Post-Election Family Meeting

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Hi, everybody.

It's Glennon and Abby and Amanda.

And we are recording on the morning after the election.

We actually planned to get on today and to have a expert on elections be on with us and to discuss what was going on and give you information.

And then

this morning...

We decided that perhaps more information is not what's needed right now.

And we talked about not recording it all because

we are so sad.

But then we thought maybe

what's best is to just show up and be sad together and be here together.

So that's what we're going to do.

And we are here today to just

share how we're feeling.

and how we're reacting to all of this.

And

whatever we share today might not be where we land.

We are reserving the right to feel however we feel and share whatever we want to share and need to share.

And as we know, during these times, we might land in a different place eventually.

But today is one stop along the way.

And we're going to keep showing up as we are.

So,

Amanda,

how are you?

I

am grateful to be with you too and grateful to be with our community today.

I have been

trying

very hard

to ground my nervous system

like every minute and a half when I start to think about

what this means for today, for next week, for next year, for

my state and country and world.

And it's very easy to fly into a bit of a tailspin about that, but I'm trying not to.

But

for me,

I was feeling very

hopeful and optimistic yesterday.

The first half of the day on election day, I was canvassing and it was a gorgeous, sunny, beautiful day.

And I just felt so goddamn thankful to be out there, you know,

going to doors and encouraging people to vote.

And I felt 100% sure that this is where we were going to end up is with our

Kamala Harris as our president elect.

And

I kept walking around going, this is the day that the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and Madame in it.

And I was so excited for myself.

I was like, we're going to get Madame president for the first time.

And

she's brilliant and good and so thankful that she has taken on what she's taken on to get us

there.

And then

at 7.30 last night, or still very excited and about to settle in to watch everything, I

got a text from a good friend

that

asked me if I wanted to know something that she knew about our other

good friend

had told her how she voted and that she had voted for trump

and

that kind of began

the unraveling for me because for me i just thought

anyone

with an a single IQ point or an ounce of decency that there would have been

there's just innumerable reasons why there would have been, like, no, that's not what we're doing anymore.

If it's for your kid's choice of your body or for your

fact that he's a convicted sexual predator and so compromised that he couldn't get like an entry-level desk job at the CIA because he's so compromised and with his debt and his impending imprisonments, and that he's going to have access to the highest level of decision-making impacting the globe.

I thought,

well, now I'm scared for us, because if that person is a litmus test to what people all over the country are doing, I'm not so sure this is going to go well.

And it also started for me this

really internal shake-up of this person I thought was in my community.

And

what is is the purpose of community if not to protect each other?

That's right.

And this is not protection of me.

And this is not protection of

the people

that are also in community with us, including Black children.

It made me really start thinking about community.

And

that thought about what is community and about

this might not go the way I thought it was going to go

just got me thinking about

how will

this go down?

How will the next four years go down if

Trump wins?

And so all, I can't stop thinking about black women

since that moment until now.

Like I just keep thinking about,

you know, I'm stomping my feet so enraged that

this system is not

fair and not just and not protecting my rights and not protecting my daughter's rights and how this is just so utterly incorrect and unjust and that this government is

going to be against us.

And I was like, oh,

wait, it's been eight eight years of that,

you know, the four years of Trump and then the threat of the return.

And now it's going to be at least four more

and how that feels so excruciatingly long and unacceptable.

And then I started thinking about

history and Black women and black families and thinking,

oh, like, I'm so pissed about this moment.

But like, there

were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and generations and entire people lived and died with

a government that was against them, with the purpose of which was to deny their humanity and the official actions of which was to ensure that the law did not respect their humanity.

I mean, we're talking about Black families who were in hundreds of years of enslavement and then pseudo enslavement through sharecropping and then the government saying Jim Crow was the way and then state sanctioned lynchings of which there was no

justice or retribution.

We're talking about like the actual compromise that is the founding of our country that said that black people would be three-fifths of humans and that Dred Scott saying, the Supreme Court saying that no person, no black person could become a citizen of the United States.

We're talking about poll taxes.

We're talking about black kids being shot up in the streets and people being acquitted after acquitted after acquitted up to this day, up to the Supreme Court in

2013, 2018, saying again, like voting rights are not protected for you.

