On Rabbit Holes and Safe Landings
Do cats eat bats, do bats eat cats?
Remember Alice? Sitting with her sister beside the river, a little bored, hot, sleepy, when suddenly a white rabbit appears, a stopwatch in his hand. Running through the field, he mutters Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!' Curious, Alice runs after him and watches as he falls into a hole and disappears. Then, to her dismay, she too finds herself falling and falling.
She had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything.
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! ` I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think--'
Presently she began again. `I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward!
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. “But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” and sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.
Do cats eat bats, do bats eat cats?
It is to Alice that I turn to describe my experience of the last seven weeks. Every morning, I wake hoping that things will have righted themselves, that the alarm will have gone off in the night and the leaders of our country will have found the megaphone and be directing all of us to safety. But no. I am still falling and there is no one to lead the way out.
Do cats eat bats, do bats eat cats?
On the morning of Ash Wednesday, four days ago, I opened my computer and followed the news, curious, like Alice, to see what happened at Trump’s Tuesday night address to the Congress which I’d chosen not to watch on TV.
it wasn’t the preposterous posturing of the President that propelled me into free-fall.
No. It was instead the behavior of both the Republicans and the Democrats in that sacred hall of Congress. It was as if when they entered the room, they’d all found a bottle on their seats, Drink Me printed in neat letters on its side. Dutifully they swallowed. The room swerved. Their bodies went numb. Their eyes went blind and no one in that room was able to see the evil and pain and cruelty and lawlessness wrought by the man standing before them.
Republicans were aglow that night, acting as if this was a night out of a 1950s America playbook. Democrats were not aglow, and a few called out but most were seated like well-behaved puppies, some holding up what Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times called “dumb little paddles,” that said Liar or False.
This moment calls for reactions that are so much more aflame, resistant, righteous, fierce than what we saw that night in Congress. The Democratic leadership reportedly instructed their congressmen to be “dignified.” On the morning of Ash Wednesday, Schumer dodged a reporter’s question about whether he supported Rep. Al Greene’s heckling of Trump, saying he thought Democrats needed to “organize.” Schumer!! Wake up! We are organizing but we need leaders who speak out publicly, inspire, and take a stand.
Imagine if Angus King, our Senator from Maine who gave an eloquent and fiery speech on the Senate floor in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, had refused to attend Trump’s speech and instead stood outside that great hall and spoke his fiery words to reporters and protesters gathered on the steps. Imagine if, when Al Green was removed from the floor, all the Democratic Congressmen rose in solidarity and followed Greene out of the building. Imagine if, in the dark, under the sky, they gave patriotic speeches about the Constitution and the rule of law and told stories about how people all over the world are suffering and will suffer more for all of this administration’s treasonous acts.
I speculate that it is not because Angus and his puppy fellow Congressmen don’t believe all this chaos is unlawful and unrepresentative of all the best that America stands for, but rather that they are not by disposition and character people of flame. They are politicians whose success depends on the art of compromise, on their capacity to stay calm in the face of conflict and pay attention to rules. This week James Carville, veteran political strategist, famously told Democrats to “take a tactical pause,” a move which Bernie Sanders, one politician with fire in his belly, called “rolling over and playing dead.”
If indeed we can’t rely on our Democratic leadership to be the knot in this long rope slipping down down down, would the fall never come to an end, where can we look? The answer to that is growing louder and fiercer every day: we are the change. We, the people, rising up in small towns and cities all over the country. I confess that as a citizen who has for too many years slogged along in nostalgic complacency, I find this moment when everything is on the line both tragic and compelling at the same time.
Though my recent work in climate activism lifted me out of that dull puddle of complacency, I felt a degree of loneliness. Too few people had awakened to the urgency of the moment, still paddled in that warm puddle of contentment with the status quo. But now people are rising, speaking, demonstrating, coming together in homes, on the street, in churches. I can feel a huge surge of energy for connection and change rising like an ocean on a stormy day.
My hope is that in this time of collapse, there will be an opportunity to reconfigure the meaning of our lives in new ways that replace our consumer-driven, wealth-and-self-obsessed culture with something kinder, more Interconnected, interwoven with the stars and the natural world and all the rhythms and truths of that world.
In the last week, I’ve been on the street with hundreds of people demonstrating against Trump and Musk in Monument Square in Portland, everyone holding signs, chanting; strangers talking to each other; cars going by, honking their horns as if that honk could change the world. The experience was transformative! I went from feeling alone and scared to feeling exuberant joy for all that is good in the world.
I’ve been to a community potluck at someone’s home, forty-plus of us, some of us with white hair, some young and unwrinkled, in a circle, each given a minute to look in the faces around us and speak the fury and fear we hold about this desecration of all that is good and right. Never in my community have I been to a gathering where people were willing to be so vulnerable. I’ve never felt such hunger for community and validation. Already, we have broken the rules about being self-sufficient, not "giving in" to anger, keeping a stiff upper lip. Already, we have committed to the fact that we need each other for support and for all that our collective imaginations can summon about what kind of actions to take to bring about real change.
Stronger Together, the name given to this group by its deft leaders, will meet again in a few weeks. We will gather in the Town library, share a meal and scheme, uniting around actions we can take together.
This model of first coming together to share feelings and form relationships followed by an exploration of possible actions and then the implementation of those actions, is brilliant. I first had experience with this in the ’80s when I joined a group organizing around the nuclear threat that was inspired by the work of Joanna Macy, and I have used it myself a number of times since.
For those of you reading this who aren’t part of a group and feel isolated and helpless, I urge you to start your own group! There is so much hunger for connection that people will be grateful to you and will bring their energy to this so that you don’t have to do it all by yourself.
At one event I attended this week we were all so thrilled to be together in the face of this crisis that we resolved to have a dance party. Let there be dancing! Let there be raucous chanting and horns blazing on the streets! Let there be fury filtered into language funneled into speeches in town halls and at demonstrations. Let there be protest art. Let there be music and song. Let there be compassion. Let There Be Mercy.
Do cats eat bats, do bats eat cats? Yes, cats eat bats, but no, bats don’t eat cats, they are insectivores who feed on insects.
Though I can still wake and read news that makes me cry, like the fact that Ukraine is now defenseless from bombing raids by Russia, or that the Coast Guard Academy has censored climate change from its curriculum, I’ve found the ground under me. Things are beginning to make sense to me. It will be up to the people and the people are rising all over the country. I have the footing that comes from sharing my Alice in Wonderland falling experience with others who are experiencing the same thing. And I have the experience of being in community with others who are looking to shape their fury into action.
That makes all the difference.
We shall overcome!
I’d welcome your comments, readers, on the experiences you are having which energize you and provide you with a sense of grounding.
Another Home Run, Kathleen, out of the ballpark, deep into the “transforming energy’s side!”
From your first brilliant image-connection of Alice through the looking glass to your rise-up energy, I am with you, Kathleen. I sure like landing in the bright light of hope. I sure like, and am grateful, for your words that brought us here, and for you.