the fatigue and not allow it to set in. This is exactly what authoritarians rely on.
This resonates with me as well.
I’m tired of watching the news and tired of endless and pointless debates, arguments and exchanges.
I’m entertaining myself, doing what I can, and hoping for healing.
There is a 4 year cycle because of the election calendar where fear spreads over the nation. It’s a tragedy. I now see America in a perpetual state of PTSD, which ebbs and wanes slightly. Trump was a 4 year long election cycle. He never stopped campaigning, and Jan 6 was just beyond the pale. It’s like when terrorists plant a second series of bombs to go off after the ambulances arrive and at the hospitals. You think you have witnessed the worse of human cruelty, and then it gets worse.
To discover yesterday was so much better than today challenges our hope and faith. Trump made Nixon look good, and George W Bush look light a giant. Yet, so many are genuflecting to his madness, still! The GOP has collapsed. After studying history all my life, I now understand the power of Hitler and Mao. Orwell’s 1984 and WWII, the war I was too young to know, are now so much more clear. What the hell has happened to America? All the same things that have happened in other places.
How do you fight fascism without becoming a fascist? That is the nut of the problem.
What a disappointment it is to discover that we were not any better, and all the abundance in the world is no substitute for simple intellectual honesty and basic morality. How do men who fought fascism in WWII follow a fascist like Trump? Did they ever understand their choice? Probably not. Here we are at the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and nobody understands what happened or why. Denial and avoidance is so much easier than the truth.
I have had many bouts of cruelty sickness, I guess, but I also bounce back. People are suffering needlessly, and mostly through self-infection. Enlightenment will never change, and will always be the central core of reform, word to word, person to person. There is no way to systemize morality or to punish crimes. A virtuous society can only exist with virtuous people. The laws only reflect our sins. We are in an intellectual wasteland right now. The rich and powerful have little control over anything. Bill Gates can’t change the world any more easily than you or me. The mass media regurgitates all the same old tired ideas, and people seek funds to get elected to preserve the status quo, promising only to say what you expect to hear.
I was thinking the other day about how much pressure is on the healthcare field. From Covid, to resistance to masks and taking the vaccine, to all the mass killing, police murders, political violence, domestic abuse in a state of economic uproar over billing, education costs, corporate profit motives, the entire mental health umbrella unhinged, and this on top of the ‘standard’ challenges of age, disease, poor exercise and diets that they have to deal with. Enough with the first responder sh*t, it’s the people behind them that are lifting the load and not passing it off to someone else. How can people’s whose lives and jobs are already full possibly be expected to be politically engaged in the mindless lunacy that is politics? Their cruelty sickness skills must be very far advanced, and perhaps it is their example we need to follow: Heal one another.