Getting Ready

For me, one of the most difficult aspects of witnessing the Trusk administration’s annihilation of common sense and ethical governance is the helplessness that I feel.  I cycle through despair, helplessness, determination, inspiration, action, and back around again.  

There are relatively few options we have available to us at this moment.  Yes, we can call our elected officials, protest, boycott, and share information.  We can support legal organizations who are using the courts in the way they were intended–as a check against absolute power.  All of those things are resistance. 

But today, those tools feel overwhelmingly inadequate–necessary, but so, so far from being sufficient. More importantly, they rely on basic assumptions about how things work that may no longer apply–things like precedent, the “rule of law”, separation of powers, transparent government, the Constitution. Increasingly, it feels like we need to think outside of the systems we know and rely on–because they may not exist or be reliable anymore.  

So, what do we do?  In recent staff and board meetings, we have begun to explore this question–and so far, we keep coming back to Getting Ready.  

• “Get Ready” for what?
  • Get ready to help those who need to flee–by building safety networks
    
  • Get ready to help ourselves or our community members if blindsided by lost jobs, lost programs, lost health care, lost safety net services–by forming and strengthening cross-community connections
    
  • Get ready to do things we don’t know about now but trust will emerge, by optimizing and prioritizing our emotional, mental, spiritual and physical health to endure sustained resistance
    
  • Get ready to imagine, debate, and build a new way by being trained in conflict resolution, strategic community collaboration, grassroots organizing, civil disobedience

We are having rich discussions about what history has taught us, what insights and guidance we can glean from writers, artists, faith leaders (lay and professional), elders, young people, each other.  We are considering how to move beyond what we know today, how to live into a future that gives light and love–not an ethereal dream, but a real, concrete, living future. 

• We are asking ourselves: 
  • What does collective liberation mean if we find it challenging to include the perpetrators of this harm in our vision?  How do we keep our faith steady when people around us celebrate viciousness? What does it mean to believe that none of us are free until all of us are free, when we have feelings of anger, frustration, and contempt for those who support the greed and cruelty we are witnessing?
    
  • How do we both uphold the humanity in all of us, and also hold all of us accountable?
    
  • What follows collapse? 
    
  • If we are living in the Hunger Games, who is the audience and who are the tributes? 
    
  • If we look at Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem Map through the lens of what is happening today, what would an overlay of “Getting Ready” look like?
      
  • Why is it that progressive groups can talk collaboration, but often seem to fall apart due to lack of focus and cohesion?  What’s missing in our skill set that we need to build up?
     
  • How do we fashion a new way, with debate and disagreement and leadership and collective action and decisiveness and creativity?
     
  • What do we disrupt? What do we leverage?  What do we build? What do we reject?
    
  • How do we forge hope in the midst of despair? 

We don’t have the answers to these questions…we don’t know.  We are leaning into the questioning and the not knowing.  We invite you to question with us, debate with us, lead us..

and Get Ready with us. 

We would love to know your thoughts about these questions.  Drop us a line or get on over to Mighty Networks* and share your thoughts there.

—-Ann (ann@uuwf.org)

*UUWF hosts a women+, secure social networking space on Mighty Networks, where we connect, learn, and inspire each other to act.  Want to be a part of the conversation? It’s easy to become a member!