Photo by Jessie Simons
It is four days after the most violent act of anti-semitism in U.S. history and finally I am crying. I am on my deck, the sun is rising over Oakland, and the tears are flowing.
Numbness. On Saturday morning I saw something about another mass shooting and I had to tune it out. I ran right to my next thing -- a family-oriented work party in East Oakland to help the indigenous women–led Sogorea Te Land Trust create a resiliency hub in a very vulnerable community. I honestly forgot about the shooting, partly because I was working so hard but mainly because it’s become so commonplace and so normalized. Bombs in the mail to “enemies” of the state. Church shootings. Police shootings. Brown kids separated from the mothers and kept in cages.
I got home and didn’t read the news -- I didn’t want to read more. Instead I got on my phone and signed up with Sierra Club’s national texting team to get out the vote. I was assigned 1,000 voters in Wisconsin and it felt so good to connect with people. More than a hundred wrote back, thanked me for the text, asked more about the race and how they could get involved.
That night I finally read the news and connected the dots between all these acts of violence. At first I felt confident in my analysis that this all mapped back to Trump and the permission structure he has created with his hateful rhetoric. And no doubt that’s a part of it. But as I saw people posting on social media about voting as the primary response to this tragedy, I felt unsatisfied.
It’s not that voting isn’t an important piece of this. Only 37 percent of eligible citizens voted in the last midterm election, and I am grateful every day for the hundreds of thousands of volunteers knocking on doors, registering new voters, getting people to the polls, and fighting voter suppression. But at the same time I found myself thinking that Trump and his enablers in Congress and in governors’ mansions and in state houses are all just symptoms of a larger disease. Or more accurately: They are symptoms of interconnected diseases that serve to divide us from each other and from ourselves; a system that serves to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few and uses hate and fear of the “other” to gain more power and more wealth; a system that numbs us to the reality of homeless encampments in our neighborhoods and increasing inequality in our society.
We can’t face these existential threats, or our own complicity in this system, unless our hearts are fully engaged.
Still the tears did not come. This theorizing was in my head, not in my heart. And we can’t face these existential threats, or our own complicity in this system, unless our hearts are fully engaged. I choked up a bit when I learned that my father was in Torah study at the exact time of the shootings. I felt some emotion when I read the names of the victims and saw that three of them shared last names with my own family. But it wasn’t until this morning that the tears started flowing, when a non-Jewish friend from work reached out to me to see how I was doing. She told me that last night, on her walk home, she got drawn into a vigil at a neighborhood synagogue and was amazed by the love and kindness of that community. Yes there was grieving, but there was also a commitment to welcome the immigrant, the “other.” They were focused on raising money for HIAS, the Jewish group that helps settle new immigrants into this country and shows them our humanity and our love.
Her outreach and her story of this experience touched my heart in a way that nothing else had.
Now that the tears have come I find solace in the fact that so many people are channeling their anger into action, into marching, into volunteering, into voting and getting others to vote. Not only because winning will help us prevent Trump from enacting more of his reactionary legislative agenda but also because winning back state houses and governorships will allow us to push forward ambitious solutions to our greatest problems and prove that government can help people in need.
And at the same time, I find inspiration in knowing there is so much more we have to do together. The hate that Trump and his enablers are tapping into won’t go away on November 7. The poverty in our communities will still be there. The climate doomsday clock will still be ticking toward midnight. The toxic masculinity and gun culture and rape culture will still be there. To change all this, we need to not only win elections but also take the long view and transform ourselves and our communities and our people (especially us white men). Our culture is sick, our economic system is sick, our political system is sick. And the cure is finding our common humanity, our common connection to the universe, to nature, and to the fundamental power of love.
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to let myself be angry, let myself be sad, let myself cry, and then I’m going to channel that emotion into organizing my people. I’m a member of Sierra Club, so I’m going to join with others from my local chapter to help get out the vote in Nevada through Election Day. And while I’m there, I’m going to encourage everyone to join me the following Saturday for the next workday with the Sogorea Te Land Trust in East Oakland. And I’m going to invite folks from Sogorea to join me for a Sierra Club hike in the East Bay Hills. I’m going to reach out to my North Oakland neighbors and start planning our own resilience strategy for the next earthquake, and I’m going to recruit them to join me for these other projects.
The idea is to bring North Oakland to South Reno and East Oakland and strengthen the bonds with my people and get my people to show up for other people. Not as charity, but because there is joy in collective liberation. There is joy in connecting with other people in loving support. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and resistance without resilience, resistance without gratitude, resistance without love, is ultimately futile. But resistance with all those things is how we will save ourselves and our world.