All Hands On Deck

A call to action and a (hopefully) helpful simplification of where to focus

In my first post, I focused on a way for us to keep ourselves a little bit grounded every day by insisting on maintaining some joy in our lives. And that was the right place to start because holy shit do we need to be resilient right now! This is the fourth draft of my second post because every time I get going on one, everything shifts again. More horror is unleashed, more people are in the crosshairs, and confusion is more all-encompassing.

Today marks the TWELFTH day Republicans have held all three branches of our government. Twelve days of non-stop terror for immigrants and trans people. Twelve days of dropping nuclear bombs on civil servants and our constitution. Twelve days of the fire-housing us with white nationalist, patriarchal incompetence, chaos and weak, laughable excuses (a plane crashed because of DE&I, not because I just fired everyone responsible for air safety—it’s common sense, he said).

I am not immune from this, even though I’ve been petting and praising my dogs like it’s my full time job (#TheyCantTakeOurDogs). I am still rapidly cycling through all the emotions. I took a personal day on Thursday just to eat ice cream and binge watch pointless TV. But taking care of ourselves is not enough. Staying grounded is not enough. Calling our senators and representatives is not enough. Hoping that our institutions and courts will save us is not enough. We have to do something…but what?

I have been going in circles about what might be useful to my 53 (yay!!) and (hopefully) growing readership. (Thank you all, by the way! I’d blush if I felt like there was time to do so.)

So I’ve got three ideas I want to share with you that might help you stay grounded, but also take meaningful action within your capacity.

#1: Focus your energy

No human on the planet has the capacity to hold the appropriate amount of rage for all the things 45/47 and the enabling Republican Party are doing, nor does any one person have the capacity to take action toward all the things. But we do have power both as individuals and as a collective. We need to leverage power in both spheres.

In my line of work we talk a lot about the circle of concern, which right now feels infinite. It is extremely helpful when feeling overwhelmed to break your concerns down into smaller chunks: what’s in your DIRECT CONTROL? Where do you have the power to influence? What is completely out of your sphere of control or influence? If we spend all our energy worrying about things out of our control, it can paralyze us from taking any meaningful action at all where we DO have power.

Yes, this is my white board. No, I’m not a very good artist.

Step One: Narrow your circle of concern

All of it is horrific, and I am not suggesting we pretend that one atrocity should get more of our attention while another gets less. But what if we gave each other permission to focus on the areas that move us the most and trust that other people are focusing on the other things. What if we trusted our collective power while focusing in on our personal power. This is not to say that we don’t care about other things, or that we ignore the other things, entirely. It just means we pick one to three things that already have our passion and focus most of our energy there. Instead of reading every article about everything, read the articles related to your narrowed list and only the headlines for everything else.

For most os us, focusing on specific groups of people is a good way to think about it. Maybe you have close friends or family in danger of deportation. Maybe you or someone you love is a civil servant, transgender or non-binary, disabled or relying on government services for any number of things. Maybe you are or love a scientist, DE&I practitioner, medical provider or teacher. Picking one to three of these groups (depending entirely on your bandwidth) to focus on creates a clear lane of focus.

For others of us, it might be an institution or process or kind of information that we need, use or help create. Maybe you or someone you love is enrolled in a clinical trial, you know a lot about the court system, you are passionate about reproductive freedom, you’re a researcher who relies on government data to do your job well, or you work at a tech company that is making damaging decisions.

The point is to pick something(s) close to your heart or something you know a lot about, and focus your energy there. If that doesn’t narrow it down for you, pick the three (or less) that feel the most pressing to you RIGHT NOW. You can always adjust your focus as things continue to unfold.

Step Two: Focus energy on things within your control

For most of us, the things in our direct control might feel small, but I assure you they are deeply important. You can, for instance, reach out to people being targeted to let them know you are on their side. You can donate money to organizations supporting them, show up to protests and community meetings, amplify the cause on social media platforms, start a SubStack or otherwise create related content. If you are a civil servant, check out the Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism for ways to slow things down internally.

Your “influence” work could mean advocating for specific populations of people where you work, or writing letters to local, state and federal officials. It could be talking to persuadable people in your life that may not understand why what you care about is important.

By focusing in on a few things and the SPECIFIC actions that are in your control and capacity to do, you can get out of paralysis mode and into the game.

#2: Be strategic with your anger

Anger is a useful and necessary emotion. It’s activating and energizing and can clear the way for us to do and say things we wouldn’t normally. It gives us a wild kind of courage. Let’s use ours strategically and with a bit more precision.

