What to Do When Everything is True: Political Contemplation in a Trumped-Again America
During an aftermath and before what's to come, political contemplation must precede political action.
There are no lies in an aftermath. Notice how decision cleaves truth. It’s temporary, but in this moment, everything feels true: The racial breakdown of the vote. The If Only Biden Had retrospectives. Movement rhetoric to gear up for what’s to come. Scanned poems go viral. Quotes from dead activists with “THIS” ascribed underneath it. Existential questions about the manipulative power of christian nationalism to erode democracy. Saying “unprecedented.” The beckoning for collective healing that categorically damns capitalism. Exhaustion. Reminders to breath. Resource lists. More James Baldwin. And, with all that, for BIPOC folx in the margins: the relentless reminders that unless you are straight, white, christian, propertied, or passing of these supremacist identities, you may not survive the next half decade.
All of this is true, and has been.
When you live a day as truthful as today in America, there is no burden or fear greater than to sit with oneself, holding admittance that despite efforts—we are not just “going back,”— we are likely going some place worse. We know that the impossible is possible while unconscionable barbarism continues to be live-streamed to populations, more or less, immobilized within a fixed denial. It’s difficult to sit with the sun this morning knowing that no amount of the past could scare people into a better future.
The timeline we are on will continue. There will be no shortage of nonprofits to donate to, join, or sign up to support. Eventually, there will be infographics comparing 2016-2020 and 2024-2028, with percentages to show the uptick of surveillance, suppression, harassment, and violence against anyone who isn’t or can’t be aligned with supremacist ideologies. You’ll hear the response to fascism: calls to community formation, civic engagement, relationally-led political organizing, protests. More. More masters posing as shamans. Increased fees for service from experts. Increased free services from burned out practitioners emptied beyond their reserves. Poor disabled folx will die. New spokesheroes will emerge. More crowdfunding. Memorials. New rhetoric. Institutions will promise things. Art will stir our dreams. Vined ecosystems of misinformation will expand. Triggers, emotional reactivity will be explained through more trauma-informed approaches.
This is to come. This and more.
Ironically, we will ask and be asked for more. To consider more. Learn more. Make more. Take more. Despite intentions, the biggest and most pervasive illusion will be purported by all sides: do more for the sake of freedom/democracy/liberation/salvation/peace. We will be chided to make this place better for our children. Learn from our parents. Advocate for migrants. Protect trans youth. Honor the ancestors. We will be invited to virtually process with strangers to be told we aren’t alone, but probably left unaccompanied in the engulfing feeling of aloneness. We will be reminded to ground ourselves. We will push ourselves.
None of this is wrong.
It is imperative to organize and, simultaneously, understand that it is unlikely that the deeply entrenched oppressive systems will be transformed or transcended solely with or within a political approach. Systems and their protectors raised us - you, me, and “them.” And systems don’t forget anyone. It knows where to situate each and every one of us to ensure its continuance. The intention is to know you better than you know yourself. That’s the design of exploitation.
The collapse of the democracy is impending, we’re told, but the collapse of its people is, is already, and has been. Movement workers know this, and teach: People over profit. Earth before institutions. Community over individuality. But even with these espoused values, we often end up moving at the pace of the oppressor we claim to oppose. So, before the luge of political action ensues, before the ringtoss of blame, before we forget ourselves in order to save ourselves, and before you sign up to do “more,” —don’t forget that contemplative practice is not solely for mystics, monks, and theists. It is a creative discipline for anyone committed to the imperfect, often transactional exchange of labor for social justice.
Those of us able to interrogate the United States of America are led to and left with a multitude of questions; the kind of questions that activate us like a kicked ant hill, sending most of us skittering in all directions. Have we, have our communities grown in the way a dictator hopes or fears? But, to reach beyond electoral antiquities and partisan blame, we have to ask ourselves individually and collectively:
Can we become something we have never been before?
Because it is that uncertainty - not Trump - that haunts America. The most useful strategy after the cleaver of decision is the chiseling of contemplation: a countercultural, self-generated, chosen stillness. Not a reactive silence. It is the only practice that could produce a different outcome than yesterday.
For many of us, the repetitive nature and velocity of political action born from reaction, combined with the dearth of reflection, may prove to be just as or more harmful than the policies we are trying to change. Try to resist the manufactured post-election urgency in the spirit of revolution. In order to break these cycles of life-stealing, joy-thwarting oppression, we need deeper foci and relationships that actually nourish us, and less “more.” We need to become unknowable to the systems through individual and collective contemplation. Then, then to act.