DON’T YIELD TO ANGER OR FEAR
Seventy-two million of my fellow citizens in the U.S. have made a dreadfully serious mistake, and we will have to live with the consequences for years to come. Things and creatures that we cherished will be lost, in some cases, never to return. What is to be done?
Of course, wherever possible, organize resistance. Truth will be on our side to the extent we remain nonviolent; and that is the only resource more powerful than the financial and military resources of those now in political power, even though the wealth at their disposal brings with it virtually complete control of the mainstream media. We will have to sacrifice much more that we’re used to, though it’s not yet clear where and how those sacrifices will work. Not a bad time to reread that well-known article by the Australian theorist, Ralph Summy, “Nonviolence and the Case of the Extremely Ruthless Opponent.”
DON’T DESPAIR
This is a very scary situation, scarier than anything I’ve faced in my rather long life. But we must not yield to fear. Just as the first rule for doctors is primum non nocere, ‘first, do no harm,’ ours might be primum non timere, ‘first do not fear’. With that, we will be free, no matter what the circumstances 𑁋 free to act from our deepest selves. Second, we have to brace ourselves: things we hold dear will be destroyed: living things and the planet we live on, institutions that make up (or made up, when they worked) democracy, and the subtler but most important things like the very meaning of human life. One shudders to think of what this will do to the already appalling numbers of suicides, e.g. of young people, and gun violence generally. We read that 20 million heavily armed “survivalists” are waiting for the civil war. Or waiting to start one. Even in the face of this threat, don’t despair. Despair is a luxury we cannot afford; besides, as Norman Cousins used to say, “No one knows enough to be a pessimist”. Despair, alongside its strategic disadvantage, would mean a loss of faith in human nature or human potential 𑁋 exactly what the opposition wants us to undergo.
Recently I found myself saying, on our biweekly radio broadcast, we have to maintain our faith in human nature and in nonviolence; and I realized that they’re the same! When we say that Truth is on our side, we are saying that the felons and unscrupulous billionaires who have come into power, riding on the fathomless gullibility of those tens of millions, are not as securely lodged in their position as they 𑁋 and we 𑁋 may think. Their very nature will weaken them in ways they may not realize; the history of nonviolence 𑁋a history we have only recently begun to recover 𑁋 will bear this out.
DO SOMETHING USEFUL
Let’s coin another variation on the Hippocratic one: primum non irascere. Meaning do not yield to anger. Notice I’m not saying, ‘Don’t be angry.’ That would be inadvisable even if it were possible; no, what we have to do is, as MLK did, “harness anger under discipline for maximum effect.” There will be plenty to anger any thoughtful person, and as individuals we can’t do everything. But we can do something, and if we select the right thing and use the right method, it can be something effective, first and foremost by lifting us out of despair, anger, paralysis, our inner enemies then by having an impact on the very sad world around us. “The real hope,” Thomas Merton once wrote to a friend, "is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see." If “God” doesn’t work for you, substitute King’s arc of the universe (that bends toward justice), or simply some version of what Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Gyoergyi famously called “the drive in living matter to perfect itself.” Truth is on our side; not just factual truth as opposed to (the now plentiful) lies around us, but Truth, Nature, the principle of Reality that no one can long repress.
This we discover in our longing for justice, our love for one another, our compassion for the misguided; this we align with in our thoughts and actions, and that is already an important victory.
