If “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” what are we supposed to be doing right now?

How to sort through a thicket of mixed messages

Photo by Wendy Wei on Pexels

What’s the image that comes to your mind when you read that slogan? 

I’ll tell you what I see.

I see a group of people in a field, looking at a ridge in the distance. They’re waiting quietly, or milling around. The sun is just coming up. They hear sounds in the distance—a crowd is coming. The people in the field perk up. The people who have been approaching cascade over the top of the ridge, peacefully, methodically, a pretty rag-tag bunch. They walk joyfully towards the people waiting below. Except it’s the same group of people, in two places at once.

It used to be that when I heard that phrase I took it as a “no heroes” approach to organizing. You don’t need a leader to tell you what to do. You don’t need a proven framework to follow. Your small self, in itself, is as heroic a being as anyone needs. I used to think it celebrated the people’s own capacity to know what is needed. I also saw it as a fierce refutation of our dominant culture’s desire to have an influencer, a preacher, a star, or a politician be this truth carrier, allowing everyone else be a worthy follower or worse, a minor copy of the idol they revered. I agreed with the slogan in theory, and I enjoyed the mental picture it conjured.

I also thought that by the time I was really needed, I’d know what to do and say; I’d be the right combination of badass and communitarian; I wouldn’t be afraid. For now, I could participate, but it wasn’t me who was really needed; I was just a low-stakes tag along.

More recently—meaning over the last five or ten years—I’ve been letting that slogan sink in. Now I hear it differently. This moment is all there is. There is no answer. There is only acting or not acting. If you want a leader, you are following. You are not in your own awareness; you are passive.

Ouch.

The question becomes, what is the right action, for you and you alone? Where is the need? What do you have to offer? When you sit with yourself and ask what you have to give, do you have a sense of how to give it, or how to find people with complementary skills, to make your offering more powerful?

It’s with these questions in mind that I started noticing some of the advice about action that’s been in the air these last few weeks. Here’s some common statements I’m encountering:

—If you aren’t doing everything you can, you’re content to let Nazi troops roll through your city, like they did to Paris on June 14, 1940, and you’re going to regret it later, when it’s too late.

—If even the people who are entrusted with the power to defend democracy are rolling over in advance, bowing to a bunch of arrogant billionaires who think their riches prove they’re smart, how can you, with no money, do much of anything to make a difference?

—Currently you’re helpless, because there’s no plan, no strategy, no “so what” to plug in to, at the national level. The problem is one of leadership and organization. When the pushback goes beyond lawsuits, then you’ll be able to do something.

—Call your Senators, and go to their offices.

—You need to take care of yourself, because this is going to be a long struggle, and dark, and you are going to watch as people you love, or people you care about but aren’t connected to, are subject to violence and may die. 

—Self care happens in a space that is separate from action, so you have to choose, or toggle between the two.

—You have the power to act. Figure out something to do, and start, now.

—If you are afraid, and want to just curl up and check out and retreat, that means you are callous, or weak, unless you are a member of an explicitly targeted group.

—You should take as much time as you can to be joyful, because now is all we have, and if you spend all your time focused on politics or violence you’ll miss the beauty of life and you’ll get bitter and nasty and no one will invite you over for tea.

One thing I started noticing, as I gathered this advice in my mind, is that what unifies almost all of it is this sense of the “bigness” of this moment, and how that should shape our response to it. Reading each of these statements in isolation, what I see are attempts to provide encouragement, or some kind of ground to stand on, or some orientation towards the future, to stop the vertigo of the “shock and awe” of the last few weeks. Some are softer and others are tougher, but what sounds kind to one person can sound tone deaf to another.

It is only when I put them side by side that the polarities, the contradictions and paradoxes become apparent. And if I’m hearing all of these statements at once, or scrolling past them all before bed, I bet I’m not the only one. I’m not saying people can’t hold paradoxical information in consciousness. I’m wondering about the emotional impact of receiving so many competing messages at once.

One project of this newsletter is to explore the emotional impact of engaging in social change work, and to ask what skills and tools we might use to increase our ability to stay strong and healthy while we do it. I’ve been thinking about the bigness, that is, not to ask whether or not it’s an accurate representation of what is happening.

Instead, I’m asking what emotional effect this kind of elevated language has on a person’s likelihood to see themselves as capable of engaging, let alone determining for themselves what they have to offer. If what you choose to do is high stakes, is of world historical import, well then, you’d better know what the hell you’re doing. When I get fundraising emails that say things like “What are you going to tell your grandchildren when they ask you what you were doing when X catastrophic thing was happening” for example, I think: this question is supposed to be an exhortation to action, but what I hear is a shaming tactic. The fastest way to get someone to shut down—or fight you—is to shame them. 

I’m actually sympathetic to the “bigness” conversation. There’s a lot happening that has never happened before, and so some people are like, well, maybe we throw out everything we’ve tried before and try to meet the originality of this moment with something equally original in response. Be humble. Be open. Be curious. In many ways, I think that’s what the slogan is recommending. We are here, now. We don’t have to look to the rights-based movements of the ‘60s, or even the BLM protests of 2020, to tell us how to organize. We are called to do something that’s for this time, not others.

This is where I think there’s a two-ness about this moment. There’s the conversation about the response to policies and laws and funding and rule breaking on the material level, right now. And there’s also a conversation about what might emerge, if we are in a moment of ecological and economic and political collapse. They are both “big” but big in different ways.

The violence that is happening, the loss that is happening, however, is not original. The method may be, but the effect is not. In that sense, what there is to do is ordinary. It’s lots of mundane tasks, repeated consistently, within the context of an unknown and uncertain outcome. (And then, later, when someone makes a movie about it, they’ll leave all that footage on the cutting room floor.)

Life isn’t a movie. That makes it seem less exciting. But I think the ordinary is the entrance point. If the actual fighting of fascism is boring, then anyone can do it. If it’s tiny tasks, completed over and over, then it’s not hard to figure out the next right thing to do, because it’s right in front of you. You don’t get to have a grand narrative of your purpose and why you’re going to win. But you also get to make soup, and plant a garden, and watch a kid play, and go back and do the next thing.

It can be exciting to think one is involved in the grand moment of history. But we can only know its grandness in retrospect. It’s grand when we tell it as a story, with an arc, and a beginning and middle and end. It’s grand when we try to compensate for our mortality by saying this moment, when we’re here, is the most important one. But if that bigness means we aren’t enough to meet it; we don’t have anything of value to contribute to something so vast, so we’ll leave it to someone who is bigger, or stronger, or who needs to be seen more than we do, then we don’t get to ask what we have that is only ours, and that can be of small use, somewhere, whether we are seen and praised for it, or not.

The struggle isn’t only “out there” on the streets. The struggle is “in here,” too, in the daily mundane things we don’t want to do, or the emotionally hard things we don’t want to face. When you make that phone call you’re dreading; when you finish the project that’s lost its allure; when you vacuum up the cat hair and do the laundry and answer the emails, even though you don’t want to, you’re building the muscle—the same muscle—that is needed to ask what you can do in this moment that is a stretch, that makes your nervous, that might be a nothing burger, that might not lead to anything other than what it is. 

You already are enough; you already have what you need; there is nothing else, but the next, unfurling thing.