What we did wrong
It’s been three weeks. Three very long weeks. We’ve now had time to experience the first four of the famous five stages of grief and loss: Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. I know that you, like me, are NOT interested in (nor are we ethically or morally capable of) moving to stage 5: Acceptance.
No. We will not accept. We will not go gentle into that [very dark] night. I don’t mean to propose that we hunker down in the “he’s not my president” bunker. Because, um, he is. Or soon will be. I mean we cannot, must not, blanket our grief with desperate acquiescence. We cannot say to ourselves or each other: “Gee, he can’t really fuck up everything, can he? Maybe we just wait it out.”
We don’t just wait it out.
We move. We act.
But what do we do that is not just a repeat of what we did that resulted in where we are now? I’d like to suggest that we good-hearted people, we card-carrying members of the (Social) Justice League helped create the climate and the culture that elected the person who is about to head our country. I would like to suggest that we accept some of the blame and learn from our mistakes.
Here’s what I think we did wrong, not in the months leading up to the election, but for years and years.
We failed to create an understanding that we are NOT in a zero-sum game here. My empowerment is not your disempowerment. My win is not your loss. My right to marry whomever I love is not your loss of marriage sanctity. The more people we empower, the more power we ALL have, the stronger we ALL are. Why wasn’t that our clear message?
We allowed basic respect for human beings and sensitivity to others to be branded “political correctness” and then turned into a joke. How did that happen? How did being civil and granting people dignity become political in the first place? What the hell does it have to do with politics?
And speaking of war of the words that we lost, may I just say: Pro-Life. What a genius (and largely unchallenged) move to re-brand those who sought to rob women of the power over their own bodies as pro anything. We who oppose them are, what, anti-life? When you allow others to craft the narrative, they can assign you a part. And they did.
We did not insist, a decade or more ago, that Media Literacy be a required course in middle and high school. Or part of adult education in our communities. So we have hundreds of thousands, we have millions and millions of people who don’t know the difference between fake news and vetted, verified information, who don’t know the difference between opinion and fact, who can be fooled by fabrications, who know the world through tweets. Shame on us.
My list is longer. But I’ll stop now. I want to hear from you. Where do you think we went wrong? Let’s get it out in the open and take some responsibility. And then let’s move forward with intelligence and heart, with energy and deep commitment.
4 comments
Let’s try this again. Feel free to delete my earlier error-laden comment.
Brilliant essay, Lauren! Very well said.
I don’t disagree with any of this. We allowed others to define us, or I should say, define what is and what isn’t appropriate behavior. We let political correctness get out of control. Heck, we let it in the door in the first place and that was wrong. We either forgot or chose to ignore those basic rules of common decency… the stuff we learned in kindergarten, for heaven’s sake!
We sacrificed, to a degree, our own sense of self and let someone else tell us who and why we were. We gave up our own self-examination and turned to others for validation.
And… we let social media make us its bitch.
We became so “lost” to ourselves that we relied on others to tell us what the score was in this game called life.
And those “others”?
Narrow-minded, uneducated… or at least, “unlearned”, persons with no ambition but a desire… need… to manipulate others.
We thought we were fighting the monsters.
We were wrong.
We let them lead us down the garden path and now, in all likelihood, a man who is the poster child for everything we thought we were fighting against is about to unleash a shit storm on America.
We had a choice. We had a chance to make a change. Instead we sat back and became bit players in someone else’s puppet show.
We still have a choice…
Eat shit or fight back.
I have no intention of going quietly into that long, dark night.
I am calling “bullshit” to all the bullshit and hyper-political-correctness.
I’m not letting anyone “take the sky from me”.
“Bit players in someone else’s puppet show.” Exactly, Veronica. We let others define us. We let others create the story. We, all of us, are the story.
Lauren
As to who the enemy is I would like to quote a friend of ours “…the poor white man is just a pawn in their game”
As we all are, Richard, as we all are. Unless, of course, we decide not to play. Or to change the rules.
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