The oligarchs and their puppets in the White House have conducted decades of propaganda and disinformation to discredit the revolution. Now, they seek to demoralize their opposition with a hailstorm of executive orders. They are counting on the resistance to wear themselves out, screaming and yelling before throwing up their hands in bitter resignation. This tactic has been working for the oligarchs for the last ten years, and there is no reason to believe they will change their tactics.
How do those who resist their reactionary propaganda and programs respond? How can we resist for the long haul?
America, Here’s the Problem
We have become spiritually unhealthy people whose dis-eased spirits live in hatred, distrust, anger, and despair. We waste the energy of our mind, body, and soul flailing against the prevailing winds of social change and have neither the patience, resilience, nor persistence to deal with this continuing threat to our common life. We must find a healthier way to sustain our resistance.
To mount a Spiritually Healthy and Sustainable Resistance (SHaSR—it rhymes with Chaucer), we need humility, respect for others, right-headedness, a shared community, and a deep capacity for solitude.
Humility offers a grounding in an acceptance of ourselves as we are. We have a self-standard to which we can rally when others attack our identity. We have no need to defend ourselves because we know who we are. Many attacks will fall apart on a solid wall of self-acceptance and humility. The Right can throw accusations of being woke, calling us snowflakes, “libtards”, left-wingers, and communists. Still, our self-acceptance will easily deflect these body blows. We know and accept who we are. Inordinate or poorly grounded pride leaves us vulnerable to these attacks, but humility protects us.
Respect for others allows us to acknowledge our friends and those who oppose us. Respect acknowledges and celebrates differences. When we are under attack, our respect for the other will allow us to see others as they are, no more and no less. Trump is not a demon. He is a deeply troubled old man fighting to defend himself from his nightmares. The oligarchs are neither extraordinarily gifted leaders who deserve our obedience nor are they wolves destined to rule us all. They are rich people with a deeply flawed understanding of power and influence and lack a social conscience. This respect will also allow us to stand in solidarity with those who are our co-resistors. We see them as clearly as we see ourselves and can ally with them appropriately. In respect, we see others for who they are and can resist accordingly.
Right-headedness will enable us to see the circumstances of our resistance and discern the things that support our vision and values. Troll farms seek to disinform us. They manipulate our perceptions and ideas in ways that serve their purposes. Right-headedness allows us to see through the nonsense and use our capacity for critical analysis to make up our own minds. When we are driven by fearmongering or flattery, right-headedness leads us to ask probing questions and the capacity to hear and assess the answers to those questions. With clear insights, we will find ways to respond to the counterrevolutionaries meaningfully.
Having a shared community allows us the space we need to relax, grow, find support, and gain new perspectives on our present lives. It allows us to celebrate our time and place with others, reflect on our experiences, and find the resources to rejoin the resistance. The administration uses carefully orchestrated rallies, while the resistance tends to rely on smaller gatherings in coffee shops and meeting halls. A shared community enables us to find a meaningful respite from the grind of resistance before stepping forward again with renewed energy.
Finally, we need a deep capacity for solitude that represents a celebration of our uniqueness. Community notwithstanding, we are solitary beings who are deeply vulnerable to loneliness, isolation, and fear of abandonment. When solitude more closely resembles these vulnerabilities, we become overwhelmed by the darkness. Grounded in our humble understanding of ourselves, we need to be able to experience our aloneness as a healthy solitude, time to reflect upon our struggles, assess who we are, and better define the role of our resistance in our lives. Solitude gives us space to do the inner work necessary to carry out our resistance. Our capacity for solitude directly correlates with our ability to engage the oligarchs long-term.
When our spiritual health provides us with these capacities, we will also be able to face the headwinds of the counter-revolution with courage (boldness), resilience (bounce), and perseverance (standing our ground). We may grow weary but will have the resources to face the gales. Fear, distrust, anger, and despair may make occasional visits, but we will have the strength to push beyond them. There will be no need to resign our resistance. We realize that quitting is the only sure path to defeat. We will rejoin the resistance and stand firm.
Choose Your Guiding Values Carefully
Where do these miracle capacities come from? They are the by-product of choosing love, trust, joy, and hope as our guiding values. Without them, we will be swallowed by fear, distrust, anger, and despair, which will steal our energy and lead us to resign ourselves to life in the oppressive world of 1984 or that proverbial Brave New World. But with love, trust, joy, and hope, we will step forward into a truly brave new world.
These four values represent the fruit of a healthy inner life. We can choose them because we have developed a deep and honest relationship with ourselves and the world around us. We are not captive to our fears, shame, anger, or despair. Healthy people can choose to love and trust in their relationships. Health spirits will face life head-on by choosing joy and hope.
However, they are not automatic nor without their cost. Love risks being hurt. Trust risks betrayal. Joy risks being found a fool. Hope makes disappointment a real possibility. But, by choosing these values in relationships and situations and being armed with the capacities described above, we can and will make a difference with our resistance and be able to sustain our efforts when the headwinds begin to blow.
Healthy relationships depend on love and trust. Healthy responses to difficult situations depend on our capacity for joy and hope. Sustainable resistance relies on healthy relationships with ourselves, our cohort of resistors, and with those whom we are resisting. Sustainable resistance faces the challenges placed before us by the counterrevolutionaries with a healthy joy and hope that justice will triumph in the end. These four choices are central to our SHaSR.
