Photo by Jeremy Perkins, Unsplash
Photo by Jeremy Perkins, Unsplash
Fascists only win when good people give up; when they become too tired to push back, when apathy and hopelessness snuff out the spark inside them.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
The heavy sadness that you can’t seem to shake?
The sense of dread that hovers over you like a drone?
The Resting WTF Face you walk around with every day?
The scalding rage bubbling just beneath the surface?
This is all by design.
This is intentional.
This is the monsters’ master plan.
The entire point of the curated chaos is to disorient you, to dishearten you, to choke the hope from within you until you stop fighting.
All terrorism is ultimately emotional.
Yes, they are rolling back decades of civil rights.
Yes, they are trying to take healthcare away from tens of millions of our most vulnerable.
Yes, they are waging legislative war on the poor and hungry.
Yes, they are weaponizing the highest court against us.
Yes, they are obliterating our systems of education and national security.
Yes, they are purging brown-skinned people from our nation.
But these stomach-turning atrocities are all just means to an end, and that end is to crush the spirits of good people like you, and you need to remember that.
Your capacity to care for strangers is a threat to them.
Your ability to have your heart broken by the suffering of others is a weapon.
Your refusal to abandon the right thing, even when that makes your path more turbulent, terrifies them.
Your decency makes you dangerous.
A nation isn’t destroyed when its systems are bulldozed or its laws are perverted, but when its collective compassion is eradicated—and you and I are here in these dark, bleak, unthinkably painful days to protect it; to hold it close to our chests and to make sure that it survives.
Fascists don’t win when they dismantle the scaffolding of government, when they wage war on the Arts and Sciences, or when they eradicate long-standing rights under the law.
They win when good people give up; when they become too tired to push back, when apathy and hopelessness snuff out the spark inside them, when the emotional cost of giving a sh*t feels too high.
They want you to become as nihilistic, miserable, and internally broken as they are—and so you need to refuse: over and over again.
Look, I’m not going to minimize the horrors being conjured up by these vampires or ignore the scale of the sorrow they’re generating or peddle some toxic positivity that pretends everything is going to be OK.
But I know that if you’re still reading this, you haven’t fully surrendered yet.
Despite the 24-7 Category 5 shit storm the monsters have been throwing at you for the past eighteen months, you haven’t completely packed it in, and I guess I just want to say thank you and to ask you to stay in the fight another day if you can.
There is too much beauty at stake, too much of priceless value to lose, too many people whose futures are tethered to what we do right now.
I’m not a blind optimist, and I don’t traffic in cheap hope. I’m not pretending the historical signs aren’t grim or that the existential threat isn’t very real.
I just recognize that right now, some irredeemably terrible people are working incredibly hard to crush our spirits, and I’m stubborn enough to say, “To hell with that.” I won’t give them the satisfaction of my submission or my hopelessness.
My life will be an annoying, brazen, defiantly joyful middle finger in their fascist faces, and if you still feel up to it, maybe yours can be, too.
Good people, these monsters are trying to break you because when they do, they win.
So, don’t let them.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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