Over and over, the shock to me that this government is not set up for me and to protect me and is against me

in the recent history of my life

has been the reality for hundreds of years of people.

And they weren't spending their whole lives holding their breath waiting for someone

to affirm their humanity.

They weren't saying, I will live when this government says that I have a right to live.

I will have joy when this government gives me a reason to have joy.

They were saying, I'm not going to them for that.

I'm not looking for safety in the court system, in the federal government, in the state government, in the police.

The only place I'm going to have safety, if at all, is in my community where I create safety, where I create joy, where I affirm my own humanity and the humanity of people around me,

where people had to raise black sons that would walk out and get lynched

with no

retribution after.

Up until, you know, you're talking about lynches, you're talking about Trayvon Martin, we're talking about over hundreds of years.

And they just had to continue to believe that their children were worthy of dignity and celebration and rights.

And they had to create that for themselves.

while they continued to push for the government to catch up with them.

And that if there's any way through this, it is going to be that.

It is not going to be holding our breath saying, Oh, we got to wait four years and then wait till we can elect someone else so that we can have humanity and rights and justice.

Hell no.

We were the only place where it's reliable to do that is with each other, is the people that we can touch and see and create that for each other and push for the government to catch up with us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I keep thinking about

so many people have texted me or said to me in the last

12 hours

this feeling of almost like embarrassment or self-flagellation for allowing the hope again.

Everyone from my kid to like the wisest person I know who texted me like is

like, I feel so

stupid for feeling hopeful.

and allowing that again and allowing myself to be crushed again.

And I feel that way a little bit, but I also think

it is not that we should not be hopeful.

Hope is not the wrong idea, but we just have to be more wise about where we're putting our hope.

Our hope is not in

these huge political systems.

Our hope is not in empire.

Our hope is in

each other, in community.

And we, I guess, got to figure figure out how to create community that is more honest, where we know people better than we know them now.

We're clearly not doing it right if we are surprised as shit by each other every time people reveal who they are and what they believe.

We do not know each other.

I went to one of my meetings this morning.

It was a really good place to be this morning discussing what we can control and what we can't.

And I was just thinking so much, and I know I've talked to both of you a lot about how I feel like I have functioned a little bit like the

codependent, complicit, panicky wife of like an alcoholic.

It's like America is my very sick husband and I am this woman who continuously cleans up the bottles and, you know, makes sure the neighbors don't hear repeat a a million times, this is not who we are.

And I'm constantly covering for him.

And I'm believing in the potential of him and not living in the reality of him.

And

I do feel and did feel this weird,

very sad,

peaceless, somber,

but deep acceptance.

Abby will tell you, even before the last few days, something about the air outside

and the people's faces and what I see, I just thought, I don't know,

that this is going to go our way.

And

I think what's interesting about what happened in the results is that nothing new happened.

Nothing happened except that once again,

America was revealed for who America is.

This is who we are.

This is how we were founded.

This is who you're married to.

Yeah, this is who we are married to.

And

I do know that

from my recovery, that there is a power in

being still with that for a bit.

Like this, we are as divided as we seem to be.

We are, in many ways two countries.

We are not the United States of America.

We were not founded on equality and freedom and liberty for all.

All of that has always been propaganda, and we have always been who we are,

who we were revealed to be once again.

And the other thing that I was thinking about in my meeting this morning is that

so many of us are just feeling so deeply unsafe and afraid right now.

And

I was looking at everybody on the screen on my meeting and thinking about how many of us,

so many of us grew up in volatile families

with parents who for whatever reason had various levels of erratic behavior and then complicit behavior.

And we spent a lot of time wondering wondering if we were going to be protected, wondering if we were going to be safe, wondering if anybody was going to come save us.

And I think that right now,

there's probably a lot of people who are feeling deeply unsafe in a way that is a little bit of PTSD, that is old, that is, a lot of us are feeling like children who are not going to be protected.

and who have an erratic dad and complicit women.

and the leadership of this country feels a lot like our nervous systems did when we were little.

And I think that that

brings us back to your point,

which is that we are not children and we are adults and we do have some agency and we don't have to wait for mommy and daddy.

to get their shit together.

