What Can I Do?
We are living in times unprecedented not just for our species, but the entire planet itself.
A history-altering pandemic has been upending life for months. The resulting economic strain continues to devastate communities of every social and cultural background. Uprisings in countries around the world against racist policing and state violence are bringing class and racial struggles to the forefront of politics and daily life.
And all the while, a planetary warming occurring at speeds greater than any before in the planet’s known history, resulting from the mass abuse of fossil fuels by the world’s economies, is devouring species, nations, and ecosystems, and threatening the ongoing existence of 95% of life on Earth.
If you’re not one of the billions whose daily life is dominated by trying to survive in these conditions, you’re left with one question:
What can I do?
The short answer is: Nothing.
The longer answer is: Everything.
The crises we face have no road map. There are people with plans, but those plans are unproven and purely theoretical. Some may argue that these plans are evidence-based, but any evidence supporting their efficacy comes from a world we no longer live in, and one we may never return to.
It is no surprise nor personal failure that many, when confronting these circumstances head on, are left feeling paralyzed and hopeless.
This is not to say these plans are useless - they aren’t. The future is, to some degree, always unknown, yet we still make decisions, act, and find that the consequences of our actions are many times consistent with not only our experiences, but the experiences of others, as well. Planning has always been a matter of birthing a reality in spite of circumstance, in spite of the unknown, and in spite of our struggle to establish something concrete in the face of temporal abstraction.
That we are in uncharted territory on a global scale does not mean that we have not learned things that can help guide us or that all plans for a path forward are created equal - some people are better equipped to guide us than others, some plans are more carefully thought through and more deeply informed, some fundamental ideas about the world are more sound and more broadly meaningful.
But there is a randomness to what’s ahead that, while always present in life, now looms much larger.
The ecological instability and violence of climate breakdown is a matter so universal, so piercing, so unimaginably intricate yet straightforwardly simple in its ferocity, that we are left with only turgid metaphor and devastating anecdote to comprehend the scale of what’s befallen us.
“What can I do?” is a question answered by another: “What must be done?”
In this context, that is a question smothered by an impossible volume of knowable and unknowable answers.
Confronted with a cloud-scraping mountain of detritus and jewels and weapons and food scraps and furniture and alien objects and screaming voices and winding vines and writhing bodies, surrounded by a wall of encroaching flames and pelted by an uncannily harsh rain made of stone and ice, how is an individual to know what action to take next to best ensure their own survival, much less that of their brothers and sisters and community and species?
It is no surprise nor personal failure that many, when confronting these circumstances head on, are left feeling paralyzed and hopeless. Any one dimension of our current situation, taken in its entirety, would be enough to overwhelm our nervous systems and crush any sense of hope for ourselves and our world. How are we supposed to face all of this - all the uncertainty and pain and hardship and confusion - and feel that there is anything to be done, or that anything we might do is truly the right course of action?
Faced alone these are struggles and questions that cannot be answered.
And yet, we need not, and cannot, face them alone.
Liberating ourselves from oppressive systems...has not been, and will not be, a matter of grand gestures and single revelatory moments, but of an ongoing commitment to each other and to change.
The mountain of bizarre horrors before us that we must sort through and build a functioning world from as the climate clock ticks down is not one we must reckon with as individuals. We are standing at its base with billions of others, many already up the mountain putting pieces together, clearing debris, figuring out what to build, many others digging trenches and tilling soil, and still others keeping up morale, offering support, and providing sources of comfort so that we may continue on and not lose sight of why we’re there at the base of the mountain working alongside one another, when turning away and pretending none of this is happening would be so much easier.
What we do as individuals is not a matter of resolving any of these crises or ensuring that we come up with foolproof plans to save ourselves - it is a matter of looking around and realizing we are in this together and that it is only by leaning on each other and supporting each other, by observing and learning from each other, by stepping up and carrying the weight when we see others struggling, and by accepting that same solidarity from others when we are struggling, that we will find our through. It is a matter of realizing that individual action exists as part of a whole, and that the whole feeds into what we’re capable of as individuals, and that this mutuality creates something more lasting, more powerful, and more resilient than either pure individualism or pure collectivism creates on its own.
In an immediate practical sense, this means ceasing to conceive of the question as “What can I do?” but rather “How can I live?”
Liberating ourselves from oppressive systems, overcoming the struggles that leave us beleaguered and detached, shifting our global society away from laissez faire capitalism and toward sustainable holistic structures of economics and governance has not been, and will not be, a matter of grand gestures and single revelatory moments, but of an ongoing commitment to each other and to change.
In the words of Anthony Trollope, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
When we think about how to change our lives and how to shift our energies so that we are helping to build the world we believe in - and in parallel healing the one as it exists today - we must consider where our passions, skills, values, and hearts lie in order for this pursuit to be sustainable. There will, of course, be times that call on us to act in ways of acute strength and bravery and that ask us to make sacrifices and changes that are Herculean, but these times will be few and far between relative to the much more important daily impact of how we live our lives.
...ultimately, figuring out how to live in a way that supports and builds a better future, that brings about justice, that creates community and solidarity and deepens our bonds, these are things we must all figure out for ourselves.
