How to Take Action in a World of Hate

Since Tuesday 11/8/16, I’ve been reading and crying and hiding and listening.

My cry is not because we didn’t break the glass ceiling — though it fucking sucks. It’s not a cry for my candidate not winning — that has happened many times. It’s not a cry for having the wool removed from my eyes — that was gone a while ago.

It is a cry for our future. A future that has radically changed.

Those of us who have been working hard on social and environmental change over the last many years have made progress. We have not stopped climate change, but at least we have slowed down the future destruction a bit. We have not stopped racism and sexism and prejudice, but we have changed awareness and moved the needle on what is normal behavior. Our economy was better, people felt safer, more people had healthcare (I still can’t afford it but 20M more people can), and there was hope for a better tomorrow.

But that version of tomorrow is a very long way off now. And we can no longer work toward that future right now. Our new future is very very dark, and each of us has to figure out how we play a role in that darker future.

We each have an obligation right now to step back and reevaluate everything we do.

We must reevaluate how we spend our time, what we do in our work, how we bring up our children, even where and how we live.

If you are white and/or someone of privilege YOU CANNOT STAND BY and watch as millions of people lose everything. Fight for your children, your friends, your neighbors. Fight for the future you really want to have for them. Fight to avoid a third world war, environmental destruction like we have never seen, a gap in wealth and opportunity that will soon look more like a chasm, and irreparable damage to the global unity we have been working for.

If you are not white and not as privileged, you have to work on being safe, and helping your kids learn what to do when they don’t feel safe. Familiarize yourself with resources where you can report crimes or seek safety and legal help. And then, you too have to fight — like you always have, and more.

We all have to fight to create safe spaces for our children — so they do not grow up where their predominant emotion is fear or hate. We have to parent harder than we already do.

Self preservation and sitting with our grief is fine for a while, but not for very long because this is going to get bad. We are going back in time and reversing a lot of progress. We are going to have to work harder just to keep from going backward as far.

But imagine if we don’t fight how much worse it will be.

Find your energy.

What you can do to take action when you’re ready.

1. Work to keep this from happening again. A lot of roads led us to where we are now, and several things need fixing so this doesn’t happen again.

You can work on electoral college reform, you can change algorithms on tech platforms so we aren’t all in our own echo chambers, you can get the other 100M Americans to vote (that’s more than the people who voted, and yes more of them are liberal), you can get more good people into office, you can change voting laws to reopen polls that were closed this year and make it easier for people who have jobs and kids to vote.

You can also work on bridging the wide chasm of empathy and compassion in this country — through media, through education, through policy.

2. Stop Trump and our Republican Congress from reversing everything. There is a lot at stake and someone has to work to stave off the worst of it.

You can do this by giving organizations money — ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Environmental Defense Fund are a few examples. You can do this by calling and writing your Senators and Representatives whenever something is up for a vote. You can do this by protesting with your dollars, your midterm votes, and your presence (marches, hearings, etc).

Never underestimate the power of media — if you have a way to influence media and technology, you can do a lot with your presence.

Some big things to protect:

• Basic human rights like the right to life, to clean water and air
• Rights we have fought hard for like the right to vote and rent housing, to get married and adopt children, and the right to a fair trial
• The right for women to make decisions about our own bodies
• The right to seek refuge in the United States when you are in danger in your birth country

3. Help keep people safe. This shit is going to get real for a lot of people — just about everyone but middle- and upper-class cis white men. Sadly, there are already reports showing the changing normalization of hate. We have to look at what has happened throughout history in other areas of the world when someone as hateful and careless as this comes to power.

This year we’ve seen police violence show its true colors — we’ll be seeing a new level of radical violence from citizen against citizen as well — at our borders, in our cities, and definitely in our suburban and rural areas. Places we thought were safe will not be safe anymore. So you can either help stop violence before it starts, help punish violence after it happens, or help mitigate the effects of violence after it happens.

• domestic violence
• violence against women
• violence against people who are queer, gay and lesbian
• violence against people who are transgender, agender, androgynous and intersex
• violence against Muslims or who might look Muslim
• violence against people who are black, African-American, Native American, Latino and/or Hispanic
• violence against people with disabilities
• violence against anyone who might look like an immigrant
• violence against people who are vocal and public allies

We all must work to help make our public spaces safe: schools, workplaces, parks, streets, restaurants, government spaces, and more. Each of us has a role to play in this. Figure out what your role is and take action like your future — and those of your children — depends on it. Because it does.

Lots of people care, you’re not alone.

If you are afraid, if you feel unsafe — please know you’re not alone. Seek out others — for friendship, advice and safety. A lot of people are mobilizing right now to help keep you and your family as safe as possible.

Don’t assume others around you don’t care about you. I, for one, care more than you will ever know.

But also don’t assume others around you understand you. And much as it might suck, please don’t surround yourselves only with people who look and think like you.

This problem we are in now happened in part because of a lack of exposure to others — a lack of empathy which is largely dependent on proximity. You have to get out there and talk to people, be with people. We all do.

We are coming out of a deep, dark week where the world changed. Grief takes time.

But don’t let it take too long.

We all need you.

Be safe, and let’s work together to fight for the future we believe in.