We get to create

the community and the safety and the grown-up belonging that we seem to be waiting for mommy and daddy to do

with our politics.

Which is false from the beginning.

Like, even if

it is such a good analogy because it's like, okay, as long as mommy and daddy are calm, we'll be okay.

Exactly.

And that's never, if mommy and daddy are throwing shit around the house, that's scary.

But also, if mommy and daddy aren't throwing the shit around the house, it doesn't mean you're safe either.

That's right.

We feel this from our homes and our whatever, but as white women, it is new to us to feel like, oh, wait, my government's not there for me?

That's weird.

That's a new feeling.

And it's not new to the centuries of people who lived before,

to the black people and brown people of our country.

Like they knew very clearly their government was not for them.

They pushed for it to be and used hope as a discipline to continue to push it to be, but weren't waiting on that safety.

I think the only safety that has ever existed is real,

like I can rely on you and you can rely on me, which is why

I felt so betrayed by that vote because I'm like, oh, no, that's how you take care of me.

You take care of me by voting for our protection.

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I want to stop there and ask you, what made you, because this is what so many people are going to be dealing with today, what made you assume that that friend would vote differently than she did?

Because she's smart

and because she has a daughter

and because she is a decent,

good

person.

So this is the problem.

We have been trusting, quote, decent good people to create a decent good government that will give us

the safety we deserve.

But decent good people

aren't voting for a decent good government.

And even if we had a decent good government, that was never going to give us the safety that is actually only possible when you can really rely on someone.

What I'm trying to say is, on my walk this morning, after I was like, oh, we don't get what I thought that we got,

I started walking around my neighborhood and I

walked by the house of a woman whose husband is dying

and

has asked me to try to help get her kids a therapist.

And I've been so busy.

trying to get this person elected that I haven't done that yet.

I walked by another friend's house who later texted me and said how petrified she was that her husband, who works for the government, because Trump has promised to eviscerate the federal government jobs, is going to lose his job.

Therefore, they are going to lose their house.

Therefore, her child who has special needs will lose his insurance and access to resources.

So she came over to my house for us to try to game plan.

That is the community.

That is, I walked by another friend's house who just learned that this country and the community that she thought were decent, good people did not put the priority on the protection of her black children at the top of their vote.

These are real, we can't do anything about the government right now.

That government is going to be that government and we can and should continue to push it to catch up with us.

But also there are people right now on your street

who have very real

problems

that you can be there for i mean you you don't have to that is what i'm going to do with my energy i am not going to rail against the machine i am going to quiet my heart and give myself dignity and peace and know that i'm the only one who gives me peace and then i'm going to look for the ways

to counteract what this government is going to do to the people in my life that I can touch and feel and make their lives actually better.

Yeah, this is the beloved community.

This idea is what

activists have been talking about for so long.

And

it intersects with my

spiritual thinking about this because what you're talking about is

it's the codependency of

I will be okay

if we just get the right government in place.

There's always a middleman.

I will be okay.

We will be okay if, Kamala, if this.

What I hear you saying is we really must remove the middleman.

We make ourselves okay.

And we make each other okay.

And

we are hoping and praying and

working and canvassing and voting

for this idea of what we think our country could be.

And right now, and I know it's not all a distraction, we will land further down the road, I'm sure, at a different day, but right now, it feels a little bit insane that all of that effort could have gone into loving our actual neighbors directly.

And I do believe,

I do believe that

fighting for people who will protect your neighbors is loving your neighbors.

And so for me, it's not either or,

but it's like, I wasn't doing the or.

Yeah.

I was just doing the either.

Like I was just like, as long as this is okay, this will be okay.

And so the wound from finding out that my community was not my community, because I think of community as protection and safety and love, and you voting for that person is not protection, safety, or love for me.

then oh then i have the wrong idea of community yeah and i have the wrong idea of like then i need to diversify my safety protection and love and i can't have it on something as shaky ground that it is susceptible to

one night every four years to find out if I have a community of care.

I need to create that community of care because guess what?

We think it's bad now.

We don't know how bad it's going to get.

And that is why we need to be outside of this system to care for one another.

