Do Your Best For Team Earth
Culture wars are SO CLEARLY a process of the dynamic tension between love and hate. Push with all your might, any moment you can, friends.
Isn’t it interesting? People like Trump and his horrifying court serve a purpose. Sadly, it’s true. By being WILLING TO and DELIGHTING IN strewing hate, they bring light to issues that need to be “culture warred” out. The outcome of culture wars is enlightenment. Even if hate ‘wins’ the ‘war,’ love is called in more brightly and lessons are learned. Even if we have to relearn them every other generation. Even if we feel the heavy drag of ‘again?’ Even when we want to give up. Culture wars are SO CLEARLY, a process of the dynamic tension between love and hate.
To love, to me, means to understand that all persons have the right to the same love I have the right to. It does not mean I, personally, love everyone. To love is to stand strong in the reality that this fact is irrefutable and non-negotiable. All people have the spiritual, universal right, per the ‘laws’ not only of our country, but through the ‘laws’ of nature. We have the capacity to experience and cultivate love.
“BUt wHAt AboUT PedOPhiLEs and RaPisTS and tHOsE GaNgs ANd mURderErs and sERIal KilLErs?!?!” I will have that talk with you, if you want to have that talk. I’ll even host a zoom meeting about it with anyone who wants to have that talk. But this is not that talk. Clap clap. Stay on task.
Perhaps some people live in a way that is ENTIRELY unlovable. So it is love from a pet, then. Or a plant that is watered by that love-dry sponge of a person. Some people have hated themselves into a corner, so to speak. Maybe it’s only their own organs that love them, simply for breathing air into their lungs, thereby procuring oxygen that gradually makes its way through the body and to the cells.
That is not my work — my work is not to love everyone. That would be foolish, and martyr-y, and condescending. But also innocent, even childlike. And I am sadly no longer a child, so I have lost that short window of opportunity and vulnerability borne of naivety, to stand in love freely, offering it at full volume, pleading for it to be received and returned, regardless of pain caused directly to my face.
One of my Tanya mantras is:
There are all kinds of people within every kind of people.
This seems to be entirely lost on many of us. And especially the Red Hatters. Many folks are stuck in seeing people as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but in the worst way — where ‘like me’ equates to ‘good,’ and ‘different from me’ equates to ‘bad.’ It is rigid, without room for negotiation or reason. And it is fueled by spite.
There will ALWAYS be evidence that the ‘others’ are ‘bad,’ if that is what you set your attention to. (Hence things like the Laken Riley act.) I am made sick to think of any child coming to harm. But to make an anti-immigration vessel of hate and destruction out of her story is disgusting. That is not love. That is using her story to usher in hate. I have seen countless stories of vicious abuse and murder of children — in RECENT NEWS — and by those children’s parents.
Where are the child protection acts in their names? Our fallacy is infinite here. These stories are being used to forward a dark agenda.
Why are we not using these incidents to tighten the gaps in our own child protective services — in the USA? For families.
Every ‘kind’ of person deserves to be fully who they are. To inhabit their full space. To delight in the human experience, with all of its celebrations and pitfalls. And to have full consequences for harms they cause.
It is difficult to be truly ‘good,’ striving to better understand love and equanimity and joy and yes, to understand that diversity is in our very nature. It is LITERALLY an aspect of biology and the nature all around us. It is difficult to take the extra time to try to understand the importance of protecting equity. It is even more difficult to take the risky position of living as an equity protector — and not because you want to have treats, but because equity includes each of us and makes life better for all of us.
Unless we are a hoarding, self-centered person. Some humans, amongst other animals, are driven to hoard resources. They will take FROM the collective and manipulate the powers to take even MORE. There is never ENOUGH. Animals often, but not always, share. Human hoarders may. But more often, they may not.
And so we must intervene thoughtfully, and from a place of slow unwinding of the conqueror mindset. We must go to work excavating and reclaiming any remaining mindsets of the ‘conquered,’ who are equally wise, brilliant, worthy, and special. And yes, also riddled with the same problems we all have — fallacies, errors, imperfections, and corruption.
Further, the wisdom, languages and pre-colonization mindsets have been truly devastated and largely erased, except for pockets here and there. Not only through genocide, but the sickening torture and abuses that happened at the hands of the conquerors. And then, we have the many years of aftermath, where so much damage was caused to entire communities, that just simple rest and joy are acts of resistance against the artificial, but effective, white superiority imbedded into everything we have here.
