No More: If it’s Coming to Our Doorsteps, it’s Going to Yours as Well
Let’s remember what we’ve always known: only mutual aid and mutual care will get us out of this nightmare, not tech bros
Sometimes, I think the answer to all our earthly problems is to care enough to make things better for one another. Really. Truly. That’s it. If we can put aside the demonizing and distancing that isolates us and instead remember something that we know deep in our DNA, this could be our path forward. In fact, this may be our actual Hail Mary.
Instead of the knee-jerk finger-pointing that gets so much wrong in quick pursuit of a easy focal point for blame, if we can settle in the knowing that mutual aid and mutual care are infinitely better — for our health, peace, longevity, prosperity, well-being and more, individually and collectively, today and in the future — than whatever the billionaires and those chasing their coattails have left for us, and if we can begin to act accordingly, we’ll get to the other side. I believe that will flow from that basis of understanding and acting will be something that is powerful and beautiful beyond what we can even imagine.
It’s easy for me, looking over snow from my safe little sanctuary of an office, to say this when the fires are raging, yes, I get that. I don’t have the smoke and ashes from all the wedding dresses, photo albums, keepsakes, homes, memories and more in my hair, on my skin, in my lungs. I don’t. I have not gathered what I could quickly grab, fled with what I could hold and not know if I’d have a home to return to when the fires receded this time. It’s important that we remember that tragedy can touch down anywhere and anytime without a moment’s notice. If you think you’re immune from this, you are in denial. Whether it’s something intimate and personal like a scary diagnosis, or something much bigger in scope and scale, like an unprecedented series of devastating fires or a hurricane moving in an anomalous path of destruction, we all know tragedy is a fact of life. Increasingly, though, as human-caused disasters close in on our ability to distance ourselves and detach, as the worst effects of capitalism in the form of climate change literally come home to roost, we are not going to be able to dissociate much more. Maybe push has finally come to shove, and I don’t mean to sound insensitive or uncaring to those who are currently feeling that shove, but maybe not having anywhere else to hide is the best thing to happen to us and move us past not caring enough.
Showing up for one another in a hands-on, vigorous way is something that our country has almost always excelled at but reserved for disasters and very rarely done between them. We love us some candlelight vigils after a school shooting, but we don’t work and fight for the systemic, structural, legislative and cultural changes that will make school shootings less imaginable. They should be unfathomable because that is actually sane.
Imagine not accepting the cynical complacency of “this is the way things are,” though. Imagine a string of arms locked together because we don’t let people suffer on our watches, because we know when some fall, they create bigger gaps for more to tumble through the cracks.
We show up because we’re stronger together and because it’s the right thing to do. It’s not much more complicated than that. We do this, too, because it’s the opposite of what the fossil fuel giants, preening tech bros and the oligarchs do, and it’s what they want us to forget in the chaos of our survival thrashings. They aided and abetted this living nightmare like we’re seeing in Los Angeles because the unfettered growth, domination and greed of billionaires demands it; our unwillingness to withhold our support of their dystopian vision and demand better of them and ourselves sustains it.
Don’t forget the Trump promise/threat to drill, baby, drill, which is going to lead to unfathomably worse climate conditions for the rest of us who don’t get to secrete ourselves away in our private jets, high-tech bunkers and gilded-gold residences as the world burns and the hurricanes rage, turning our homes into heaps of ash and rubble before our eyes.
Don’t forget it.
If the nightmare is coming to our doorsteps, and it is, it needs to have their addresses as well. I’m not calling for violence. I am calling for mutual freaking aid and to stop complying with the overlords and their cynical, indifferent avarice. We are so much more creative, resourceful and ingenious than they are: We need to remember this. It’s time to act and stand up for each other.
Let the nepo babies, oligarchs and bro billionaires keep racing each other to the moon. In the meantime, we can fuel our capacity to care for one another by knowing that every precious family memento, every home, every sense of security, every personal history, and those of your neighbors, near and far, matter. Stand up. Claim your space, even if it’s for the first time. Show the world how a deeply connected, caring, creative, compassionate person lives. If we do this like our lives depend on it, and they do, these terrible boys with their monstrous toys will begin to disappear, I can promise you that.
It’s time. We can decide today and act like it.
Marla Rose is cofounding partner of VeganStreet.com.
