I remember, decades ago, facing this tension: on the one hand, aware of how completely frigged up the way our world works, wishing for this way of life to come to an end, but meanwhile, wishing also for it to last a big longer, the racing to save what could be saved while hurtling towards catastrophe.

To have elected a Kamala Harris government would have been to have voted to cling to our ledge on a crumbling edifice. Electing Trump is like pouring gasoline on the edifice as it erupts in flames.

Are there other options? Well, at one level, no. At another, there is what our hero/heroines have been doing for ages. Author Rivera Sun shared a clip of Marianne Williamson speaking about how, at other times, people did the impossible. For example, abolitionists – what hope did they have of succeeding? But they kept working because it was what they knew needed doing.

She did not speak of Sitting Bull or other Indigenous people who saw that their loving, healthy way of living was being exterminated, the people in their communities, the other wild beings they shared awareness with, who helped them survive, also, being exterminated.

Our situation is, surely, akin to that of Sitting Bull, where so much that we have treasured is being lost and destroyed. Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) recounts how Sitting Bull faced his situation:  “In spite of the horrors of the buffalo being gone, and the smallpox and the war and loss of his people… he still played his music, he still did ceremony. He still was generous. And somebody asked him [Why are you here? Why are you doing these things?] and he said, ‘Well, I want to be a human being.’ He said, ‘I’m a spirit in this body, I’ll be back again, somehow, maybe not as a human maybe as a tree or something.’ ” (Listen here: https://kinshiphub.net/at-home-with-nature-the-kinship-worldview/ )

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 I suppose I had a realization something akin to this years ago, in doing a thought experiment. What if I knew that, in a year, there would be a nuclear holocaust, wiping out everything I know and love? How might I change my life now? I realized I would still want to do most of what I do.

How about another thought experiment now? Like, would I ask that somehow, our society might change, in the face of knowing that our survival now is coming to an end? What about prioritizing health for all earth’s children? Spiritual health too. I remember reading how Etty Hillesum went to a concentration camp, where she eventually died/was killed. She noticed mothers goading their children to behave in certain ways by threatening them that the Nazis would get them if they did not obey. She was appalled. Contrast this with the story Wahinkpe Topa shares from the Trail of Tears, where Cherokee people were forced to move to an entirely different territory. Along the way, and even after arriving, thousands died from exposure, starvation and disease. Somehow, he learned a song that women sang to their children along the trail. The song invites the children to look at the shapes in the clouds, the fish in the water, helping to keep it clean, the beauty around them.

What would it look like, for us, as a society, to make providing healthy food and water and healthy ways of relating to “all our relations”, for our children, for us too, our priority?

As a START to that reflection, I would suggest an idea I first encountered in a version of the “Worldview chart”, available on this site:  https://worldviewliteracy.org/ . In the version I have, it cites, for the Indigenous worldview, “Generosity as highest expression of courage” whereas in the dominant, colonializing worldview, fighting is seen as the highest expression of courage.

In our society, generosity is usually seen as donations of money & resources, but ultimately, I see generosity as rooted in love & gratitude, so it can take other forms too.

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PS. I just got this article, which I think is worth reading, to help us orient ourselves in this new/long-historied world:  https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/

And books by Rivera Sun https://riverasun.com/, such as the Ari Ara series and the Dandelion Trilogy. At times, these can feel like “escape” literature, because Rivera Sun’s imagination is a wonderful place to explore when the political reality around us is horrifying. I think though, such books can do more than that; they help us raise our spiritual and emotional states.