If we give in to consumer mentality: work, stress, speed, convenience, exhaustion…if we acquiesce, if we ignore…oligarchy and fascism can win.

If we pay attention, if we rise up, not out of hate or stress but out of love and caring, we can not lose.

If we all roll the boulder up the hill together, if we shine sunlight on acts off despicable greed and corruption…they can not win.

​If we come together, right now, we will win.

These are dangerous times. Economy, health care, vaccines, alliances in war and peace, education, transportation investment, jobs, basic trust…all shaken, so quickly.

But hate from one corner of the world inspires—as we are seeing in Canada and Europe—a renewed sense of sanity, solidarity, appreciation of democratic freedoms, and a shunning of a suddenly-less-popular far-right politics of blame in others:

And so it goes.

At the end of the day, at the end of the week, you and I have to be willing to stand up for what we care about. Whether it’s improving our healthcare system or schools, we have to help, not hurt; invest in, not gut. And when we invest in bettering our town, our city, our state, or community, our country…they flower, and bear fruit, our economy improves and stabilizes.

Voting for hate will never result in such sanity, health, safety, or stability. And that’s what we’ve done, every other election.

And so we realize that half our country is willing to vote for a racist, rapist bully. Those aren’t insults, they’re facts (and that’s worse): they’ve been established in a court of law. And so we realize that our course forward is to care, more. To love, more. To ground our feet in the earth, more. To look at the stars at night, before going to bed, more. To stretch, and meditate, and cuddle, and read, more.

As we invest in our own lives, in meaning and care, we flower. As we flower, our community flowers. As communities flower, our shaken country finds its feet, again.