This is why we need the trickster energy that Tricia Hersey talks about

to figure our way around and through these things that for generations, people who have been billion times more marginalized than us have had to do.

That is a survival tactic.

And there's a few survival tactics here.

One is how we are going to get through this intact in our personhood.

And another is how we're going to help the people around us get through this with the very real, very tangible

realities that this administration is going to impose on them.

And like we can't just scream at Trump for the next four years, berating him for doing these things to the people we love.

We need to actually activate and start helping.

the actual people in their actual houses to do these things.

And I, I just, I feel like I need to stop and circle back because I can't start

talking about black women as the model of survival and resilience and the alternative trickster way of surviving in a system not meant for you and not talk about

in line with the misconception of faux community that I have relied upon

and not talk about the fact

that 55%

of white people voted for Trump.

59% of white men voted for Trump.

Those men looked around

over the last eight years and said,

yep, this looks good to me.

Only 2% of them changed their mind with all of the horrors that we have seen.

52%

of white women voted for Trump.

They looked around and said, looks good to me.

Okay?

That went only down by 3%

from the last election.

It doesn't matter.

There is not a line.

They voted for them.

And also, just, I'm not going to pontificate about anything, but I just need to say one thing about the things that everyone choose your own adventure here, but.

No one come to me and say a goddamn word about the black vote or the Latino vote.

Why on God's green earth do we keep talking?

First of all, let's just put that to bed because

the exact same number of black people voted for Trump this time as last time, which means the exact same number voted for Democrats.

Black men went up by one for him, but black women went down by two, okay?

They are the ones that are holding the community line.

And they are the ones that have been making real community out in the world and taking care of each other.

And the Latino vote, that's fine.

That did change.

Okay.

That went more for Trump.

But also, like, do not look at the spec in someone else's eye without looking at the log in yours.

We are 66% of the vote and Latinos are 13%.

And so we're going to say it's the Latinos voted for Trump.

That's why he got elected into office.

Fuck that.

We are 66% of the vote.

We voted Trump into office.

Yeah.

Yep.

White vote.

Love, I would love to hear from you.

What are you thinking, my love?

Well, I just am listening to you both, and I'm so grateful for your honesty and all the beautiful things that you've said.

I'm sure so many people are like listening and really relating.

And I also think that there's probably a sect of people

who aren't even close

to getting

through the feelings

enough to be even able to establish the what-ifs and to think about a plan

because today

I feel

I feel stuck

and

stuck in this weird way because we have children and you know I have lived through

a time when gay people couldn't get married and now we can get married and what does that mean?

And I think everybody's kind of playing out these like

possible things,

but I think we might be skipping over

the real deal.

And to me,

I have extraordinary rage and confusion around

why

people hate women so much,

Even women.

And I don't,

you know, I went and worked out this morning and

I'm not going to be the person that stays in my house because I can't do that.

I'm not going to be afraid.

I'm going to go and face the shit.

I'm going to put my fucking body in the world and figure out how to live within it.

And I cannot tell you the solidarity that was energetically felt between all of the women inside of this gym.

And I

am sorry for all the men listening because you are allies and I love you.

But I have a kind of rage

that is directed towards men right now.

And I know that this election is beyond gender and I think it's more about race.

I understand that.

But I can't understand.

I feel silly only because our country has only shown us this.

Why did any part of me think

that there was a possible different conclusion that we could come up with?

And,

you know, they say

progress takes a long time.

And I am just dumbfounded and sad.

And I

feel rage.

Yeah.

And that's the only place I can get to because

I'm stunned.

And I'm

the men in the gym couldn't look me in the eye.

As they fucking shouldn't.

And I was looking and I was looking for it.

I was like, you fucking look at me.

Yeah.

You fucking vote that way.

You fucking eat it.

Because what you're going to get is you're going to get fucking rage eyes today and tomorrow and the next day because I don't give a fuck.

That's what I have to say.

You want to dude, bro on your ballot like you're a badass and you can't even make eye contact and own it after?

Yeah, fuck me, you little fucking man.

Stupid little man.

I do want to say this.

But if you're listening to this, you're probably one of the good men.

So

you're not a stupid fucking little man.

