The response to my piece, “Children in cages. Dear God, what have we become?” on Elephant Journal earlier this week was overwhelming.

My friends, I hear you.

Many of us are experiencing a crisis of faith over the continued hateful actions of President Trump, as well as the stupefying insistence of his supporters that he is doing nothing wrong.

Me, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the way things work on this planet. I’m a firm believer in Law of Attraction, and I’ve struggled with how that fits with these dangerous times. If “believe, then receive” truly worked, shouldn’t we have world peace by now?

I have a friend who is able to manifest a convenient parking spot any time she goes anywhere. She jokes about it: the parking gods have her back.

What kind of god, one has to wonder, answers the prayers of a middle-class American woman seeking a parking space at the shopping mall, but not the desperate prayers of refugees fleeing violence and death?

What I’ve come to believe is that it has nothing to do with God at all. It has to do with the way energy works in our universe.

Manifesting a parking space is easy because it is a simple, silly little thing. My friend is lighthearted when she does it, joking assuredly about those parking gods. It’s a game, and her energy is high.

Consider, in contrast, the energy of the refugee in peril. There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there’s no lighthearted, high-vibration energy, either. Fear, desperation, dread—these are all incredibly low energies. They don’t resonate with any hopeful outcome.

Am I suggesting, then, that people in peril should buck up, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and maybe sing a chorus of, “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow?”

Hell, no.

Any reasonable person understands that someone in that position has no simple solution to the very real low-energy feelings in which they’re mired. There is no way to “feel” oneself out of mortal danger.

This, I believe, is the very reason we feel empathy.

None of us, when we are at our lowest, can do for ourselves what needs to be done. It takes other people reaching out to us, acting on their empathy, to raise us up just enough to feel that stirring of hope in our hearts.

That stirring is the flicker of light that moves our energy up a notch. The smallest act of compassion speaks to our humanity and gives us a glimmer of hope. It resonates with energy at a higher vibration than what we could ever feel alone in the depths of our despair.

We’ve all had the experience of unintentionally getting ourselves into a downward spiral. You stub your toe getting out of bed and sarcastically grumble, “Well, this is going to be a great day.” Then you spill your coffee, get stuck in traffic, miss an appointment…on and on it goes.

But upward spirals happen, too. They just take more work—and often, they require that helping hand reaching out from a place of higher energy.

Look, there is no hope in the faces of those children torn from their parents at our southern border. How could there be? But if you want to find god and good in this situation, look within. The pain you feel on behalf of people you’ve never met? That is your divinity. That is the voice of god stirring you to action.

And dear god, we must act.

Because the opposite of love is fear, and that is the very tool the current regime used to come to power. It is the tool they expect to use to maintain their power.

In an interview with Susan B. Glasser published in The New Yorker on June 22, Senator Jeff Merkley said he “considers Trump a ‘fear’ candidate from a Republican Party that had learned to run what Merkley called the ‘three-terrors strategy’: pick three issues that scare the American public, and emphasize them at all costs.”

I know we’ve all seen how that played out.

Additionally, this regime uses bullying tactics borrowed directly from “reality” TV to ramp up drama and incite anger in the opposition.

It was no mistake Kirstjen Nielsen dined at a Mexican restaurant on the same day she defended the policy of separating children from their parents at the border and asserted it would continue. Nor was it an accident that the First Lady made what was pitched as a humanitarian visit to children in a detention center while wearing a jacket that declared in massive lettering, “I really don’t care. Do U?”

Anger and fear are low-level energies from which positive action is never possible. This regime knows this, because it is what got them the vote enabling their dark mission. It is what keeps the victims of their brutal policies down, and it is the reason they are trying to provoke us into a similar state of anger and fear and despair.

A social media acquaintance messaged me recently, “I know—‘When they go low, we go high’ and all that. But how do you continue to go high when they’ve gone this low?”

My friends, when they’ve gone this low (and all indications are that they will continue to go even lower) we absolutely must go high.

The MAGA mob will continue to mock us at rallies, to sport T-shirts with slogans like, “F*ck Your Feelings,” to troll our posts with gleeful jabs at “libtards.” They will denounce us as un-American and flat-out deny facts. This is all part of an attempt to bring our energy down to the level of theirs because they know we cannot effect positive change from a negative place.

If you need proof of that, consider this: in actuality, there is no “us” and “them,” even when it comes to the MAGA folk. We all—every last one of us—originate from the same source. We all have that spark of divinity within us.

The hateful actions of this regime and its supporters?

That is what we become when we stop reaching out to each other in empathy.

That is what we become when fear snuffs out that spark of hope.

That is what we must rise against—and then reach a hand back to raise more souls up.

My friends, we can do this.

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