Putting feet to prayer — Anne Lamott on the “American Spring”

From Anne Lamott on Facebook
(Some of us are still there . . .)

[Anne Lamott] “Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country, even medium-good people with bad feet and attitudes, like me. Now. This week.

Some of you voted enthusiastically for Donald Trump and still believe he has good ideas, but none of you, not a one, voted for Elon Musk. Today, as I write this, there is a bloodbath in process at HHS, NIH, and CDC. Generations of scientists, health care officials and staff being wiped out because of Musk and Robert Kennedy, Jr. The Department of Education, Social Security offices, the Veterans Administration—the VETS. I mean, for Pete’s sake — pun intended. Children dying of measles — measles! The end of helping the world’s starving children. The National Zoo being torn down and remade because of the woke ideology of the giraffes.

Wait, obviously I need to collect myself. I’ll eat my body weight in carbs, and maybe watch a quick Below Deck Mediterranean, and then I’ll get back to you.

Hey, hi, me again. I’m back. So say you have tiny, tiny anxieties about what we have witnessed in the last two months, let alone the last few days— an innocent man is rotting in a nightmarish foreign prison because Trump made a mistake and now refuses to do anything. All the elements of Fascism…

Sorry, sorry, that was my crazy hysterical twin with TDS [total disaster syndrome? ed.] . I just gave her a sharing size bag of M&M’s (peanut butter) to distract her. I’m back, nice calm me.

There will be huge national rallies on Saturday—April 5th—against Elon Musk and Doge. It’s happening, some peaceful version of an American Spring. More than half of us will be women, though, so the odds of the violence we saw in the Arab Spring will be very low. Spring, resurrection. In the winter — in devastation, desolation, darkness — we sink down under the ground to stay safe and so we don’t come up too soon. You come up too soon and you get cut off, because the timing of the seasons is precise. It is inside us, too, energetically, and now — now! — when we feel whatever is stirring, we rise, stride out and release what has been crunched up in winter time.

Spring is about new life, much more light to see by.

Spring is a time to rebuild.

Sometime not too long after the San Francisco earthquake and fire in April, 1906, William James, the author of Varieties of Religious Experience, came up from Stanford where he was lecturing, to visit, and see with his own eyes.

The world had ended. The fire had all but destroyed the city. Everything was knocked down, blown up, burned away, and what does William James see? People had been re-building, spreading out, helping each other, developing plans for raising the city back up. People had been spreading out, helping other, creating. And James says, “Exactly, that’s how it works.”

Things fall down. Desperation, and hard times are part of the equation. But so is consolation. In a peaceful protest march against authoritarianism and cruelty, you feel part of, instead of that awful sheet metal feeling of isolation. Some consolation is mild, and some is dramatically powerful.

The energy of a peaceful protest march is profound and life giving, being part of one big body, a sea of people who believe in goodness and Democracy and that silly old Constitution.

The anxious freaked out “I” turns to “We.” We, the people, who, I will point out again nicely, did not elect Elon Musk.

Christians call this putting feet to prayer. There will be singing of the old songs of the Civil Rights movement, the same songs that eventually stopped the Vietnam War. The haranguers will harangue. The sound system will suck. But two things will carry the day: millions of regular people like us, heartbroken and terrified, who care, saying NO to power; and a glorious feeling of solidarity, camaraderie.

And if you meet us at one of these rallies on Saturday, this will give you hope, feelings of newness, expansion and visibility. In my Sunday school classes, I taught my kids that Easter means you can bury the truth in the ground, but you can’t keep it there.

Friends, Honey Bears, we got work to do. See you Saturday