Own it

We have to own it.

No more railing against those other people in other places who say and do those things we cannot believe they do. No more shock about the man who golfs and tweets as the death toll exceeds 100,000. No more astonishment over the spinelessness of that man’s party. No more channeling anger into posting horrific memes and upsetting images. No more gasping at what we have become. No more paralyzing grief.

It is our country that is tearing itself apart. It is our country. It is us. Maybe we believe ourselves to be the good ones, the righteous ones, the enlightened ones, the rational ones. But we are citizens of a country that has enshrined privilege and institutionalized inequality and elected and kept in power a monster.

This country is what we have allowed it to be, what we have—maybe silently, maybe unknowingly, maybe lazily—colluded in it becoming. And now we are horrified.

It is not aliens from another planet who have, overnight, transformed medically-endorsed mask-wearing into a divisive political statement. It is not a secret army of the brainwashed who arm themselves with assault rifles and march on state capitals, who hang their governors in effigy, who flock to the beaches to revel, ass to elbow, as the virus spreads. It. Is. Us.

To quote the Turkish proverb: ‘When the axe came into the forest, the trees said, “The handle is one of us.”

These people, this president, they are us. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we stop feeling special and above-it-all and oh-so-woke, the sooner we stop feeling smug, the sooner we can take real meaningful action. Maybe we are not part of the problem. But we sure as hell are not (yet)–not vibrantly, powerfully, whole-heartedly–part of the solution.

Let’s stop gasping and start acting.