SCENE:

A few days ago. Low on sleep, feeling raw because I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t stop fretting about the safety of my loved ones, the future of our nation, Trump and Musk’s cruelty and casual incompetence and swaggering pleasure in power. Now I’m having lunch with a wise and beloved friend who is Black.

ME: I couldn’t sleep. It’s all just so horrifying. What should we DO? I have no idea what to do.

HIM: I don’t mean to invalidate your feelings. They’re real and they make sense. And… it sounds like you’re new to feeling like your government is breaking your heart.

Wow. New to feeling like my government is breaking my heart.

So much wisdom in that response.

It’s a shot of perspective, yes. A reminder that I’ve been privileged, that I still am. But that’s not the point.

The point is, what I’m experiencing now is scary and disorienting to me because I never expected my government to be utterly unresponsive to my beliefs, my needs. I never expected my government – not just the President, but the full faith and credit of the United States Federal Government – to mobilize intentionally for the purpose of crushing people like me and breaking our spirits.

But: lots of people in our country have spent their whole lives surviving and thriving, persisting and resisting, in the face of systems that were explicitly built to harm them.

Lots of people in our country have always turned to each other for safety and support because their government sometimes shows up to kill them.

Lots of people in our country still experience generational trauma from “getting owned” not as an anti-liberal catchphrase but a visceral, literal reality.

In our country, those people are Black. They are Indigenous. They are people of color. And yes, they are women, they are people who are LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, all the folx whose human rights have been and are still considered debatable by our so-called leaders.

So I don’t hear “check your privilege” in what my wise friend said. What I hear is:

“You are not alone.”

“We can do this.”

“We have always done this.”

And I hear this too:

“Listen to us.”

That’s maybe the most important part, my white friends. For those of us who are new to this, it is time (it is PAST time) for us to learn from the people whose generations of joyous, painful, successful struggle have brought us all this far. If we don’t know how to do mutual aid, if we don’t know what it looks like to stand in solidarity… we need to turn to the folks for whom that’s as natural as breathing, because they’ve done it all their lives.

If you’re wondering how to even go about finding the people who do know how… I don’t have the perfect prescription, because after all that’s my whole point, right?

I think one way to try, though, is by finding and following leaders, especially women, who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. On social media, for starters; for all the downsides of these corporate platforms, there are women on Facebook whose posts have been giving me wisdom and courage for years, and never more so than now. Feel free to ping me for ideas if you know how to reach me, but also feel free to explore on your own, and please share back with me, OK? This way, we’ll learn more together about what to do out there in the real world.

Onwards, my dears. We can do this. We are not alone.