You're probably a big, great teddy bear of a

look.

On my meeting this morning, three different older white men

were

absolutely broken down and bawling like legit.

And that was

important for me this morning.

That is why you go to 12-step meetings instead of the gym.

Yeah, exactly.

You mentioned our

buy and tell.

I did grab, just on on principle, heavier weights than the two gentlemen.

That you did, Joseph.

Fucking stronger than you.

Good job.

Don't you think, though, Abby, though, like what you're describing, that is exactly how, if I was a black woman, that's exactly how I'd be looking at every white woman I saw.

That's right.

Absolutely.

Look me in the eye.

Yeah.

Look me in the eye.

Me of the I was a 98%

vote for Kamala Harris.

You want want to fucking look me in the eye that you are, you have literally nothing to lose, you middle-class white woman, by voting for Kamala, except that you're afraid that you're going to piss off your daddy.

Your tribalism is so ingrained in you that you're willing to let the ship go down.

You were actually probably hoping that I kept it up and look me in the eye.

That's right.

And I just think we have to be like, I,

that same rage that I feel about men, six out of the white men you walk around and see today, they voted Trump in the middle.

Six out of 10, right?

Yeah.

Six out of 10.

Yeah.

59%.

But also,

five out of 10 white women you see today also did.

This is what I mean about community.

Where is it?

Where can we find it?

Where can we build it?

Because it isn't,

it isn't this, whatever this thing is.

And the rage they must feel.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I

sensed

the community

that I want to build and be a part of, and spend all of my energy and time and love

in

over the last like 14 hours through the people that were texting me and like specific people.

I could feel it in who I wanted to reach out to.

Yeah.

And I I could feel it in who was reaching out to me.

And I feel it in the energy of, oh,

we are

in apocalypse times.

Like this is an apocalypse.

It's, which just means to reveal.

It's just nothing has happened except for

it has been revealed what is.

And I think for me,

I'm not going to have fake community anymore.

Yeah.

I'm not going to have bullshit.

What is that?

Because you're all in the same neighborhood or you're all in the same team or you're all in the same,

even the whole like decent good people.

Like, what does that mean?

Exactly.

Because I don't agree with you.

Like, I don't think that person is a decent and good person.

And hello, maybe I'll land somewhere else eventually.

I'm just saying today,

love is as love does.

Decency as decency votes.

Like, what the fuck does that mean?

She's nice.

I don't know what it means other than when it comes down to it, I will put my vote on the line to protect my community.

So, and that doesn't mean what I'm saying is that's my version.

That is what the community I want.

That's my version of trust and care and being cared for.

So shame on us for having fake community where we actually don't know each other's hearts because I kind of feel like that's a version, that's whiteness.

Like that is whiteness.

Just keep it surface.

Call everybody decent.

Don't get under the hood.

Don't ask the hard questions.

Don't have the hard conversations.

Like,

if I don't know you well enough to know your values and whether or not you are for people

who are hurting and whether or not you have my family's back when it comes down to it.

100% we're not in community.

Yeah.

You're not my people.

And I think we have to figure out what really constitutes community because it's not a zip code or a

convenience thing.

It's intentional.

It's knowing each other.

It's knowing each other's values.

It's feeling the way you felt on election night, feeling the fear for your family and knowing who you want to reach for.

That's them.

It's like Lovey says, it's accountability.

Yeah.

We have been like friend, people who are friendly become friends, but there's not an accountability there.

Like that is what community is.

It is you have, this affects you.

I see it.

I am part of it with you.

You are part of it with me.

And there's no going rogue.

There's no lack of accountability

without

breaching the community.

For those of us who are new to this,

which is most of white people, right, who are even getting in this game and trying has been in the last,

like statistically, our consciousness was shaken up by Trump.

The white people who have gotten in it have mostly gotten in it since then.

And we continue to be shocked by each other.

And what, how convenient of us?

We continue to be shocked by,

like you said, Abby, that the reason 2016 for me was so fetal position bawling stab through my heart is because I didn't know the country hated women until then.

I didn't.

I didn't know they hated us.