It makes sense to be angry at people who voted for 45/47. It’s easy to assign complicity to everyone who chose him over a clearly more qualified and compassionate alternative. But I want you to go on a little thought exercise with me for a moment.

Imagine you were one of the MILLIONS of people who are not part of the MAGA faithful, but voted for him anyway. You were probably frustrated with the rising costs of everything and not plugged into politics because it’s exhausting and “they’re all the same” and who has time for all that when there are bills to pay and kids to take care of and parents to take care of and on and on. You might have voted for him (and we know this is true for many, many voters) because you really thought he was going to be better for the economy and you felt like you had to prioritize that over all the other noise that was probably overblown anyway. I mean, we survived the first time, right?

Now imagine how rip-shit pissed you’d be right now (or will be when you realize prices are still going up and things are getting worse in every way). Imagine how played you might feel. Maybe even a little ashamed. Then imagine what it would be like to hear “welcome to the fight” instead of “you did this, asshole”?

Wouldn’t it be great to fold that new, raw anger into our movement unencumbered by humiliation? These aren’t, for the most part, people who are battle-scarred from political activism and social justice work. They aren’t burned out and disheartened. They’ll have energy and we should let them spend it trying to help rather than trying to defend their choices (that can’t be changed now anyway).

If we can keep ourselves from hurling blame at this group of people, if we can, instead, create a door for them to walk through, we will be better off in the end. We don’t need to add our “I told you so’s” (no matter how TRUE that is!!). That might make us feel slightly better for about two seconds, but it may shut the door for them to say, you know what? This sucks and I want to do something about it.

This is not an easy thing to do, and I don’t want to sound all high and mighty. I have been so angry at everyone who voted for Trump, because it’s true it didn’t have to be this way and they helped make it so. But most of them were used by this corrupt sociopath and Republicans, in general. Let’s maybe give them some room to learn from a mistake and help make things better.

#3: Get creative

We lost the last election in part because the Democratic Party leaned too hard into the status quo: a democracy that wasn’t working as well as it could, mainstream media that lost its reach years ago, poll-tested and disciplined messaging that came off as inauthentic to many. I am not blaming the Harris campaign here, or suggesting these were the only things at play, but these need to be some of the lessons we learn, and we don’t have a ton of time to contemplate. We need to do something different right now.

If we learn anything from the election, I think it should be that we need to be more innovative and creative and authentic in how we approach the political process. We are not playing by the same rules that Republicans are (and haven’t been for decades). They have been cheating for years and accusing us of cheating at every turn. Classic projection and gas-lighting. What can we take from their playbook and turn to our advantage?

I don’t think we need to sell our souls to get attention, but I do think we need to set down our pearls and the idea that tradition and norms will win the day if only enough people know about them.

We have to break out of the way we’ve always done things and think differently about how to win people over (or pull people away from the other side). And we have to think holistically: it’s the messages and the messengers and the mediums.

I have a couple of what I think are out-of-the-box ideas. But there are only 53 of you and I have no idea if they’ll work. So I’ll share them and you tell me if any of them sound interesting. But I’m just as interested in hearing your new ideas. I think we should try anything that has a possibility of working.

First is worst

My first out of the box idea was that we find a minority-owned small business to make a bunch of MAGA hats (perhaps with an asterisk) and start wearing them while protesting things we know will impact everyone in a way we think folks who voted for him would talk about them. Hopefully you get the idea: Appropriate the hat, pose as his supporters en masse to protest things we know are impacting even the MAGA faithful. This would, I think, confuse the Republicans just enough to cause some cracks and slow some decisions down. Maybe seeing a sea of red hats screaming at him that he’s failing is something he’d actually notice.

I do not think this is a great idea. But it evolved to this one:

MAFA: Make America Free Again (or Fair again?)

What if we create a new slogan—again, using the red hats for confusion; or blue hats as a way to create a contrast…you tell me which makes the most sense…I’m just spit-balling here—but with a message that is supposedly at the core of the MAGA movement. We could focus on all the obvious, outrageous ways he, Republicans and the billionaires he’s surrounding himself with are stealing our freedoms and subverting the idea of merit into something that obviously involves no merit (Pete Hegseth?!? Robert F Kennedy?!?).

Class-Action Suit: Emotional distress and suffering

I know this is a very long shot and that, traditionally, emotional suffering is only included with physical injury claims. But if filed by 37 million people? Anyone? Bueller?

Okay. I am out of time to write and if I look at the headlines, this will all probably seem like the wrong thing to have written.

I hope some of it resonated, and I still believe that an insistence on joy and connection is integral to making it through these awful times. So don’t forget to do that first!

They can’t take our dogs. Let’s not let them take us, either.