The Sky is Falling in America

Photo by Hannah Popowski on Unsplash

For the past nine years, many of us knew this day was coming.

We sounded every alarm, rang every bell, we shot up a thousand desperate flares to rile people from the numbed stupor of laziness, apathy, and false security, and awaken them to the slow, almost imperceptible erosion of the bedrock of Liberty around them.

Day after day, we crafted every urgent plea possible to persuade them: appealing to their intellects and their hearts and their humanity and their patriotism.

They told us we were exaggerating,
we were overreacting,
that we were drifting into melodrama or delusion,
that the doom we were forecasting was a fabrication of our minds,
that such grim realities were virtual impossibilities.

They said that the center would hold,
that an entire political party would not be consumed by him,
that our elected officials would not abandon their calling,
that the Christian Church would never discard its namesake,
that good people would not embrace conspiracy,
that the courts would protect the law,
that the system would not fail us,
that democracy was bulletproof.

"The sky is not falling, Chicken Little." they said. "You need to relax."

As we watch the rights of women to have autonomy over their own bodies and healthcare decisions teetering on the abyss here, it's difficult not to come to a sickening conclusion:

Yes, the sky is falling.

When the realization hits that our government has been fatally polluted by a traitorous serial grifter, an unstable billionaire, and a cadre of predatory ghouls who hold contempt for the laws of this land, the aspirations of its framers, and the diversity of its people:

Yes, the sky is falling.

As the likelihood of a white evangelical theocracy grows exponentially higher, the possibility of minority rule becomes increasingly likely, and the chances of a truly legitimate election seem to be dissolving like fog in the morning sun:

Yes, the sky is falling.

When every guardrail of the law and the free press and consciences of good people seem to be failing simultaneously in a perfect storm of circumstances too massive to outrun or avoid:

Yes, the sky is falling.

So, what do people of faith, morality, and conscience do when the heavens around them come crashing down?
When the worst-case scenario plays out in real-time?
When the arc of the moral universe is bending sharply toward injustice?

What do decent human beings do when the sky is falling?

We hold up the damn sky.

We transform our outrage into action.
We channel every bit of grief and anger and fear into a focused and productive response.
We waste no time in useless performative displays of social media despair.
We abandon our doom-scrolling and our handwringing and our prophesying of disaster.
We log out of our devices and step out our front doors and into the trenches of our local communities and we do the work of saving what we can.
We give and work and organize and sweat and fight, and when we feel we will expire we rest and begin it all again.

These days as difficult and unthinkable as they are, are not new.

We are not standing where billions of others haven't stood before: watching what seems like the inexorable march of fascism and the unavoidable arrival of autocracy and feeling hopelessness creeping up our bodies like a quickly-rising flood.

And in every such time and place, despite the dwindling odds and the mounting terrors and the vanishing options, the good people have done what good people always do: bravely and steadfastly spent themselves on behalf of those who would follow them—so that they might inherit something a little more beautiful and a bit less violent than had they never lived.

This is our invitation and calling right now.

There is no denying that much of what we feared and warned people about has come to pass and likely more will play out in front of us. It is highly likely that it will get much worse before it gets better.

And yet, as bad as it is or becomes here in America and elsewhere, people who believe love will have the last, loudest word, still have the responsibility and the ability to walk into the tumult of days like these, to press our shoulders together, to steady ourselves, to raise our arms to the heavens—and to hold up the sky.

Portions of this piece were taken from ‘Worth Fighting For.’ Get it here:

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