What's Next? 30

What's next? we ask.  How about a sense of proportion, Gentle Reader?  Emotions and high and lovely feelings and strident and just outrage are all well and good, but they don't get anything done.  Setting buildings on fire and tearing down statues of people you don't like is not going to move anyone nor anything one single millimetre forward, and more likely is going to set in reverse even the worthiest of causes and movements.  Destructive actions do absolute nothing to build a new world, and will simply make the perpetrators turn into monsters every bit as vile or even worse than the horrible oppressors they want to replace.

What are we going to replace them with?  We have only to consider what happens when oppressed people take power, without sufficient self-reflection to prevent them from repeating and perpetrating the abuses and crimes that were done against them.   Consider the Jews when they founded the modern state of Israel.  Following all the horrific persecutions and attempted genocide throughout their troubled history, now they are marginalizing and mistreating the people who were living in their country long before they returned.  And of course, the many white settlers who came here to the Americas were fleeing persecution, oppression and genocide (remember the French Huguenots, anybody?)  And look what they did to the millions of aboriginal peoples who inhabited these lands millennia before we ever did?

I have given up on a lot of my previous activism.  The sloganeering and the black and white thinking and all the heightened emotions have done absolute squat to change anything at all, and serve only as an emotional outlet for immature and developmentally arrested adults.  We cannot validly protest anything without being prepared to provide or recommend viable alternatives that do not involve rampant destruction or fear or hate mongering.  And none of this is happening.  That is what is really concerning.  Especially during this epoch of fear and heightened anxiety that we are all living in right now.

I can't even offer anything constructive, except maybe for this little challenge.  Everybody.  Think before you speak or act.  Never mind about destruction or tearing down monuments.  Focus instead on what you intend to build. Make friends and allies everywhere possible, and accept whatever help or support is being offered, even if it does not meet your lofty expectations

Humility, anyone?  Patience, too.  Nothing good is ever going to come overnight.  You have to work for it.  And you have to earn it.

All for now, duckies!