A Resolution: Finding a Better Home Through Action
I need to take to the streets next year and put more of my thinking and feeling into action.
Just stewing on “the way things are” internalizes the sadness and frustration I feel about humanity's environmental impacts, technology’s “autonomy-killing” propensities, and the steady erosion of common purpose in political life. You could call this condition public-facing depression, or what somebody labelled “mourning in our bodies” from the harms that accumulate when it feels like our nation or our entire way of life is stuck in a slow-motion car crash.
I can’t remember his name, but there is a British environmental activist who has attributed the urgency he feels regarding the climate crisis and his ease in translating it into action to his being on the Asperger spectrum. Because of his wiring, somehow there is less in-the-way of his emotional response to this issue so his energy never simply festers. Instead, it feels "natural" for him to put his grief and his rage about our failures around climate change into action.
Greta Thunberg, another climate activist on the spectrum, felt the pain so acutely that she was physically disabled when she first realized what was happening to the world as a result of global warming. But then she found her “super-power” (as she calls it), not letting the information overload or the alarm she was feeling sap the sense of urgency she could turn into action.
Those of us with different wiring may need to make the choice more deliberately.
In a twist on a famous line: between the emotion and the act falls the shadow for many of us. So a brain trick, that's something like theirs, will be needed to lift the shadow that inhibits more productive responses. It is whatever you need to take the risk of action (or in Rebecca Solnit's words) “to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety.”
I heard a Jane Fonda interview this week on NPR's 1A, talking about the arc between public-facing depression and (for her, most recently too) climate activism. She recognized that driving an electric car and eliminating single-use plastics was not enough to lift her despondent shadow so she initiated Fire Drill Friday protests in Washington D.C.—a gauntlet of response from weekly, group education (about, say, recycling or ocean threats) to unlawful assembly on the Capitol steps where she and her fellow protestors announce: "I'm putting myself on the line to say 'Enough' to your foot dragging."
When she first escaped her sadness and hopelessness with action, Fonda felt better and people said she looked better. Like the former fitness maven she was in the 1980’s, she describes what she is doing today as “a full body experience.” But it's not just about her physical well-being. Fonda also wanted to “role-model” how to act on your sense of urgency because others who felt it too didn’t know what they should "do with it." Like a rabble-rousing, San Francisco broadcaster once closed his news programs, Fonda was saying to them: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”
Actions that lift the shadow can be smaller and more local than hers, but as with all dissenting voices, my sense of urgency will need to be shared with others who feel it (or at least can hear it) too. Public problems require a public face. As Solnit also writes in Hope in the Dark:
“The term ‘politics of prefiguration’ has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it’s a temporary and local place, this paradise of participating, this vale where souls are made.” (italics mine)
Her kind of activism faces out was well as in. Its “democratic,” outward-facing side can help me to build and enjoy the solidarity of change-oriented communities, but its inner benefits can be equally profound.
Next year, when I put more of the energy that had been going into sadness and frustration behind my “bets” on the future, that energy will no longer be turning “in on itself “ Instead, I’ll have outlets in possibilities I couldn’t see when I was keeping these emotions to myself, and a healthier home to live in.
My New Year’s resolution is: since I don’t like almost anything about the news today, I’ll have to try writing more of my own.
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Enjoy the week’s celebrations as we ring in the new year! I’ll see all of you in 2020.
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