To Americans Still "Staying out of Politics"

A few days ago, I ran into a friend from my former church at the grocery store.

We were quickly catching up on the last eighteen months of one another’s lives while the cashier logged and bagged her purchases.

The conversation eventually drifted to the state of the world, and my friend casually interrupted with a revelation that nearly knocked me into the colorful tower of impulse items behind me.

”Yeah, I’m barely on social media anymore, and I can’t stand the news.” She said, matter-of-factly. “I’m just trying to stay out of politics altogether.”

I did my best to retain a pleasant poker face, but a volcano of outrage was erupting within my stomach just a few inches away. I outwardly held it together just long enough to send her off toward the parking lot with a hug and a smile—but I felt deflated.

I know many people like my friend. They’re otherwise decent, responsible, good-hearted human beings who don’t realize how insulated they are from the kind of fear and threat that people of color, the queer community, Latinos, or Muslims experience as a working reality.

This convenient ignorance makes inaction tempting, especially when moving invites such conflict and grief. That they feel a choice in these moments is even possible, shows the subtle and insidious ways privilege works. It allows people to have urgency as an option, where for others it is a necessity. Some people are fighting for their very lives, and the idea that they could or would opt out isn’t a consideration. It shouldn’t be an option for any of us if we claim to treasure humanity and democracy.

Friends, neutrality and silence are literally deadly right now.

We are in a time of unprecedented betrayal of the freedoms and systems we all hold dear; a wholesale soul-selling of Republican politicians and Conservative Christian leaders; a historic power grab the likes of which we’ve never seen in this country. This President (empowered by a morally neutered GOP and a fully politicized Evangelical Church) is doing irreparable and continual harm to our rule of law, our standards of decency, our environment, our personal liberties, our elections, our people, and our standing in the world.

These days, being apolitical is being complicit in these atrocities.

Because of the volume and the relentlessness of the danger, there must be a similarly loud and steadfast response.
Because each morning a different attack comes: on migrants or women or meal vouchers or national parks or transgender soldiers or Jewish Americans or the disabled or journalists or shooting victims—then each morning there must be those of us who unequivocally oppose it all.
This Administration is testing how much inhumanity the people will tolerate, and saying nothing only emboldens them to seek a deeper moral bottom.

As long as this man and his cadre of sycophants continue to shun their responsibility, hoard wealth, preach fear, prey upon the vulnerable, serve no one but themselves, and weaponize religion, the voices of dissent must be unrelenting and explicit.

There are days when I feel my own white comfort creeping in; when I find myself overwhelmed or disheartened by the steady stream of horrible news parading in front of me, when the collateral damage of the fight feels too great, and I’d rather turn it all off. It’s a reflex action that I’d have justified a couple of years ago, but now I know better. Now I know that this is my privilege on full display, providing a buffer that were I to indulge it, could keep me cloistered away in a cozy little cocoon where activism is an elective endeavor, saved for those moments when I’m okay being inconvenienced with it.

Now I fight that instinct when it comes, because I know that many people don’t get to choose neutrality in matters of justice. They don’t get to decide to ignore the events of the day or sidestep the difficult conversations or avoid walking into the streets and braving taunts and threats. Some people do this as a matter of daily survival, and if I am to even come close to living in any kind of solidarity with them, I need to be as internally burdened as they are. I have to be willing to feel even some momentary, infinitesimal measure of the urgency they live every second with.

And look, I get it: it’s terrifying to admit what’s happening right now. No one wants to believe their nation is falling into authoritarianism, that the norms they relied on in the past are no longer givens, that the can’t-happen-heres are actually happening here. It’s sickening to fully fix your gaze on the terror unfolding by the hour. But the slide into the abyss will not be slowed or stopped by wishing it away, hiding from the horrors, or clinging to the dead myth of American exceptionalism.

There is no protection in a fascist regime: not silence or wealth or apathy or position. Eventually, they’ll come for all of us. We are tethered together.

Remaining quiet in turbulent times is a luxury that privilege and ignorance afford. That passivity is born out of the illusion of safety. (Trust me, none of us is safe.)

Staying out of politics is an impossibility.

The politicians are making sure of that.

The war is on our doorsteps despite how much we’d like to avoid it.

And the only way we’re gonna survive and save this place is by not looking away, by deciding what matters to us, and then heading straight into the fray.