We’re cooked. I hear a lot of people saying that right now. (Well, they usually use a more colorful word than “cooked.”)
And, I’m not gonna lie, I often find that showing up as the trending story inside my head lately, too.
I also know it’s crap fiction born out of excessive doomscrolling and a lack of fresh air.
Yes, it’s all manner of jacked-up out there, and yes, there is real, quantifiable data that we should be alarmed by. Where we’ve found ourselves as a nation should boil our blood and break our hearts and make us sick to our stomachs—but it shouldn’t yield resignation. That’s the coping mechanism of exhausted people or it’s the crutch of cowards, but either way, it’s not true or helpful.
Not only is our certain demise an abject lie, but it’s an insult to the people who called this place their homes long before we showed up. It’s a middle finger to the activists, allies, caregivers, rebels, revolutionaries, resisters, and good troublemakers in the rearview mirror of our shared story who spent themselves bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice despite the ferocity and success of those around them opposing that progress.
We are not standing where billions of others haven’t stood before: watching what seems like the inexorable march of fascism and the unavoidable arrival of autocracy and feeling hopelessness creeping up their bodies like a quickly-rising flood.
And in every such time and place, despite the dwindling odds and the mounting terrors and the vanishing options, the good people have done what good people always do: they have bravely and steadfastly spent themselves on behalf of those who would follow them so that they might inherit something a little more beautiful and a bit less violent than had they never lived.
This is our invitation and our calling right now. This is our cue to show the hell up.
Anything we feel like we are losing or are in danger of losing right now is because someone else fought so that we could have it to begin with. The right for women to have autonomy over their own bodies, the right of all people to marry the person they love, the right for people of color to determine their destinies, and every personal and collective liberty we’ve enjoyed up until this moment are all the fruit of the sustained efforts of millions of people who came before us. We owe a debt of gratitude to them for the perseverance and intestinal fortitude, and part of that gratitude is refusing to become so tired or so frustrated or so disheartened that we give up.
In 1942, Jewish-Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and philosopher Victor Frankl was sent to a German prison camp, where he would be for three years while losing his father, mother, his brother, and his wife. Frankl ended up earning a PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna and writing “Man’s Search for Meaning” based on his experience in a prolonged period where nearly everything was out of his control and the prospects were extremely dire, when life should have felt pointless.
Frankl writes: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
We choose our own way every day we wake up and step into the world, and are faced with challenges and questions and crises and heartbreak and tragedy. We decide whether circumstances will determine our internal condition, or whether we will, whether the trending news will dominate the headlines in our heads, or whether we will write a different story.
Frankl states: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The present, like the one we sit inside today, the one you inhabit as you encounter these very words, is always that space between stimulus and response. In this space, we have one thing: the choices we make based on what we believe matters. We don’t receive any guarantees of success or promises of health or assurances of safety. We also don’t have control over the courts or the politicians or the systems—even while we work to nudge them in whatever ways we can individually and together. We do have the space between what happens and what we decide to do in response to what happens.
America, we are terribly broken. We are existentially threatened. We are facing Constitutional crises. We are fractured by tribalism. We are in dire straits along many fronts.
But we are not cooked unless we who are here stop feeling and caring and working and fighting.
I know you’re down. I’m down, too. Decide you won’t stay there. Choose to get the hell back up again today.
John Pavlovitz
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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