Resisting Authoritarians: Reclaim Your Space to Breathe
A Meditation on Stillness, Resistance, and the Beautiful We
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin
It is a beautiful morning carrying portents of Fall. Clear sunny skies and temperatures that are cool, but not yet crisp or cold. We are far enough from midsummer now that my mornings coincide with the early sunlight - neither the sun nor I have yet finished our first cup of coffee. These mornings are my cathedral.
Shortly after the election last November I turned off my television. It was just a habit anyway. But I just could not bring myself to listen to the talking migraine that is Morning Joe. I needed quiet, to just sit and be still. That was the beginning.
In turning off the TV I began to disengage from the machine.
My daily workflow now begins without a screen. I go outside and simply sit. The warmth of the coffee mug in my hand, the backyard menagerie scurrying through their morning routines. I simply sit and give my brain the space to breathe.
And it is in those moments, decluttered of the shouting chyron, that I have started to truly see.
The commodification of the self ensnares us into a slow suicidal hustle for the gains of someone else; for promises we will never see. If we start to listen inward without an agenda, without tracking a goal, we free ourselves of the treadmill that keeps us running to nowhere at all.
Is it a conspiracy? Is there a dark, smoky board room, malevolent shadows crafting a sinister plot? I think probably not. Yet, our dehumanization is baked into the system which entraps us into buying our way out of bondage, selling who we are in hopes of being free.
The key is to let go and embrace what lives inside. That is the resistance.
I now only watch or read voices I have not yet heard. The stories of the forgotten and the silenced, they are those from whom I learn. In opening myself to the differences I begin to see my “me” is a part of a beautiful “we”.
That is what gives me hope in this moment of dark despair.
The violence, the hate, the venom that is always in the air.
The glorification of ignorance and our collective pacification through the banal.
The cultural migration away from the front porch to the privacy fenced deck chair.
The empty grievances of privileged cries, frothing “that’s not fair”.
It is all a cheap facade.
Turn it all off. Listen to hear. Find a future you in the eyes of someone who arrived here through a different path. Doing so, you begin to understand that yes, as a matter of fact, I am my brother’s keeper. To be so is something sacred and dear.
So tomorrow, resist in the most powerful way there is. Reject the lie that there is an “other” and allow yourself to see. Fight the power through stillness, silencing their provocations of fear.