It is the eve of the presidential inauguration.
Tomorrow, power relations will shift radically in this country. The world was already dying, its people and plants and animals and very breath and blood and skin already dying, before America’s hallucinatory descent into authoritarianism. The insane drive to accumulate pointless wealth and unthinking xenophobia already threatened billions of lives. But there is absolutely no doubt we have entered–with the ecological crisis progressing faster than any model can dream, relations between nations and people fraught with violence and the potential for it, and the most power in the world concentrated in the hands of a particularly mercurial and idiotic despot–a uniquely precarious and dire phase in human existence.
My name is Arnold. I’ve spent a lot of my life involved in political movements confronting the ecological crisis, doing direct action which negotiates the murky borders of acceptable risk, and I want to say something about how we live together in the new world we are entering.
It is very simple: Fear and moral smallness are the same thing. The moral clarity to recognize injustice is what one possesses when one is able to see the world beyond the narrow self interest described by their fear.
Therefore, what I want to say is: Do not be afraid. We do not have to agree on anything but we have a responsibility to collectively defend one another. We all have much to lose. We will lose the least if we all take principled risks, on behalf of the collective good, greater than those strictly demanded us.
I want to be honest that I have grappled with fear in the last couple of months. Many who dissent have grappled with fear and considerations of diminishing their role in a movement or their propensity for conflict with unjust forces. I have personally entertained such thoughts. I think it’s important that at least some of us who advocate conflict and risk acknowledge our personal fears and the thought processes fear has engendered: I do not want to go to prison. I do not want to be tortured. I do not want to die. I so badly don’t want these things, and they seem realistic enough, that I’ve considered not taking actions that I felt called to take on principle.
I would likewise be amiss if I did not acknowledge that a few weeks ago I woke from a dream in which a voice from Standing Rock was telling the water protectors to take courage and stand their ground, in which the drums and smoke of burning sage and singing with which we’ve confronted domestic military forces were present, and I knew immediately I was done with fear. To do otherwise would be to deny the power I have shared with others in the struggle for a liveable future, to deny the power I’ve felt in the hills and in our collective courage and in indigenous singing to confront the power of machines.
This is not a precarious or equivocal position. On the contrary, I have never been so certain of where my energies belong. My heart and mind and blood and body and whole being are in this fight forever, and I feel absolutely certain that every injustice I’ve witnessed or been subject to has strengthened this resolve. This is the idiocy of injustice: It inflicts pain to instill compliance, but it is precisely the pain of past abuses which we call on for the strength to resist.
I have spent plenty of time, long before Trump, questioning my choices to encourage others to fight power or to take risks. I am sometimes burdened by my choices. So know that I do not take the choice to say this lightly.
There is no point in describing an action as a matter of principle unless one is willing to take it precisely when it implies risk or hardship to oneself. If you were willing to take an action and describe it as a moral necessity before the current wave of authoritarianism, it is all the more pertinent to take it now. If we acquiesce to our fears we will realize them. Trump represents nothing if not an unjust application of force, and collective courage is all we possess in the face of an unjust application of force. We create the greatest likelihood of survival if we act on principle and overcome, or at least coherently engage, our terror.
Let us not step back. Let us instead fight together, friends. We will need each other very badly to survive what is coming.
With Love,
Arnold