Love prioritizes the needs of others when those needs are greater than our own. A healthy person with two coats will, in loving response, share their second coat with a person who has none. The hungry child will be given food. The lonely pensioner will be offered companionship. Each of these actions is a choice grounded in a value, love, that prioritizes the needs of others over our own.
Healthy relationships thrive when we respond to the needs of others. But love demands that we identify the genuine needs of ourselves and others and then respond appropriately. We parse the difference in wants and needs and identify the needs by their impact on ourselves and others. An alcoholic may want or even need a drink, but is it loving to pour him a shot? We must weigh the other’s needs against our own and decide on a course of action. We may want to pour that drink to make our lives easier, but our desire does not match their need. Loving acts, though difficult, are energizing when they grow out of a loving relationship.
But love is only part of a healthy relationship. Trust is foundational to healthy relationships with ourselves and others. Trust means entrusting our needs to others. Like love, it requires that we distinguish between wants and needs and the ability of ourselves and others to address those needs. However, it requires an additional ability to know who and how much to trust others with our needs. (I never promised that this would be easy!)
Trust requires a clear-headed assessment of what makes our lives worthwhile and then recognition that we cannot provide everything within ourselves. Self-sufficiency is a dangerous delusion. We all need others. But we need to choose where we place our trust wisely. Providing an alcoholic with a drink invests our need to avoid conflict with them. But such trust is misplaced and destructive to the alcoholic. Know who you can trust with your needs and lean into those relationships.
However, we need to be wary of echo chambers. These places support your needs but violate your need to be honest with yourself. Many people on the left and the Right will invest deeply in relationships that confirm their biases instead of challenging their insights and conclusions. Resistance requires clear thinking and feeling. Echo chambers of people who agree with us about everything prevent us from being honest with ourselves and those around us. However, a clearly understood idea and insight, especially when it reveals our biases and prejudices, invigorates our resistance and helps us sustain it even when others disagree.
Joy is the chosen capacity to celebrate each day as an opportunity to live into our resistance and make a difference. It addresses our measure of control over our daily lives. Individually, we do not have any control over how our actions will change other people. However, we all can control how we enter those relationships. When our success or failure is no longer a factor in our joy, we find meaning and fulfillment. When we "enjoy" our resistance, we will find it easier to persevere, be more resilient, and bounce. Ask yourself each morning, what can I do today to resist the injustice around us. Let your resistance be the source of your joy, not your need to control the outcome.
But joy in the work alone will not sustain your resistance. We all need hope.
Hope is the choice to believe that justice will eventually emerge from the chaos. Hope is not so much about actual events surrounding the emergence of justice as it is about the timing of justice. Justice will appear in its own time, not ours. Hopelessness is more about impatience than reality. Hopelessness complains that it is "not yet." While hope leans into “what if” and lives “as if” justice is already appearing. It sees the seeds of justice in the murky chaos of the present. It keeps paddling toward the future, convinced that justice awaits us. It does not allow setbacks, lies, distortions, or propaganda to destroy those seeds of hope. Choosing hope over despair is to live our lives "as if" justice will prevail even though we may never see it. Such hope will feed our souls and give strength and insight to our bodies and minds. Combined with joy, it will make rising each day to the difficult circumstances of the resistance a health-giving moment.
Love and trust, joy and hope are essential choices for everyone who faces challenging circumstances. However, these values are aspirational. We must acknowledge that we grow into them but will not always live up to them fully. Therefore, choices must be made and renewed regularly. Just as our society has yet to live fully into the promise of our founders, these values are aspirational and inspire us to stay firm in our resistance. Love, trust, joy, and hope are meant to inspire us to rise each day and serve the resistance. Aspirational values are the only ones worth investing in our lives. Any aspiration that can be completely fulfilled would be too little to ask for with a precious lifetime. The resistance will not falter as long as we continue making these choices and push toward their fulfillment.
Spiritually Healthy and Sustainable Resistance (SHaSR)
Self-care will enable us to resist in the long haul by keeping the mind, body, and soul in conversation. When we do, our mind can see through the smoke, our body will withstand the hardships of the journey, and our soul can remain focused on the values and vision that keep us going.
Spiritual dis-ease occurs when our mind overthinks, our body becomes weary, and our soul gets lost in our emotions. As these problems increase, we struggle to maintain the energy to face challenges and disappointments. We may withdraw or start lashing out haphazardly.
Self-care enables us to keep the mind, body, and soul in communication with each other through our internal dialogue. The soul will help us maintain an appropriate energy level to make meaningful choices. The body will offer us the perceptive ability to see and interact with the world around us. The mind will remain clear enough to sort through the evidence and understand viable options so that we can respond meaningfully. Working together, the mind, body, and soul contribute unique voices and gifts. When they do so, we are able to maintain the energy we need to resist the prevailing winds of the counter-revolution. They help us choose to love and trust while living in joy and hope. These values will replenish the reserves of energy when we need it.
We may grow weary, but we will not faint.
We may become angry, but that anger will not deter us from our resolve to love and trust.
We may become confused, but our minds will still have the resources to step back and take a new look at the world around us.
Together, they will give us the energy we need to persevere until that new day dawns.
Let it be said about this generation, as was said about Elizabeth Warren, “Nevertheless she persisted!”
SHaSR is the key to our persistence, and our resistance will continue. We will not be silenced by intimidation, threats, or any other actions by the counter-revolution. Our ancestors invested too much of their lives in bringing our revolution this far. Many of us have been engaged in the revolution our whole lives. More people than ever are moving toward justice in their social conscience. May it be said of us, “Nevertheless, they persisted.”
Bob
