It's tempting, in times of pain, chaos, and transformation, to think there are no opportunities for you to participate, or feel like life is so insane that nothing matters, and besides, the world is ending anyway. Plenty of people are caught in the meme that nothing makes a difference, especially them.
I know it can seem that way. We've been moving at the compressed speed of events around eclipses, and our minds are warped into the light-speed movement of electric communication that delivers the latest crisis to our purse or pocket in mere seconds. Everything is accelerated, magnified, and thrown into a mash-up with everything else streaming across your news feed and beleaguered brain.
It's easy to imagine there's no place for you in the world at this time, or that there's no use trying. You might be so disgusted, shocked or scared, that you cannot figure out what to do. I'm here with another idea. But first, let's review the recent past.
If you follow the news, it's been the War of the Week since mid-August.
It started with the threat to have a nuclear war with North Korea. Remember that? Trump's threat of hellfire and brimstone, and power like the world has never witnessed before? This featured Kim Jong-un and The Donald, throwing adolescent tantrums as people in Seoul and Tokyo wondered if they were in the line of fire.
That was just three weeks ago; I know that's a long time, and it's hard to remember so far back in ancient history. Threatening nuclear war was a ruse to scramble coverage of a story that broke earlier in the week, the one about how the home of Paul Manafort, the presidential campaign manager for the guy who is now president, was raided by the FBI.
The raid was part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Russian connection and a labyrinth of financial crimes. I consider Manafort to be the pin in the pinwheel of this whole Russia business. He's had endless dealings with the Russians and was the made-to-order manager for the Soviet Revival Presidential Campaign of 2016.
Mueller has impaneled a grand jury. He now has subpoena power. We may not know what's in Trump's tax returns, but now Mueller has the power to get them right from the IRS, and may have already done so.
This got under the skin of the commander-in-chief sufficiently for him to go nuclear, which distracted everyone from the whole Russia bit for about 48 hours. When that got boring, it was time to threaten the invasion, or perhaps just bombing, of Venezuela. Everyone was saying the same thing. Venezuela? Uh, why? It was like that scene in Wag the Dog. A war with Albania? Seriously? In the old days, that would have been more than enough.
That's when things got really interesting: it was time for a race riot. For our weekend diversion, we got a kind of Civil War reenactment—or what the New York Daily News editorial writers called (who were being witty, but not kidding) "the Civil War's Battle of Fifth Ave."
In Charlottesville, VA, the city had decided to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who commanded the army of northern Virginia. White supremacists took to the road like Phish fans and gathered with their body armor, Glocks and assault rifles. Others, wearing chinos and polo shirts, staged a midnight tiki-torch march on the University of Virginia campus.
In the midst of this, violence erupted various places, and then a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer. Two police officers were also killed when their helicopter went down.
Trump then held a couple of press conferences, blaming "both sides" of the issue, praising the fine people protesting for white rights, and comparing Robert E. Lee to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. White nationalist leaders praised Trump for refusing to condemn the whole thing, which he then did briefly; then, to the feigned shock of his communications team, walked it back at a patently insane press conference held at Trump Tower where he revealed himself as a kind of wannabe Nazi who thinks there's no difference between Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee.
The phrase "alt left" was born, but the most recent buzzword is antifa, meaning antifascist. As this went on, communities in the South were quietly removing their confederate statues. Nearly all of these were put in place in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the Civil Rights movement. Personally, I am eager to see slave memorials built in their place.
The Onion chimed in with the headline, "Trump Warns Removing Confederate Statues Could Be Slippery Slope To Eliminating Racism Entirely."
The New York Times published this sentence: "WASHINGTON—President Trump found himself increasingly isolated in a racial crisis of his own making on Wednesday, abandoned by the nation's top business executives, contradicted by military leaders and shunned by Republicans outraged by his defense of white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, VA."
Just before the eclipse, a US Navy destroyer collided with a merchant ship near Singapore. That occupied most of eclipse weekend. Then Monday, feeling neglected by all the people looking up at the Sun and not at him, Trump announced that we would be reviving the war with Afghanistan and turning Pakistan into the latest enemy.
This all went down in the space of two weeks. And what have you been up to?
