My friend Amy Solomon was feeling despair as the new reports of massive, industrial scale child abuse paid for by our tax dollars spilled out last week.
“I can’t stand it,” she told me on Facebook.
After she created a candlelight vigil event.
We’ve all seen the places we should send money, and I think most of us have sent some, or we have continued to support the ACLU and other groups, maybe our democratic candidate, but there is something about paying other people to do this work for you that is not satisfying.
Creating this event herself felt super weird to me. Did she have a permit? What would it matter… 10, 20, 50, 100 people. Would we be hassled? Wasn’t someone organizing something later, bigger, where I could go where I was told, and chant in unison? Where the media could under-report the size of the crowd, and take pictures of the anti-protestors to run side by side with us?
I mean, did we have permission to do this? Then I laughed, out loud, not LOLing, but actually laughing out loud.
Did we have permission to do this!
I agreed instantly. I’ve learned that sometimes other people remind me of what I really want to do.
In response to the candlelight vigil (we skipped the candles and walked with signs) some angry person went off on Amy on Facebook, in that way people do easily on social media, about how the Trumpers don’t care about our protests or our sadness, how the time for that is past.
I wondered how to respond.
Angrily? “Fuck you. What are you doing? Fucking holier than though piece of shit, you.”
Then, less angry, “It may not do much, but the one thing I do know is that anything in the real world beats whining in social media, like you.” You dumb fuck. I leave that part off of course. I”m being less angry.
There’s the CBT therapy response, which goes, “I understand why you feel that way. I feel like that too sometimes. What are you doing that you think is more effective? I’m open to suggestions. You obviously want to stop this too, so we are on the same side.”
Then, I hit on the real response.
“Sorry you feel hopeless. I didn’t do this for you. I didn’t do it for the Trumpers. To some degree, I didn’t even do it for the kids in the cages, at the bottom of this, we do these things for ourselves, so we aren’t the people who do nothing.”
Not to be smug, or holier than thou, or delusional about how much impact we are having.
There is a great scene in the last season of Babylon Five in which Londo, a diplomat representing a fading power who dreams of making his empire great again, whispers to a mysterious alien in a bar. This leads to the Great War, that turns into a genocide Londo grows to hate.
When it’s over Londo is plagued by nightmares, which become a fatal illness. In his visions he confronts Gkar, a diplomat for the race swept into camps and slaughtered.
“There was nothing I could do to stop it! I would be court martialed and shot!”
Gkar explains without rancor that Londo had to do something anyway.
It didn’t matter if anything he did could possible work.
Londo had to do it for himself. You have to do this for yourself.
To be a person you can live with.
You can’t make anyone in this world do a damn thing. As Robert Heinlein said, the worst you can do is kill them.
The only person you control, is yourself. The only real voices in your head are your own.
Tell yourself to be the person you want to be. It’s the only way you become them.
Your ideals, your humanity, becomes worthless when you don’t, and you might not consciously know it, but that voice inside reminds you, deep down that voice you conjure, knows if you are lying. It knows you.
Either way. Do this for yourself, your best self, and or your God, if you want to think that way.
And even if all the protest signs do is mark you for ridicule, for persecution, you still have to hold them.
To be yourself.
