Where to focus?
In the middle of a strategy intended to exhaust and demoralize us, focus is our ally in taking action that matters.
As the firehose of chaos continued this past week, I tried to figure out where to focus. We know that this is the strategy: “flood the field,” they say. It is intended to exhaust and demoralize us. With a thousand incoming arrows, one or two are bound to find their targets.
Many are sacrificial, intended to create confusion but not to land with purpose. Many are symbolic, intended to send messages to vulnerable groups, instill fear, and simply “prove” that power has shifted. And most are illegal, anti-constitutional, and deadly: the freeze on USAID hurts children all over the world, and helps China. The purging of officials at the FBI and Justice Department hurts prosecutions of violent crimes and crimes against civil rights of all people.
So where do we focus our attention, when it has been trained on ads, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation?
I’m thinking about two ways to sort through the chaos and place my efforts where they will mean something. The first is to focus on those being harmed. For example, I’ve spent time with students who are fearful because of their identities as trans, or because they or someone they love lives without documentation. A friend of mine has been handing out multilingual “know your rights” cards so folks can learn their options if ICE comes to their doors. I’ve asked (and am waiting for answers) about whether our campus will continue to be considered a “sensitive” place, off limits for immigration raids. And I’ve listened as one of my colleagues described making sure he and his wife always carry their passport cards with them. They are American citizens, born in India, with two young sons born here. And they are prepared to be stopped and asked to prove their status.
The second way is to focus less on the arrows and more on the senders. The misdirection element of the chaos strategy is intended to force us to look away from the people who launch it. In this light, the president is shown for what he is: a front man for a much larger effort to dismantle the federal government as a means to protect and serve the American people. Ending democracy is a side effect of the corrupt desires of those with deep pockets, intending to create an economy that works for billionaires only, with unfettered greed as their north star.
So we can “flood the zone” as well, with emails and calls to our legitimate representatives; with personal actions; with taking stands on behalf of democracy, equity, and equality before the law. And we can shed daylight on the people who want to end freedom for everyone but themselves.
Above all, we can hold up one another, refusing to bow to the chaos, insisting on locking arms and meeting the arrows with love, truth, and compassion.
Reminders of pages that will help you find the actions that are meaningful to you are below the photo. Don’t give up, we are just getting started.
Represent US has a strategy to end corruption state by state:
