Upwellings: Peace in a Time of Fascism

Today, there’s a stiff breeze from the west.  The sun is out and it’s not yet too hot. A perfect New England summer’s day.  The kitties are exploring the back porch as I sit here and write with a cup of Lady Grey and a newly washed fountain pen, joyfully smooth as it dances over the pages.

Looking at the fields and the wood line, you’d never know that that I live in a country slowly creeping towards fascism.  The crows and jays call just the same as they harass a shrieking hawk.  The daisy fleabane sways gently in the wind.  The red winged blackbirds flit in and out of the cattails.  This is my center.  If not for the internet, this would be my reality.  Small struggles, small victories.  I could  block my ears to the horrors my government is perpetrating, as as my privilege affords me.

And yet, I cannot.

Storms never arise overnight.  They are the manifestations of a confluence of factors–of pressure, temperature, humidity.  Earthquakes build even more slowly.  Dreams and scrying reveal hidden currents, bubbling fears: a monolithic white “45” against a red sky, newspapers printed red-on-white paving the red dirt road at its feet. No blue (or green) to be seen.

Blind Goddess of the Scales, I have always trusted you to see us through.  But the very blindfold that lends you impartiality also has kept you from seeing that your scales are no longer balanced.  And they are becoming less so with every child torn from their mother’s arms in the name of enforcing “the rules”. Justice cannot afford to be blind when her tools have been tampered with.

I cannot sit and look out over my field to forget these horrors, our slow slouch towards genocide.  But most people can’t make the time to care, or can’t afford (literally) to take action because they will lose one of the three jobs that kept their children from starvation and homelessness.

I am blessed with my comfortable home, my privately educated child, my affluent neighbors, my white skin, and my college education.  I can afford to give peace to the quarters, for I am in a place of relative peace.  Peace is what we most need, but we cannot sacrifice the lives of the brown, the black, the poor, the foreign, to preserve our own peace.  And that is what we have done.

I call for peace. And prepare to fight.