Don't Wait for Rock Bottom
During a staff lunch at Earth Island Institute earlier this week, a Latinx colleague talked about how she had spent several days anxiously hunting for her misplaced US birth certificate before finally locating it. “Imagine if someone who looks like me can’t produce it when asked,” she told a group of us, grimacing. We shook our heads silently, at a loss for words. That same evening, at my kids’ gymnastics class, I overheard one mother saying she had lost her job as an international public health expert, the direct result of the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID. “It’s so weird to have to keep going as though things are normal,” she said, as I offered her my sympathies. Meanwhile, my neighbor across the street, who works in the federal government, is watching the axe fall on colleagues and wondering if she will be next. And a scientist friend who works on women’s health tells me her research grants are on hold and might be canceled. It has not even been a full seven weeks, and already evidence of the pain and suffering Donald Trump and his gang have unleashed is reaching me not only through the headlines but in people’s lives around me. I’m surely not the only one worried about where this leads. “We're not at rock bottom yet, but we are certainly falling towards it very quickly,” sociologist Dana Fisher, who I interviewed on Terra Verde today, told me. Having studied social movements opposed to tyranny, she said she knows that the darkest times, when the sense of personal risk becomes near universal, create solidarity across the social spectrum. “That's when we do our best work as a people.” It was meant as a message of hope, but it pained me to hear that more people will have to suffer, and more damage done, before we can find our way through these awful times. Still, like Fisher, I’m holding out hope that each of us will find in this moment an opportunity to build power where we are, and build it fast. The sooner the better.
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