wrong hornets

01.29.2017

We will lift each other up.

Despite frequent daily moves into white-hot rage and despair, the sentiment persists. Standing up at airports last night, a week after three million people stood up everywhere. Our national disgrace is not normal, at all, but this consolidation in opposition is like nothing I have ever seen. I say that not as an activist, because I am far from having earned the title, but as someone with eyes.

This goes one of two ways: we get exhausted, which seems to be their strategy (shock and awe, all week. has it only been a week?), or we rise up en masse. I am writing and doing what little I can to push the needle, by a microscopic increment, towards rising up. Spin a web around yourself and it will pull. You wind up on the steps of the capitol, or in an airport holding a sign, or in Jason Lewis' office with your kids, or on the phone, or writing your way into becoming a relay point, an outpost, an amplifier. Resetting an intention to contribute.

When I moved to New York to "make it" as a musician I remember the realization that being a part of the world of making was the end itself, not clawing my way up above it. Now the objective is impact and change, ultimately the removal from power of those for whom power is the only value. But the way that happens is through all of us lifting each other up. The most perfect contribution sees that contribution, that membership, as an end itself. Spin the web and it will pull all of us.

​During the election it was typical to say that Trump "kicked the hornets' nest," stirred up not only a whole subculture of sociopaths but also the worst of our own individual impulses, our suspicions and fearfulness, our hate. Wrong hornets. There is a bigger swarm consolidating. Three million of us last weekend and that was only day one. Lift each other up.