“There once was a note, pure and easy…”

What to say about protesting today? Endless.

Elephants who have been abused and overworked go to sanctuaries, if they are lucky. Sorry creatures, who have had their tusks ripped out, their bones bruised, skin scabbed and sore. They are exhausted and fearful.

There, people are kind to them. The battered animals, who deserve to be wild and regal, free to roam,  have instead lived under the yoke, learned to mistrust humans and even other elephants. Slowly, in these sanctuaries, surrounded by other animals who have been through the same nightmares, they may heal. Sometimes they make friends. More rarely, they meet up again with others they knew before. The general narrative leaves animals befriending each other and humans to children’s books.

The truth is that often, we are taught to grow out of care and tenderness, leaving it behind, or to others, not as important. Dictators, busy executives, tech bros leaving a trail of fatherless children, women who shoot dogs, or those who even their mothers say they are abusive to their wives and drink too much – they don’t seem to care for anyone but themselves. Such an odd list. Can’t imagine where it came from.

So-called men, in the fascist narrative, use all creatures who are unlike them, for their own purposes.

Remember that these abused creatures, human and animal, who are damaged by this aggressive and inhuman world view, have minds and feelings and hearts. We read about women who kill themselves after abuse. Men who are killed during ICE raids. Mothers torn from their children. Stripped and bound, the men in the videos of enforcement become faceless. These images are repeated, until we are used to seeing them, then they are on repeat, interspersed with news reports on maternity hospitals being bombed, children mutilated as they go to collect food. We watch this, then go to work to write emails. Deliver packages. Pretend that the commerce of daily life has not been altered irrevocably.

The elephants are waiting for redemption. What are we waiting for?

I read about a man who plays piano for the elephants. They circle him to listen to Beethoven. But there are many videos from around the world of different animals coming over to listen to guitar and pipes, to say hello to small children, to welcome fellow bruised animals.

Yet we say people who are inhumane are animals. That needs to be changed. Animals don’t treat each other the way we treat each other. And once we hoped that never again meant something.

This so-called government tells us about waste. Laughs at the disabled, who they claim are stealing benefits. One congressman has just been evicted from his luxury apartment, owing $85,000 in back rent. Nothing will happen to him. Nothing will happen to Noam, busy picking her portrait for Instagram, lying about cutting off call centers, being murderously slow to respond to floods. The lies told about vaccines that now have created an epidemic of children sick with measles – in Alberta, Canada as well. The maga tentacles of death stretching out along the internet to the world.

Now they want to abolish more of Medicare and Medicaid, because taking food stamps and health care away from children and the elderly isn’t enough. The dangerously unbalanced Supreme Court has now approved the destruction of the Department of Education. Only fools think that is a good idea, and there will be more fools because of it. A country that worships racism, stupidity, and abuse. The American Dream.

What do the rest of us, the ones protesting or hoping that it will all go away do? This government has accused most of the population, including those who voted for this devil, as being wasteful. They have condemned all except the wealthy to a precarious life. A woman I spoke to, who owns an apartment, said that she felt that her own situation was precarious. As she is a Green Card holder, perhaps she is right.

Seeing extremes changes our thinking. Compassion or ignorance? Strengthened to speak out, or silenced? I mentioned Ukraine to a co-worker. No response. The silence was deafening. Nothing. No words. Not even a change of topic. Just a brick wall. Silenced. Possibly fearful of what can be seen on a chat.

Meanwhile, this government tells us that that its actions are necessary. Newspapers such as the both-sides addicted NYT tries to explain cruelty, as though it could be justified. They call health care for children and the elderly an entitlement. No matter that we have been paying into Social Security and Medicare our entire working lives. No matter that children and the elderly can’t work. Tell that to the people that want to impose work requirements. Not for the first time, I’ve wondered about the UK as a staging ground for some of the extreme ideas.

