Rediscovering Humanity

Hi, friends. Welcome back and thank you for joining me.

To start us off, I’m going to ask everyone to take a breath. Read this line, close your eyes, try your best to empty your mind, and take a deep breath. Okay? Okay.

I’m not going to reiterate everything in the news. There’s too much and I have nothing new to add that people on the ground haven’t already said. What I will do is ask you to be mindful about who you’re following for updates and action items right now. Anyone who’s telling you “nothing is happening” and “no one is doing anything” are either panicking or lying to you. I highly recommend following Celeste Pewter for accurate updates and action items, reading this piece from Garrett Bucks, and taking a look at some of Rabbi Danya Ruttenburg’s work from Life is a Sacred Text instead of doomscrolling today. 

Breathe. 

Optimism in the Face of Overwhelming Loss

All my life, I’ve been an optimist. I’ve been through some pretty harrowing ordeals, and sometimes my mind becomes a very dark place, but in the end, I always come out on the side of hope. I always have. It is in the core of my being.

Hope is very difficult to come by right now. But still, I seek it out. I choose it. I fight for it.

In the deepest part of my spirit, I truly believe that so much of the rot we are experiencing in the present moment is born of forgetting to look for the humanity in others. When people are hurting, they frequently turn inward. But we are social creatures. We are made to exist in community. It is why we all, even the worst of us, seek it in some form.

Every day, I become more and more convinced that the push toward individualism and isolation has caused deep, abiding wounds to the collective human soul. There is a reason solitary confinement is proven to be psychologically damaging. There is a reason we are seeing the cracks in the idea that billionaires become billionaires through some individual drive or achievement rather than as the collective work of dozens, hundreds, thousands of other people who make billionaires’ existence possible. 

The one cannot exist without the many, and that is what the powerful want us to forget.

Rediscovering Our Love for Humanity

Last night, my spouse was watching a video of a man who created an elaborate (but harmless) mechanism to prank his wife. He spent hours crafting, creating, and executing just to experience a few seconds of joy when it worked and his wife realized what he’d done (again, a harmless and easily remedied situation). I watched this and I thought: what an incredible species we are.

The human experience is so vast, so varied. People’s minds are capable of so many different things, fascinated by so many different interests. We pursue our passions. We create mind-boggling works of art, literature, science, architecture, and industry every single day, across the globe. We work endlessly to heal what ails us, to cure the sick, to treat the wounded. Every last one of us is a universe, uniquely ourselves but also part of a great community organism.

As part of that tapestry, some of us are capable of great acts of violence and evil. Truly, I believe we all are, but every day we make a choice. We choose to be a wretched, vicious cudgel, or we choose to be a person who lives in a society. Every day, we make that decision anew. You are making it right now.

There are no easy answers, here. That is the core that those who would enact violence seek to exploit. People want there to be easy labels for good and evil. They want simple answers to complex problems – problems to which there is no universal solution. We are not where we are today because of any single actor or single problem. Like the rest of human existence, this is a complex web of crossroads and the result of a group of human beings working together to enact a system intended for the dominance of the few, not the survival of the many.

What do we do? Where on this tiny blue marble do we even begin to combat this?

We begin by rediscovering the humanity in others.

Curiosity is Strength, Empathy is Power

The human experience is enormous, and it is good to be curious about other people. A variety of worldviews encourages diverse thought and a broader (and kinder) sense of self. Community leaders who keep their community isolated through persecution rhetoric and an elitist view (“only WE know the truth, only WE are chosen”) do so out of a sense of control, not care.

Discouraging curiosity, questions, and interest in the complexity of other people is how we dehumanize one another. It makes it easier to be callous. It makes it easier to control the message. At its core, it’s an exploitation of the human desire to be both accepted and special. It is cutting a limb or organ from the body, severing it from the spirit.

Discouraging education and curiosity is always a method of control. It is never a method of protection. It is isolating, not uniting. 

No large group of human beings is universally evil. We need to divorce ourselves from that thought. No large group is broadly stupid. They can be misled, manipulated, exhausted. But they are not stupid. People who are disadvantaged and tired seek leaders who lighten their mental load. They seek an authority that can tell them how to live in a way that benefits them. They are too tired to do it all themselves. Bad actors take advantage of this.

The current state of America is dismal. There is no getting around it. We are one of the world’s wealthiest nations and we refuse to care for our people in a substantial way. The Christian Nationalist movement has hijacked the message to obscure the fact that wealth disparity is the issue and have instead turned to standard nationalist scapegoating. “You are miserable because of outsiders, not because greed has run unchecked for too long.” 

This is textbook fascism. Every nationalist and fascist movement in history has operated by finding a targeted group of human beings to blame for society’s ills, and it has never been true. The target group will continue to get larger, and larger, and larger because they are not and have never been the problem. The few at the top consolidating power and exerting control are the problem, and they know it.

Our first step is to rediscover the humanity in others. To ask questions. To understand that the people you’ve been told are to blame for your woes are in fact more like you than like those causing actual harm.

We Carry On and We Reach Out

Now we continue.

We must ask ourselves: what has THIS PERSON really done to me? What have they personally done to hurt me, specifically? Anything? Nothing? Have you ever even met a person you know for a fact is transgender? Do you ever speak to a Black person outside of the shallowest of passing conversations? Has an immigrant ever harmed you in any real, tangible way? If so, is that single person truly representative of the vast group of which they are a part? Of course not.

These death-cult movements survive on fear and a promise that they will protect the “chosen.” People join these movements because they are promised safety and protection as part of the controlling class. This is not care. This is not safety. If you’re here reading this, it’s because you know in your heart that it is a lie. You know that you cannot steal safety from others and keep it for yourself. It will always be under attack. 

There will always be another threat. You will never be safe. The powerful will point out the next enemy, then the next, then the next, and you will continue to exist in a perpetual state of loss and fear. Moreso, you will be severed from the spirit of humanity – from all the incredible things we are capable of when we unite.

People are seeking acceptance and connection. That is ultimately why the alt-right rose – they found people who wanted answers to questions they didn’t know how to ask and offered them a hand. They sought people’s misery and gave them a uniting element to blame. They met them on their level. We must do the same.

This rot in the soul of humanity can be defeated. It will be. It will take time, and blood, and tears. It will be anguishing. It will be so, so, so hard. But humanity rolls toward wanting to do more than simply survive – we want to live. Do not ever give up on the human spirit. 

If you take one thing away from this letter today, take this: humanity has survived uncountable horrors without losing our joy, and we will again. No evil, no person, no movement can kill our collective soul.