I didn't know the country hated women so much that they would vote for a sexual predator,

six-time bankrupt,

xenophobe, misogynist, racist

because he wasn't a woman.

And this time,

it was easier in a way because I already knew that.

I already knew we hated us.

And it was harder in some respects because everyone knew exactly what they were getting and bought it anyway.

But that's the shock and the first term.

I think part of it is creating the community of people that you can actually trust in this world and building it on that more solid ground of each other rather than this world out here that we can't control.

But I think part of

the answer is, how are we going to get through the next four years?

Because the first four years,

it was every day.

He does something, reaction.

His craziness, we're equal and opposite crazy.

We are everything.

We have to respond.

And that took time off our lives.

That was giving him our lives.

And we can't opt out of this because too many people who are

much

more precariously situated than we are need us not to opt out of this.

But also, I'm not doing it like that again.

Well, it's not, that's not doing it.

I mean, that's not doing it.

That has nothing to do with doing it.

If we decide, I mean, as I told you last night, I'm drastically changing my life in terms of what I expose myself to and what I waste my energy on.

And if we choose to turn on our TVs every day, scroll, do the doom scroll, if we choose to do that,

then we cannot call ourselves victims of it.

We are volunteers of it.

We know now

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It doesn't do anything.

It doesn't help anybody.

It doesn't do anything except pay the bills of those media companies and jack up our nervous systems and trick us into thinking we're doing something.

It does nothing.

So if we choose to live that way, then we do not get to call ourselves victims of it.

It is not the hardest thing to do, to decide I'm not letting that in my house.

I'm going to stay clear.

I'm going to stay engaged.

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I just wanted to say that, and this is dangerous territory, and

it's not for me.

All this is just, you know, swimming in my mind, so I might not say it exactly right, but I don't believe that we know what we think we know.

I don't believe this is much of a binary as we are even presenting it today.

I'm not saying that to be correct in any way.

I actually don't believe that it's true.

I don't believe

that it's bad guys versus good guys, and the bad guys won.

I think our whole system is bad.

And I think that the MAGA party is horrific.

And I think that there is a lot of problems with the Democratic Party as well.

I think that there's something

that is not true to the core.

I think that when you are setting yourself up to be the good guys and to be the ones who are protecting human beings while actively funding genocides, while actively having foreign policy all over the planet that does not jive with what you are presenting yourself to be.

When there is rot at the core of anything,

you're going to see that in the fruit.

And

I believe that we are now raising generations of people who aren't buying it anymore.

And I'm not saying,

I'm not discounting anything we've said up until now,

but I am saying this is not a clear case anymore in my eyes of good guys and bad guys.

This is, we are in the hunger games.

And the only way that I see, I just texted a good friend this morning and was like, I just want to be out of the fucking arena and I want to be at fucking bonfires.

outside the capitol with people who are

have ejected themselves and are just taking fierce care of each other and are just fucking lawless.

I just wanted to say that.

I do not think

that

there is any purity

or

rightness even

at the center of either political party.

Yeah, and I think that if we go back to starting it with the the model of survival and and perseverance of the black community in this nation, none of them would say that there was ever an ounce of purity in any of these parties.

Even that idea of like, there's a really good guy and a really bad guy is not a luxury that has been entertained.

It was who is the least likely to kill us.

The idea of politics

being a notion of harm reduction.

We're not counting on you to keep us safe.

You weren't built for that and you're never going to do it.

We are going to keep us safe is their model, but we're going to vote in the people

who are most likely to reduce harm against us.

So I think that that

is an idea that has been around for a long time.

And I think in some, when we're talking about whiteness throughout this whole thing, I think we have not thought that.

We have thought there's a good option, a good option for me, because we've been less confronted with the daily truth that nothing was made for us.

Yeah, the good guy, bad guy is a white progressive idea.

And like, so that in some ways helps me to be like, oh, there's, if there's no one coming to save you, your only choice is to save yourself and the people that you love.

So find people that you love, because it might not be the people that you think.

Who are you going to put in that boat with you when it's time?

You got to know who those people are and who's going to do that for you.

And I think the other way to survive this, I was thinking about it.

I'm like, the answer is not opting out.

That is too much privilege.

But how do we keep our sanity and keep our life?