BuT WhAt AbOUt the IrIsh SlAveS?!? Such a sickening, cocky comeback. I started reading about the horrors perpetuated against Jewish people, Indigenous people, and the enslaved Africans when I was only 10. I was horrified. I couldn’t stop reading about it. And I read fast. Alone, knowing I could not talk with anyone about this in 1980’s Wyoming, and afraid someone would tell me to stop reading these stories if they knew, I kept it secret. I carried the churning feelings inside of my small frame, and I quietly, privately came undone.
It can never be repaired. We can only do our best to provide reparations, acknowledge the harm done, and stop interfering with the recovery of the people our white ancestors were so incredibly, savagely cruel to, for so very long. We can stop giving them bread crumbs, with little to no support, adding every type of meddling interference, and then pointing and laughing when people fail. For instance, perhaps, calling them a ‘DEI hire.’ Or the alternative, holding their heads underwater so hard that they have no choice but to become super-human. And boy, that pisses a mediocre, racism-denier white person off more than anything.
This leads me to inclusion. Because there are all kinds of people, within every kind of people, inclusion means to understand all of this. The history. The mediocre attempts to level the playing field. The false choice to assimilate or be ostracized — accept our tokenization, or how dare you. All of it. To be truly inclusive, you have to set safe enough ground, norms, discernment and energy for people to be able to show up, feel welcomed and safe to be who they are, and share their own brand of magic.
Words mean everything and they mean nothing. A true ‘liberal’ does not think that ‘all __________ (fill in the blank) people are good.’ A true ‘liberal’ believes that regardless of your ‘goodness’ or your ‘badness’ you deserve to move through your life without the constant fear of oppression, intrusion, violation, and violence. A true ‘liberal’ builds community, and together they make enough pies so that everyone gets the pie they need. Sounds kind of like trickle down humanity, doesn’t it? Weird.
The Trumpian era has unleashed a mass of locusts. Red Hatters believe that the ‘liberal’ desire to inform ‘conservatives’ they are TREADING ON the rights of ‘others not like them,’ is some form of harm. They cry victim. But, Yes. I will happily harm you in that way. I will, and have, actually stopped people from treading on others when it has happened in my presence.
And that is love — to step in and potentially cause a degree (or several) of harm, in order to stop a hateful action, is love. There are degrees of harm caused by self defense (and community protection), for sure — it’s hard to be interrupted while doing something you may or may not understand is harmful. It ranges from hurt feelings and embarrassment, to even scuffling physically, which can cause injuries. Not one to brag, but I once punted a poor little squirrel for trying to frantically jump onto and climb up my toddler. I did not hesitate to cause that harm. I felt bad about it later, and yet I would do it again.
I have held children down to help a phlebotomist insert an IV, that will allow us to give them life saving medicine. I have started IV’s myself, while trying my best to soothe the absolute terror in a child’s eyes while they are held down by others. I have told people that no, I will no longer tolerate that behavior, even if it means we are no longer friends after they clarify that their hateful rhetoric is more important to them than striving to understand. And I am patient, forgiving, and I understand. But everyone has limits. Accepting any of this current era of Red Hatter abuse is a hard no.
I have hurt people. Because not everyone gets what they want. And I am comfortable causing hurt to center love and interrupt hate. Does that create a victim? Yes — of their own blindness to their harms. Of their own hatefulness. Of their own inability to step into reflection. Of their own inability to step out from behind a bully and risk being harmed by that bully along with the rest of us. It’s easy to stand behind a power monger. They always throw their backers scraps, because a bully is nothing without their backup. They don’t even have to get blood on their own hands after a short window of time.
We are confused here. But I think many, many of us are not. I’m not here to become a violent person on behalf of love. But I am willing to stand, and even push against the train of hate. Dynamic tension (look it up).
I see many, many of you doing that too. It’s really all we can do. Raise a ruckus, push back, say no, be usefully insolent, and remember love as the driving force of our actions. We have to do it any moment that we can.
Cassie Phillips coined the phrase, Let Them, in a 2019 poem. Mel Robbins took it, basically stole it without collaboration, and made it popular. Whether you heard it from Cassie, or Mel, Let Them. Let them call you anything they will. It’s not true. And hey, in the meantime, you will be living a life that is full and rich and something you can stand and look back on with the wisdom of someone who fought back. Whether it was skillful, or awkward, or riddled with cringe moments, unlearning and redirecting, you will feel satisfied that you did your best for team Earth.
