AMERICAN SPECTACULAR

Becoming who we need to be in order to do what we need to do

Something seriously strange is going on these days. I’ve been heartened, however, at how the word is starting to spread, pieces are falling into place, and the larger patterns are becoming clear. The only thing to fear is people going numb, looking the other way, or acquiescing to the madness. I see a dark cloud over this country, that’s for sure, but I also see an extraordinary amount of spirited protest, expressed in many different ways, tying millions of people together in a collective cry of Hell No.

As Joni Mitchell sang, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” I’d amend that to, “We didn’t know what we had until it was almost gone - and now we’re pissed.” People who hadn’t ever spent five minutes thinking about how lucky we were that America was (more than not) a free society, are now for the first time thinking about what that really means. There is a Spirit of America, infused into our founding in some metaphysical way, that gets us all riled up when we start to feel the walls of freedom closing in around us. What we had forgotten as a nation was how much vigilance it takes to make sure they don’t.

But that’s changing now. The alarm’s gone off.

Americans are often chronically disengaged from the deeper issues of life, but we are not stupid. And we are not uncaring. From Pearl Harbor to 9/11, Americans have proven we’ll show up for our country when we feel it threatened. But the threat to America now is coming not via bombs dropping from the sky. It’s coming from a long-term systematic propaganda campaign to convince millions of Americans that a free democracy isn’t really a good idea anyway. A democratic government is never efficient, after all (they’re wrecking it as we speak, in order to prove that to you). So we may as well just turn the whole thing over to some techno billionaires dictators - since they’re the only ones who can be trusted to take care of the little guy. (Huh?)

In the midst of all this, like a small purple flower growing up between broken pieces of cement, a new Americanism is rising up. People are not taking this lying down. Those most bent on destroying our freedom, our government and our security, are awakening within us a long buried spirit. It isn’t about Left or Right. It isn’t about Democrat or Republican. It’s about totalitarianism and reckless autocrats versus freedom and the rule of law.

The purveyors of autocracy are not unmet; nature is organizing the resistance. It’s futile to think traditional political strategy alone can override the forces arrayed against us. We the People have to augment that. We can think of ourselves as peaceful, artful, and creative guerrilla forces. Jump at ‘em with whatever you’ve got - a podcast over here, a genius computer move over there, a social media post over there, a political campaign over here, an organizing effort over there, a protest over here, a media project over there, a comedy routine over here, agit prop theatre over there, an educated argument at dinner over here, a refusal to accept the unacceptable over there. Do the thing that you can do. It’s not a single effort that’s going to fix this. It’s a field of energy by which we will elegantly, collectively, and powerfully fuck them up.

Dedicate your life to it. Don’t let a day go by that you don’t do something. Everything we do is a participatory particle in a rising wave of a new American spirit. God knows this country has made some terrible mistakes. America has even done some evil things. But never has there failed to be a generation that rose up among us courageous and humble enough to course-correct. Let’s not be the first generation to wimp out on doing so. In the process, we will find some power we didn’t even know we had within us. In the words of Winston Churchill, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

The forces arrayed against our democracy are petty, mean-spirited, and in many ways cruel. Let us meet them with honor and good sense, plus a fierce and patriotic love - of each other, our country, and our planet. They planned all this for a very long time, but let’s prove that they made one mistake in their planning. They thought their takeover would easy because they assumed we would be soft. They assumed we would be weak. They assumed we would not be brave.

Let’s prove them not as smart as they thought they were, by being more spectacular than we even knew we could be.