Because I've been thinking about what Tricia Hersey says about white supremacist capitalism and how she just says over and over, like, I don't belong to that.

You can't have me.

I'm not the one you're going to get.

And I keep thinking about that for the next four years.

You circus that you're making over here, you can't have me.

I'm not the one you're going to get.

I'm not trading the next four years of my life and my joy and my nervous system to your fucking circus.

No, I'm not going to do it.

It's, it's a, y'all, it is a riptide.

MAGA is a riptide.

And what we have done, what I have done

up to now

is

the force of that riptide pulling us out to sea.

I have just conjured every bit of my strength and my rage and my endurance.

And I have fought like hell to have an equal and opposite swim back to shore against the tide.

And that

is not right.

If anyone who does that literally exhausts themselves to drowning, That is how you die in a riptide.

It isn't because you're not trying hard enough.

It isn't because you don't have enough passion.

It isn't because you don't want to live enough and you don't want to save the people around you.

It's that you're moving in the wrong fucking direction.

To save a riptide, you move

a few feet in the opposite direction and you just swim out of the riptide.

And that conserves your energy.

And you swim back to fucking shore where you can pull people in.

Because when you're swimming in a riptide, you can't pull people in.

You can't save yourself.

You can't save anyone else.

You have to stay calm and conserve your energy.

You have to get off of Twitter.

When you are in the current, you don't have any hope of helping yourself or anyone else.

It is not a question of effort.

It's not a question of belief.

And it is a question of direction.

Which direction are you moving from?

And are you on solid ground?

when you're trying to help people out.

Yeah.

And it's not your own human failing to to stay calm when you actually have jumped in the riptide.

Like, it's not that you just don't have the strength, it's what the riptide is

made for.

The only two things a riptide does is push you out to sea or drowned you through exhaustion trying for you to swim to the shore.

That's the only thing a riptide does, that's the only thing MAGA does.

Yeah, I just want to leave us with a few thoughts and ideas.

First of all,

as I can tell you a hopeful thing, which is that

if you do decide to not ride the riptide,

not to opt out, but so you can actually opt in effectively,

and you decide to cut off whatever it is that is the riptide to you, okay, whether it's the news on your phone or whatever.

I did that 90 days ago or 60 days ago.

And I'm here to report to you that I am a different human being

two months after I stopped all social media.

I am

telling you that I am clearer.

I am less terrified all the time.

I am braver.

I am saner.

And I'm telling you this not as a braggy thing, because I actually

am treating it now like a very important part of my sobriety.

I am sober from social media.

I am not being hyperbolic.

I have been trying

to avoid admitting that I was powerless over social media for the last seven years, 10 years.

I have found myself deleting it and then

days later, frantically asking people for my password so I can get it just like I used to hide booze from myself behind refrigerators and then a day later get chairs and try to find the booze again.

I am powerless over social media.

It is designed to make me insane so that I will stay on it and buy shit.

That is not just me.

That is all of us.

You have that power.

When we are choosing what we can control and what we can't control, that is something that every single person is choosing.

It is an addiction.

It takes a minute.

But there is hope.

I am telling you that my life is different.

Secondly, when I got up this morning,

I went upstairs,

turned on the coffee maker.

When I tell you, I looked outside the window and saw that the sun was rising.

And when I tell you that I was surprised,

I had a moment of surprise that the sun was rising, okay?

Because it was unbelievably beautiful.

And the rays were coming over the path in front of our house.

And it was gorgeous.

And

I kept thinking,

nature is voting.

Okay, like The sun has risen again.

Some force that is nature has decided.

And yet, yes, we are still going to go on.

And yes, there is still beauty.

And yes, there is still light.

And that force is not man-made.

I am looking at two different, there are different realms that we can live in.

And the one that brings us the great despair is the one that's created by the middlemen.

But there's one beyond that, and there's one within me.

And this might sound crazy, but it's

I can feel it in my bones.

There are two sanctuaries that I have right now.

And they're the truest ones.

And one is this deep inside of me.

When I go deep inside of me, there is a part that is beyond all of this madness.

That is like a low level of river of peace.

And there is one outside of me.

And that is nature.

