Let’s take stock.
My country now has an Executive branch which lost the popular vote and is likely compromised by a foreign government – a government which is historically hostile to the United States and has a vested interest in curbing the U.S.’s global power as it attempts countless power grabs for itself. Wars which were unthinkable four months ago now loom all around us.
It has a crippled Judicial branch missing 13% of its federal judges and a dysfunctional, 8-member Supreme Court, due to a concerted effort on the part of that Executive’s political party to cripple it and keep it crippled.
And it has a gerrymandered Legislative branch under the control of the same political party, which refuses to investigate the Executive because they share a party, regardless of the unprecedented and terrifying news that is exposed day by day or the desperate efforts of the nation’s intelligence and free press communities.
In ten years, we will look back at these days in one of two ways.
We will lament the fall of modern day Rome.
Or we will celebrate the moment when we rose up as one and took power back.
We can still seize the rudder, though time is quickly running out. We can still push back, and push and push and push until the rotten tumor at the heart of our government tumbles over a cliff. We still have a hope of a future where we can say, “That was the year we woke up. That was the year we said, ‘No more.’ That was the moment – on the cusp of their victory over compassion and reason – that we stood, and we fought, and we won.” We can still realize a future where we set the childish notions of pollution and hatred behind us. Where we require our technology to be subservient to our wisdom, not the other way around. Where we begin to transform this planet into something thriving, holistic, and beautiful, a realization of humankind’s greatest and deepest potential.
But it is a mutually exclusive proposition. We are on the knife’s edge, and gravity is pulling us the other way – away from that magnificent future, and toward failure.
That failure means surrendering not only a hundred years of social policy advancement, decades of climate work, and a social expectation of safety and respect. Those things were largely products of the past that some of us had foolishly taken for granted, but losing this fight also means losing the future. It means falling into a modern dark age, where science is ridiculed, the truth is determined solely by our malevolent leadership, and “social justice” becomes a term of mockery. It means watching the world literally suffocate under the weight of its own pollution, and witnessing an apocalypse that unfolds in slow motion over the span of our lifetimes: storms that annihilate our homes and extinctions that devastate our food supply. It means starving and warring and dying, all while the men in charge shriek that it’s not real and wage war against those who dare to trust evidence, condemning, imprisoning, or killing them.
Some say our children will ask us, “Where were you? What did you do?” I say we will ask ourselves.
The dangers in play in the U.S. are replicated worldwide. This all comes back to who we are as a species. We are explorers, investigators, and creators. We have discovered unprecedented wonders of technology, but if we don’t define them, they will define us. This is the moment when we decide whether the energy we’ve discovered destroys us, or propels us forward; whether our powers of communication create a brilliant focus on truth, or suffocate us in lies.
This is not just the most vital moment of your life. It is not just the most vital moment of my nation’s existence.
It is the most critical moment for our species in modern history.
We must stand up.
We must fight.
We must win.
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