I'm aware some people are hiding in bed waiting for this to all be over. Others are expecting the worst. It is worth pondering how much of a problem the racial thing really is. Troublesome though it may be, it's not such a huge problem if cities respond by taking down statues of Civil War heroes while this is all going on. That does not make life perfect for people of color—hardly—though it's a sign that society is paying attention.
All politics is local. Many Republicans are speaking out against this. Their constituents may fancy themselves conservative, but white supremacy is taking things a little too far for them; maybe that will get them to start questioning their whole viewpoint, that is, the one where the logical conclusion is white supremacy.
If eclipses set patterns, this is a pretty good one: reaction followed by response, issue after issue. None of this stupidity has been met by silence. Every one of these issues has caused a rumble through society. Many people know it's all a distraction from Russia having seized control of the US government through its asset and operative Donald Trump.
And then there's you. Many people are struggling to hold things together—or that was a common thing in the weeks leading up to the eclipse. I've noticed that people are starting to crack—and that interesting sounds and visions are coming through the little fractures.
Even if you're feeling spun around, this can actually be productive. All this chaos, both global and personal, is opportunity knocking on your door. It's an opportunity to participate, whether that means stepping up to your desire to work on the issues you care about, or to step into your chosen role as whatever it is you want to do or become.
You may think that the seeming chaos is blocking you, or that the uncertainty is scrambling your plans. I suggest you think otherwise.
First of all, things are not that chaotic at the moment. What we have now is about average for a transitional time in American history.
However, there's a quickening going on; a loosening up of the structure of society, of expectations, and a corresponding movement of energy. This is the ideal time to insert yourself and your ideas into the equation of society. If you look back at history, you'll see that many of the most enduring (and useful) ideas, institutions, and achievements came through in times of total mayhem. There are many examples, but one is how The Lord of the Rings was written in the author's garage between Nazi bombing runs on his area in England. To include yourself indeed, you would just need to do one thing: make yourself available.
That's the thing. And to do that, you'll have to drop some of your character armor. You cannot hug a child with nuclear arms, and you can't be available if you've packed all kinds of defenses around your personality.
Character armor is all that 'no' you may have packed around yourself: no to experimenting, no to life, no to relationships, no to sex, no to taking chances, no to doing what you want.
It shows up in various pseudo forms of integrity, purity, uprightness, prudishness and many related affects and artifacts. It comes in the form of withholding. It comes in the form of wanting people to know what a good person you are, therefore, you would never do that. Never be seen with that person. Never think that thought. Never get to know someone who is not a marriage contender. Never take a real chance on yourself—meaning that the outcome of your choice is uncertain. Never come out as the sexual being you personally are; that's for all the LGBTQ folk.
And yet you can smell the smoke coming off of many people: that's the scent of their circuits being fried by an overload of energy combined with inaction. It's the smell of driving with the brakes on.
To participate and to be available, you'll need to get over any fear you may have of being seen, being heard, standing out, standing up, being outstanding, being too much or not enough. These are just hang-ups, which is like hanging up on yourself.
The paradox of participating, of counting yourself in, is that you would have to open up and be vulnerable somewhere other than a "safe zone." To the contrary, you would be exposing yourself to, uh, something—really, to your own feelings, and to change—right when everything seems so dangerous.
Yet to the extent things seem dangerous, that's likely to be a direct function of any armoring that you're carrying around. The more you defend against something, the realer it seems; but what exactly are you defending, and against what?
One other thing: It's vital to live in a bigger world of more important priorities than what you may currently inhabit. There is a world, and it's larger than your world. To live, it's urgently necessary to give up pettiness: such as the obsession with small transgressions, being perpetually offended, or being riveted to what's familiar.
It's necessary to be flexible, lest you break. The less you flex and bend, the stiffer the wind feels.
People are figuring out that this all comes down to sex. To some, that's the scariest news of all, to some it's the best news of all, and to others, it's just not news: in particular, to purists who make attacking and undermining sex their primary agenda. Contaminating sex is the very most important tool of fascists, of tyrants, of priests and other cops.
Sex is the ultimate anarchy, because you just have to go with it: no choreography, no expectations, and all that planning and control just fall apart. That's just how it is. Then something else comes out: your voice, your love, your sweat, your tears, your music, your art, your desire to be alive, and your gratitude for being so.
Count yourself in. Do it now.