It is not touched by racism or misogyny or any of this shit that we have built.

It is what has been consistent from the beginning of time.

And it is the same today as it was yesterday.

And so

when you are finding yourself in despair in that second realm where everything is shit,

go to nature today.

Okay, just look, walk.

Just,

it is

the living manifestation of hope,

of

the idea that somehow

much is untouched.

And there are places to find

peace and beauty and joy.

And we do not have to wait for anyone to give us those things.

We can have them now

in the first or third realm.

I would love to add my things to that, too, of like things

to get through.

I set up three monthly donations.

One is to the Southern Poverty Law Center that does a lot of anti-hate crime work and monitoring of hate groups, my local abortion fund, and the ACLU.

Find the places that are what you care about.

That is your equal and opposite response.

It isn't your rage.

It's your dollars and your time.

Also, the people that

are most hurt by this are the people who are going to be impacted by the policies, but also the people who are shaken to the core about who is actually standing with them and for them.

I was seeing a meme go around that was like: if you don't understand why your trans friend is scared right now, you don't have a trans friend.

You know a trans person.

If you don't understand why your black friend is scared and enraged, you don't have a black friend.

I'm going to be reaching out to those people in my life and sharing

my sorrow and

figuring out what I can do to learn to be

with them in community.

Just like I'm learning to find the people in mine.

The part I didn't really cry this time.

I think I just

After 2016, it was all of the tears and all of the times and I just was kind of dumbfounded again, except when I realized I had to wake up and tell my kids this morning what happened.

And I think that is just so fucking sad.

Like, none of this is pontificating about, isn't this a nice little bow?

Here's what we do.

It's really fucking sad to have to tell your kids that this is the America that they live in.

And

we can also do the same thing with our kids.

We can, in this neighborhood, I know we have groups that are

looking out for and standing with immigrant populations who are right now sitting in their houses trying to figure out whether they

take their kids with them back to war-torn countries or whether they live their lives without their children and can find anyone that they trust enough to take care of their children in this country.

We can show up in our communities.

These are national issues, but they are people.

We're saying the country did this.

No, the country didn't do this.

The individual people in our country did this, and the individual people in our country are the ones that are being affected by it.

Like, we can show up in our communities, and that is stepping outside of the riptide.

And there are a lot of us.

I mean, that's the other thing.

When I say this is who we are,

what I mean is both sides.

Like,

we are also

almost half the country who showed up and didn't vote for Trump.

That is also who we are.

Yes.

We are both.

And showing up, we need to expand what we think about when we think about showing up.

It's not every four years.

It's for the people who are in our communities right now that are terrified.

Our friends who are going to lose jobs as a result of this.

Our community members who are going to be separated from their families as a result of this.

We can show up in the way to give each other the safety in the only way that safety has ever existed, which is in reliance on people where there is accountability between you.

Yeah.

And if you're a little bit like me and you don't have the capacity to even go there quite yet, sister, I love how

you're thinking about this.

I think that's giving me a lot to think about.

I'm just like trying to get through this one day.

And I don't think I even have the capacity to like

do all of this beautiful thing that you guys are even thinking of.

I'm just like sad.

And I feel like I just want to reach out to the people out there who need a second to just like let this simmer, let this settle,

so that I just speak for myself so that I can feel a little bit more strength in whatever I choose to do going forward.

I think that's the bravest thing.

I think a lot of the like

jumping to

action or nextness or hope or even like, okay, now we don't put it in this, we put it in this.

It's also just

a lot of times that flurry is

trying not to just

have the first, first, the pain.

It's like jumping to the rising.

And I.

That's not what I'm doing.

This is how I channel my pain.

This is my new.

Yeah, I'm just responding to what she's saying, that it's not, I don't think

that that's a lack of courage to stop

and sit with the sadness.

And I think could be world-changing, actually, if everybody just sat with it for a good long minute.

Oh,

I love you three.

Two.

I mean, there's actually, I do love me too.

Yes, you do.

And the most important thing is that you can't do that.

I love us three.

Y'all, we love you so much.

I know it feels like

a lot of people feel like nobody's got them, you know, but we do have each other.

We've got each other.

We'll see you soon.

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We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

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