Our pursuits and ways of being, then, cannot simply be about reacting to the actions of those opposed to our values or be guided in response to events or policies that undermine our goals. How we live, how we address the crises facing us, how we seize the opportunities to build something better, must come from a place of living for what we believe in, and not merely against what we don’t. If the course of our lives is dictated by reaction to circumstance, the world we’re capable of building can only shrink as the inertia of oppressive forces presents an endless series of hurdles for us to confront and resist. Our imaginations for our lives must not be defined by the world as it is, but the world as it could be, and we must ask ourselves what it means to live a life conducive to building that world.
This is not a question that can be answered simply by turning to others.
It is a question that can, and must, be informed by others as that is part of what it means to be in solidarity and to live in a community. We can learn from the wisdom and experiences of those who came before us, and we can hone our own understanding of ourselves in dialogue with those we trust and those we respect. We can expand and grow our empathy by engaging with people outside our immediate communities and by protecting our sense of curiosity about the world. But, ultimately, figuring out how to live in a way that supports and builds a better future, that brings about justice, that creates community and solidarity and deepens our bonds, these are things we must all figure out for ourselves.
The pursuit of liberation is at the center of the crises facing us - liberation from capitalist structures of economies and energy, liberation from racist hierarchies of human worth and meaning, liberation from oppressive states and institutional violence. Liberation is not achieved by replacing one model of servitude with another. Rather, true liberation comes from forgoing models of dominance altogether and instead choosing solidarity, cooperation, and community where our own humanity, the humanity of others, and the intrinsic un-measurable value of all life guides our liberating pursuits. Turning solely to others to tell us how to live, even if their vision is better than the status quo, is still a form of servitude and hierarchy that can, and will, eventually lead us back to a place we must liberate ourselves from.
Embodying the liberation spirit - truly valuing all life as equal - begins with liberating ourselves from the superstructures that have conditioned us to slip into hierarchical thinking and relinquish our own responsibility in learning how to live our values and love those we live in solidarity with - our family, our friends, our community.
This process is neither wholly internal nor wholly external. It is done neither in the vacuum of our minds nor in the expanse of our world. It is done in dialectic between ourselves and those we are building our lives and a better world with. It is one where we value ourselves enough to make our own decisions, while valuing others enough to let their perspectives and experiences inform our decisions. True liberation is a feedback loop, one where our own intuition and wisdom guides us but where that intuition and wisdom also feeds and informs the intuition and wisdom of others, just as our own is fed by theirs, and collectively we grow and expand and struggle and celebrate our becoming more in tune with each other and the world.
The project of liberation is an iterative one - an ongoing process of learning and unlearning, conditioning and de-conditioning, construction and destruction.
There are nearly infinite ways to tangibly express these ideals, and countless ways to inhabit a liberation ideology. The diversity of experience and expression is our greatest strength as people in pursuit of ecological and humanitarian liberation, of an interconnected freeing from oppressive structures for all life, and it is one that should be encouraged, not constrained. The homogenization of the human experience is the antithesis of liberation and must be resisted as we seek to unshackle ourselves from the mental constraints of the systems that brought us to this point.
Yet there remain tendencies we can recognize in ourselves and in others that are not reflective of the diversity of liberative spirit or the authentic complexity and expansiveness of the human experience, but instead represent holdovers from the domination-centric ideology at the center of most of our societies and from which we wish to free ourselves.
We can see it when our loyalties and perspectives favor the values, lives, and principles of those with the greatest power over those with the least. We can see it when our perceptions favor the egos of those most prized by the status quo over a diverse and idiosyncratic human reality. We can know it when we find ourselves defensive or protective of systems and ideas and beliefs that affirm hierarchical thinking, that affirm dominance ideology, that affirm the self at the expense of the other or the other at the expense of the self. We can name and highlight these inherited ways of thinking as being born of the status quo that we wish to rid ourselves of, and recognize that letting them go is a radical act in the process of liberation.
Still, it is not necessary for us to unlearn all the conditioning and values imposed upon by us by the systems and power structures before we are able to pursue true liberation. Indeed, the project of liberation is an iterative one - an ongoing process of learning and unlearning, conditioning and de-conditioning, construction and destruction. It is one that has no barrier to entry nor demand for perfection.
It is one that has no concrete start nor concrete end.
It is one that requires no credentials nor provides any markers of approval.
It is one that offers no promise of victory, but also no loneliness in defeat.
It is one that, by its nature, requires us to kill our egos while learning to love ourselves in wholeness beyond our egos.
It is one that where the ends and the means are one in the same - where our participation in our liberation is the liberation we seek.
None of us can know what lies ahead or whether the crises that face us represent a surge of suffering before a turning toward justice, or if perhaps they are a harbinger of more suffering to come. But neither does any of that matter. We do not act today based on a guarantee that we will be delivered the future we desire. We act today because in our acting we are making the world as it stands into a place more loving, more connected, more liberating place than the one that existed mere moments before we acted.
“What can I do?”
“How can I live?”
These are not questions that can be answered by following a set of instructions or listening to a wise leader.
They are questions that are answered every day, in ways big and small, in voices heard and ignored, in things visible and things not, in paths taken and paths abandoned. And with each day, at our best, we learn to see these answers just a little more clearly. We learn who we are just a little bit better. We see each other just a little more honestly. We strengthen our bonds just a little more deeply. We love the world just a little more fully. And we find accepting that we cannot control the outcomes or our futures, that we can only control our actions and commitments, is an idea full of promise and hope, not resignation or fear, on the path to liberation.