Mask off

Today I went down and danced by the river. I noticed the flowers shooting up, the trilliums, the hellebore, the pink blossoms on the ends of branches, the new nettles poking up near the creek bed.

I breathed and danced with my own shadow.

Sometimes I think we forget to dance. and when the world seems bleakest, that’s when it’s imperative that we do it.

I used to believe so hard in the nonprofit sector.

Then I realized, over the last 7 years, how deeply brainwashed I was.

What made the mask come off for me?

Shut up and do what we tell you.

Be grateful for what you get, don’t ask for more.

Come back to the office even if it’s not safe.

Don’t speak out about genocide or you’ll be out on your ass.

Our donors don’t like it when we get “political.”

The mask is off in the nonprofit sector. Can you see it, too?

In the car this afternoon, I was talking with my partner about what we’d been noticing in the news. How it just seems to be masks off now, how every single federal politician we can see, in the US, is just masks off, ok, it’s all about empire, colonialism, genocide is fine with them. And my partner was incredulous that we have politicians who are just stating this openly. like that is the whole problem, why don’t they hide it anymore? Then we can all go back to hiding in our incrementalism and electoral politics that is business as usual.

It’s like Too Black says in the Black Myths podcast, Nonviolence is Violence too. Somebody’s gotta die, for people to get mad enough to say that changes need to be made. It took Alex Pretti and Nicole Good being killed for more white people to be up in arms and demand justice.

When reporters asked about the Epstein files, the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “we’re moving on from that now.”

Masks off, they don’t care about children being trafficked, raped, murdered. They don’t care about innocent protestors getting killed.

Personally, I think the masks off stage is the stage where people get ready to change the structure of a system that doesn’t work for 99% of us, really.

This post below was written by Jessica Wildfire at the Sentinel Intelligence. I highly encourage you to subscribe to the Sentinel Intelligence and support her work.

She writes,

Maybe that’s the biggest shift since the release of the Epstein files. There’s no pretending anymore. Most of the politicians, billionaires, CEOs, bankers, lobbyists, and so on are just as bad as we always wondered. Perhaps they’re even worse than we feared, and there’s no sweeping it away now.

It’s just there, in plain sight, and you either look at it or look away.

We’ve learned to live with a level of pain and uncertainty that felt unthinkable ten years ago. As I learned even before all of this, stress and trauma can rewire your brain. So in a sense, we’ve changed on a biochemical level.

Sit down for a minute and listen to yourself.

You can sense it.

(I can.)

Everyone is dealing with this cold new world in different ways. Some of us are facing it with fight songs and protests. Some of us are prepping our way through. Some of us are just keeping our heads above water. Millions more have learned to sublimate, to just push it all down and pretend harder that everything is fine.

Believe it or not, millions of people out there, especially Americans, have no idea what’s going on. That’s how they manage to get by.

What about the rest of us?

Well, I can only tell you what I’m doing. I’ve spent the last several years not running from any of this, but facing it and learning how to process it.

I’ve learned what I can do to protect myself from all these new threats, and what I can’t. I’ve gamed out how bad the future can get for my family. I’ve sat with it. I’ve accepted it. I’ve come up with plans and plans.

I’ve executed the plans.

We live on two wavelengths now, one where we hold on to the moral and ethical center that never allows us to become desensitized to the horrors unfolding, while simultaneously growing mental and emotional callouses that allow us to function in a world with soul-crushing, stupefying amounts of cruelty.

And that would be the right phrasing, I think.

Callouses. Tough skin.

Armor.

I’ve learned who I can be honest with. I’ve figured out how to talk to people about doom without saying the words “doom.” I’ve carved out spaces and routines for myself. I’ve learned when to turn off my phone and go outside. I’ve learned what signals to pay attention to, and what noise to ignore.

There’s no magic ride to this better place, but it starts with something simple enough. Maybe you know it, but let’s say it anyway:

You have to accept the current reality. You can devote yourself to making a better future, but you have to live in the present.

You have to acknowledge what’s happening, not what you want to be happening.

It sounds easy until you see how many people out there aren’t doing it. They’re not living in reality. They’re living in a matrix they created for themselves. In those moments when the matrix glitches, they comfort themselves with the notion that we’ll somehow find a way back to the comforting narrative pretenses of last decade.