Things are pretty fucked up and the future is uncertain — probably the worst in my lifetime (perhaps excepting 1969 before I can remember). When it’s like that, I like to think about my grandparents and what they faced and got through with the Great Depression and WWII.
/1
/2 There were absolutely no guarantees that everything would be all right. Terrible things were happening and more terrible things were a distinct possibility. But they got through it, relying on the fundamental things they cared about.
/3 I think about Grandma taking a taxi to the hospital to have my mom, forbidding my grandpa’s parents from calling him to let him know — he was on base studying for the supply officer test the next day, and doing well would determine where he was assigned, and maybe whether he’d live or die.
/4 (Grandpa’s parents had a car, but grandma had a flair for drama, I think.)
He did well and went off to be the supply officer on a ship in the Pacific. Went with absolutely no guarantee of coming back. That’s what people did.
/5 So, in terrible circumstances, think what people before you have endured. Think about how you can support and defend folks less able than you to endure. And fight the bastards.
/6 My grandparents didn’t whine about it. Nor, for that matter, did my college classmate who survived as a child in 1970s Cambodia by hiding in a pile of his neighbor’s bodies. So, keep calm and fight.
I think it's okay to whine a little, you know, at times. But yeah. This collective deer in the headlights thing, esp for white mid to UMC Americans, Boomers and younger. maybe even more so the elder among us. We're metaphorically soft handed about this shit.
