Love in a time of crisis
The COVID pandemic — with its fear, and its quarantine, and its ongoing recommendations for limiting social contact — is still affecting us. Even if we are not among the many unfortunate individuals who are still ill with long COVID, our situation has changed. We are now living in a society where loneliness has increased and trust has decreased. As Jeet Heer wrote in The Nation, “In the wake of COVID, Americans have become more individualistic, more conspiracy-minded, and less committed to collective social effort.” We tend to be more separate from each other.
This is one of the factors that made the resurgence of Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans possible. They in turn have amplified a selfish, anti-social, conspiracy-minded, mistrustful mood in the country for their own ends.
Many of us choose love as a core value
In the current political moment it is important that we not just resist the rise of authoritarianism, but also together forge a positive vision of who we are and want to be. Now, more than ever, it is important that we choose to care about each other, take care of each other, and include everyone. A great many of us want love to be one of our core values — love of people, love of country, love of justice, love of the environment.
Getting yelled at
I was part of the weekly social justice standout in the middle my town a few weeks ago, holding a sign that says “Protect Immigrants.” A couple of young college-age men out for a run came by us on the other side of the street. One of them yelled derisively, “I can’t even pay my tuition bills and you’re supporting people who don’t belong here.”
He had gone on down the road before I could think of any useful reply. I don’t know if I could have succeeded, but I would have loved to be able to dialogue with him. I would have loved to hear about his struggles and to share my vision of a unified people’s movement — a movement that advocates for better funding for public higher education, cancelling student debt, human rights and dignity for immigrants and other marginalized people, and bold action to solve climate change. I would have loved to be able to engage him in thinking about how the ultra-wealthy and their political supporters work to set us against each other and to deny us the resources needed to address all these issues.
We are in this together
I keep coming back to the idea that we are all in this together. There was a brief upsurge of this idea at the beginning of the COVID pandemic when we all masked to try to keep each other safe. Unfortunately, that was soon subverted by those who thought they had more to gain by sowing division and discord among us. But this is still an idea that can begin to knit us back together — to form threads of connection among us.
Deciding that we are all in this together is fundamental to welcoming immigrants, standing against racism, and joining with the people of the world to end the global climate crisis. It is fundamental to building community. With the perspective that we are in it together we will be more able to reach across political divides and find each other’s humanness. This could be the basis for creating a connection culture, rather than a cancel culture. Armed with this perspective we will be able to build relationships with people who don’t agree with us about everything.
Resisting the rise of authoritarianism
All of this is part of resisting the rise of authoritarianism. On April 5th literally millions of people in the U.S. took to the streets and joined in rallies to demand that the Trump/Musk/MAGA folks keep their “hands off” Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, women’s rights, free speech, transgender rights, veterans’ rights, democracy, etc. It was tremendously hopeful.
Get more linked up with each other
In order to be able to stop the rise in authoritarianism, we now need to all get more linked up with each other — organized into groups, building relationships, making community. They don’t need to all be political groups, they just need to be groups that give each of us a sense of community, a sense of not being alone, and sense of being connected with each other.
I think we will do well to remember the recent words of historian and blogger Heather Cox Richardson, who said on Instagram, “Authoritarians cannot rise if there are strong communities and people are acting with joy. You need despair and anger in order for an authoritarian to rise…. Whatever those things are that you bring to the community, do them and do them with joy. Don’t stop doing the things you love because you are scared.” Being in community with others and acting with joy are forms of resistance.
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I took this photo of cherry blossoms and a London Planetree at a children’s playground in Brooklyn. This tree is one of my highlights each spring.
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