Holding hands, holding truth

This is the time to hold hands. We are down to that minimum grace: to hold hands, tight, one with another, and form a chain of humanity to stand against the losses and challenges our species will face in the coming decades. These decades, I believe along with many others, mark the endgame: the period during which we learn whether the planet will allow us to live after what we have done to her.

My generation of Americans has danced through its history under a virtual veil of glittering, glorious media — the communications-and-culture functions that help ensure American hegemony, that bedazzle us and keep us from noticing the ongoing theft of every one of our core human values and liberties (not to mention the substantive wealth of our middle class). We’d like to teach the world to sing, we said, and then we changed that to say we’d like to buy the world a Coke; but we did neither. Instead, we allowed the corporations to ruthlessly extract fossil fuels and pour carbon into the air. The world remains songless and thirsty, and the glittering veil has now tightened around our faces into a suffocating hood that perhaps cannot be removed without surgical intervention. The American kleptocracy that emerged after World War II scaled up so rapidly around the globe that the climate consequences are blatant, global, and possibly irrevocable. For many reasons, I believe, as do many others much smarter than me, that humans will pay a high price in suffering if we do not engage in mass action right away.

But I can’t do anything about that when I am in a state of existential terror. So I have stumbled back to basics. I hold hands with people more — partner, family, friends. Electronic interfaces can organize us, but speaking our minds must always and ever be rooted in our authentic physical selves.

Bodies in the street; in the voting booth….

More than ever, we need to reclaim the powerful, platonic, one-on-one, skin-to-skin communications that we know we can trust. We have recently been learning, to our dismay, how fragile a vessel for truth the electronic media have proven to be. We really can no longer trust our eyes; our monitor screens; that video; that sound bite. For truth, we must return to real shared experience; to human-to-human transmission of information, flawed as that sometimes is.

We need to hold hands more within our circle of loved ones. Then, we need to extend our hands into our communities. It’s hard to hate someone if you can shake their hand; hold the door for them; help them with their child. It’s easier to spot a lie and to talk through a falsehood if you do it in person, right up close.

Extend hands. Engage eyes. Share the air, the space, the real world.

It is past time for the people to speak truth to the powers who are making so many criminal, calamitous mistakes, one after another. For me, the only way to attain authentic, resilient courage to speak that truth is if I can hold tight to the hands of the people I love.

Hold hands; hold the truth. And thereby hold, once more, the power.