Repeat after me: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation". (Thank you, Alaisdair Gray.)
For each of us, this will mean different things. But collectively, our goal should be to build local and national communities that offer justice, opportunity, and freedom to all, regardless of race, gender, religion, class, ability, or any other criteria that has been used to separate and divide us.The challenge we face *is* daunting. It's clear now that some significant fraction of our fellow humans are happy ceding their agency to authority in many forms, and cannot understand that their choices in fact harm others, and often harm themselves.
There's nothing wrong with practicing conservative politics or religion; but to force others to live with either or both, without consent, is wrong. The same is true on the left -- and this may be the only time I'll acknowledge the equivalence of belief in conservative and liberal values.
We've seen the corrosion of humanist values over the course of the last 40 years. In the last four years, the corrorision has lead to the wholesale destruction of liberal democracy and its replacement with, or the threat of, fascism and authoritarian oligarchy. Men who have no business leading anything, let alone a nation-state, threaten to rule by fiat and not the with the consent and will of the people.
In the United States we are 79 days away from the most consequential national election the United States has ever undertaken. As I type this, the President and his claque continue to deploy tactics to intimidate voters and suppress voting turnout. There are active clashes between fascist and radical right-wing groups who are armed, violent and advocate sedition, and many other groups across the political spectrum who are (mostly) peaceful and largely non-violent and unarmed. In many cases, local law enforcement support the fascist and radical right -wing groups.
This has to change; and only by imagining and working towards and for a better future can we see the end of this rot on civil society. Try and do something every day to help change the world and make a new, better community, town, city, state, nation, and world.