Logic has no place in this new scheme of brutality. Instead, we are convinced to give more to those who need it the least. More images become regularized. Private jets by the hundred flying to events treated as coronations. Billionaires cavorting at 50 million dollar weddings, with women whose lips seem oddly exploded, as do their breasts. The symbolism of women, now chemically and surgically altered. As the world is chemically and surgically altered. There has been a spate of articles recently on the new ultra thinness embraced by the uber wealthy as being related to the fascist mindset overtaking the world. And the injectable chemical available at a price to induce boniness in those who can afford food thousands of times over, who never need to work in the fields or factories, whose exercise is maintaining their position. There must be a connection between the destruction of the planet and the manipulation of body, mind, and spirit.

Surrounded by propaganda, the monolithic quality of fascist argumentation surrounds us like skyscrapers on a city street. We can’t see beyond their grey, implacable face to anything warm or alive. And then we start to wonder if there really is anything else but this reality, this war on so many fronts. Masked men abducting men and women, forcing them into unmarked black SUVs. Soldiers occupying Los Angeles. Threats to take over NYC and Washington. And underneath the photographs of this glorification of violence, they slip in doubts. Fraud in health care. Diversity as reduction and unfairness. The expense of student loans, preventing a generation from investing in their future homes – so don’t cancel loans, instead say that higher education is a waste of time. Their wars – their attacks on education, their success at dividing people by race, or age, or gender – these slip in to consciousness in strange ways. Young people who irrationally hate everyone over a certain age. White people who hate people of color. Too many have been convinced that these groups have robbed something from them, while the real robbers tell lies, and distract, always a new distraction. 

To fight back is also to guard our sanity. Not an easy thing to do.

This morning, I read some pieces on ways to protect and strengthen our mental resilience. One pointed out that a successful cure is not the elimination of the mental symptoms, but new ways of dealing with them when they recur.

One piece invited people to write and/or publish the pieces that they were afraid to show to others. Expansion, instead of contraction. Laughter, instead of sarcasm. Dreams, instead of fear and endless dullness. Difficult to imagine someone encouraging – but they are out there. Hard to imagine a world of laughter, where children flourish instead of being wiped out.

How to be resilient, when fear is the dominant emotion. An inability to focus. A sense that any pushback is pointless. Watching the opposition party, who was supposed to be helping, instead fighting each other, resisting voices that look for ways out of this mess. Watching the drift further to the right, as political parties that are supposedly on the side of the vast majority of people adopt policies that pander to the far right. Anything to avoid acknowledging that the system is the problem. That fear of losing power makes people lie.

What happens to our daily lives? The mediocre are silent, or are pushed forward into positions of power. At work, the supporter of the current government praised a person who would be willing to make cuts regardless of utility, without fighting back, calling them “a good soldier.” I think of those who say just play the game. People who talked about how playing mind games was fun, because it was possible to convince others.  The power to convince, or persuade. Because so many are impressed by external markers of success, handbags to houses, SUVs, boats, penthouses, more, always more. Some just call it the game of life – and exploit how those in charge enjoy hearing phrases that either reinforce their superiority over others, or show deference of some kind. 

It’s easy to give up.

What to do? If you are fortunate, you have a support group of some kind. Many don’t. I read about people moving overseas, and how their partner is fixing the cottage. About artists who rely on the support of friends or family. Groups who are there for each other. If you have none of these, it all sounds like make believe. Yet there are kind people. There are people who play music for elephants. 

It’s easy to stay with fear. Fear, so familiar. The illusion of safety. The depression of Sunday evening, the hollow relief of the Monday morning commute, the known. Shakespeare:

“But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in

To saucy doubts and fears”

The way we treat people is a mirror of our souls. And this country has headed down a very dark route, from which return is not guaranteed. At work, the supporter of the current president said to me that he was right about not having quotas in jobs, that it should be the best person. 

The mental blindness. This from someone whose grandparents emigrated here. What’s that quote – none so blind as those who will not see?

This is an abusive government, one designed to function on the energy created by fear and hatred. 

We must fight against the normalization of these outrageous acts done by this increasingly out of control government. Stand up against the colonization of our minds by this machine of inhumanity. As Bob Marley said,

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds