Everything is Awful And Why Isn't Anybody Doing Anything About It?

I already fed this to the social media algorithms, but I want to link to it from my blog because that's what we do to things worthy of time and attention.

This morning I woke up with a heavy heart and mind over the big stuff (Epstein files released... but the Justice Department and US Gov't has known about it for a while and nothing has happened... so nothing is actually going to happen, right?) as well as the local stuff (friends going through a eerily similar process to what my wife and others went through with a board acting in unnecessarily cruel and almost intentionally evil ways towards people working for them, etc.) and just feeling heaviness and powerlessness to help or do anything.

After getting the kids to school, walking the dog, prepping some rice for supper, and warming up my coffee (again), I opened the old RSS reader to see Dave Rupert , LLC. had written up a nice antidote to the doom brain I was spiralling in:

If complaining worked, we would have won the culture war already. We’d have a reformed Elon and the White House wouldn’t be committing crimes against humanity. But that’s not the world we live in. The one we live in is much worse. If you hate the here and now, write about what would be a better future. Write about what’s good and why more of that good would be good.

And later on in the post:

Often people need you to show, not tell the alternative. You need to paint a picture. Not a full complete picture, but one where a person can paint themselves in it. When people want change and bad change is happening all around them, that’s a hopeless place. Build a raft of opportunity that people can latch onto in the rough open waters, instead of hitting them with spears.

Painting a picture of hope (or building a raft depending on if you're a painter or a rafter?) for what the world could be like is also going to be a helpful way to draw people away from the tire fire that is in the big stuff and the local stuff. I've tried the route of thinking "if they only just saw the bad that's happening, surely they'd rally around change" and it didn't work. People are apathetic, busy, lazy, and there's nothing to do with a pile of garbage besides toss it. But, to extend Dave's metaphor way beyond it's best before date, if you show people a painting of where you want to go, or give them a pile of pre-cut lumber and wood glue (?) with plans to build a raft, that's much more fun to help with than sifting through garbage.

Right now I'm struggling to be able to know what kind of future I actually want.

I want people to stop being cruel. To stop making life harder than it already is for others. To love one another by standing up for each other. To listen to painful stories and care about the pain someone is carrying in a way that goes beyond platitudes. To see men called out for wicked behaviour. Justice.