by Joe Courter
I was at a music show at First Magnitude last Saturday (my motto for a better life: “you gotta leave the house” ), and an Iguana reader who knew me came up and earnestly asked “Do you have any hope?” I said a qualified yes, but it got me to thinking about the feeling of hope I do have, what it is focused on besides just a general feeling and attitude toward this one life I get to live, and trying to enjoy every day.
My hope is based on history, on what has worked in the past, and that has always been organizing. It is also based on a realistic assessment of the tools we have to build a resistance to this rising authoritarian coup by which Trump and MAGA have grabbed this nation. They are approaching things with the arrogance that Trump once said regarding women: “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.” They have played an audacious hand, the deck has been increasingly stacked for decades and they have capitalized on it. It’s like when you own a store, there are certain conventions customers follow in doing business. Now, it’s like an armed gang has come to loot the place. The norms of business/society have been thrown out the window. Our rights, our public services, our free and open educational system, vandalized or snatched! What we need to do is organize and energize a broad opposition, use what tactics we can find to work and turn it around. What will be the power that will motivate such a movement? You guessed it, hope.
There are four words in the Constitution I find extremely important: “promote the general Welfare.” Those words were put into action more than any other time in history in the 1930s under FDR, coming out of the Depression. To the horror of the greedy overlords, taxes were going to be directed to those in need! Poor people, black people, immigrants were to be lifted up toward some ideal of equality, and inequities of the past in some way be acknowledged and compensated. This “New Deal” sparked opposition that has now, after decades of repressive legislation and Supreme Court rulings, metastasized into the greed and self-centered MAGA, who reject all this seeing and caring about others as nonsense.
The dictionary says empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” It does not, I notice, say anything about action, but for human beings, we are at our functional best when we give a damn about other people, and we prioritize and live by a philosophy that promotes such behavior. You know, that “it takes a village’’ thing. Building up good things takes work. What MAGA is doing — tearing things down, ripping things away, decreeing prohibitions — that’s no work except destruction, being done rapidly before opposition arises. Because they know we outnumber them, and why they are disrupting electoral processes with dark money and voter suppression.
Back to hope: My hope is that we empathetic people can build a functional resistance to this breakdown in democratic norms that is being perpetrated on this nation and its people. Find inspiration in the NYC mayor’s race with Zohran Mamdani and their grassroots campaign. Iowa just flipped their state House with Democrat Caitlin Drey. When the European leaders recently descended on the White House I saw a clip of them mingling before Trump came in the room: affable, friendly, cultured people. They were not asked to come, but they organized themselves to come, to speak up and speak out. They recognize this MAGA mess here in the US as a problem that affects them, too. They acted to do what they could in that moment.
Awareness needs to go beyond just seeing the horrors to where we can find paths of resistance we feel comfortable joining in with. We can’t individually do it all, but plug in somewhere. Find good independent sources of information, support and share them. Find organizations of other people, from book clubs to big protests, and counter the fear and feelings of helplessness. Join and/or support groups that are already working toward justice and human rights, be it immigration, labor, or social justice based. Be ready to support those being directly affected by the shit going down. Make art and decorate your community. Hold a sign on a corner, or put one up somewhere. Preserve our already flawed election system and actively hold our elected representatives to account with calls, letters and visits. Stay healthy, we are going to need each other. Keep hope alive.