Courage, care, and connection

I stilled my nerves to sleep on and off through the night, but the third time I woke up, I thought I saw sunlight creeping in under the window shade. “Maybe it’s morning,” I thought, checking my bedside clock and seeing 5:40am. “I can’t wait any longer,” I decided, climbing out of bed and stumbling into the next room to lift my phone from the charger.

Punching in the code. Swiping to the New York Times. “Trump wins” were the only words I saw. I expected to feel agony. In fact, I just felt numb. How are we back here again? After all that we had been through as a country, how could we have reelected him? Of course, most of my fellow citizens don’t feel that way. Whether they embraced Trump enthusiastically or reluctantly, they had welcomed him back into the White House.

What does this mean for us? We need look no further than Trump’s own promises, although he is famously even less trustworthy than your average politician. He has pledged to “be a dictator on day 1”; repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the massive climate bill passed in 2022; “get … transgender insanity the hell out of our schools”; and deport every undocumented immigrant in the country. His cruel beliefs are antithetical to everything I believe and stand for. He fully embraces and represents the interests of the greedy elite class of which he is a member. The top 1% of wealthy individuals in this country own almost one-third of this country’s wealth, and they want more. As a class, they will stop at nothing to divide us through blaming immigrants, transgender people, and the poor for everyone’s problems and accumulating wealth by driving down their taxes as far as they possibly can.

This is the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy that was built into this nation at its founding.

We chip away at that system, as our ancestors did. There have always been Black people, Indigenous people, Latine people, Asian people, Middle Eastern people who have fought back against the oppressive systems working against them, and there have always been white people – as small in numbers as we have sometimes been – who worked as accomplices with those people of color. Sadly, as we have seen in this election, there have also always been people of every race who were more willing to collaborate with the system than push back against it.

In this moment, as at many in the past, those ready to fight back against this system are a minority. Less than half of those who voted chose someone other than Trump. But even of those who voted for someone else, clearly not all of them are ready to mobilize. Many of us are too invested in the system as it currently exists to act against it.

But if we examine the truths of this system, we see that it takes more from every single one of us than it gives. Some of us may gain money, others power, others esteem. But all of this comes at the price of true community with one another. Even a white, middle-class, heterosexual cis-gender man like myself who seemingly benefits in many ways is actually losing. I lose my connection to my family and friends as I work non-stop to save up enough for my retirement. I lose my health as I focus on monetary gain over my well-being. I lose my connection to the natural world as we strip the resources from the land around us to feed this insatiable system. If I tally the emotional, mental, and physical costs and benefits of collaborating with this diabolical institution, I see that I, just like everyone else, comes out a loser.

And so, those of us who are ready to give up the devil’s bargain must stand against the forces of darkness, as we always have. We are currently a minority of a minority in this country. But that is not a reason to despair. It is a reason for courage, because we can recognize that those who fought these fights always started from a position of numerical weakness but moral strength.

As we engage in the battle to come, we must ground our fighting stance in three principles. First, we must be willing to name the contradictions inherent in the system. It claims that it benefits those who support it. We must expose this lie as scholar Ian Haney-Lopez teaches – to demonstrate, as I earlier did for my own situation, how all of us come out behind. Second, we must be willing to build coalitions with those who don’t yet see the contradictions. We will engage this fight in our current numbers, but we will not win it with them. We must bring others who are inclined to agree with us into the fight. And we must convince some of those who don’t agree with us that they too are losing out in the current status quo. Some of them might be too enraptured by the system to be convinced. Although the wealthiest 10% in this country are also losing out on community, health, and connection, they are gaining so much in money and power that most of them will never come around. But we should be open to convincing anyone. Third, we must be willing to disrupt the functioning of the system through labor and street actions to demonstrate power outside of the electoral arena. Professor August Nimtz tells us we must build and show power in places other than elections to demonstrably influence the system. I believe that we must act through a combination of political levels – elections, strikes, demonstrations – even when we don’t yet have the numbers to make our will felt.

If we engage this fight – and if we do it in solidarity with others across lines of class, race, and gender – we will build the power that we need to win. Not just to block Trump, Not just to elect someone slightly more favorable to our life chances in the next election. But to create communities of courage, care, and connection that are for the best in all of us. I do this for my child. I do this for my wife. I do this for my parents, my sister, my nieces, all of my family. I do it for myself. I do it for you. As I know that you do it for me.