Category: John Pavlovitz

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Sometimes you don’t notice attrition when it happens.

When you lose elemental parts of yourself, they don’t all depart at once, and since you’re sustaining the daily woundings of this life from the inside, you may not be aware of the thousands of tiny cuts at the time. You may not notice the lifeblood slowly draining from your spirit.

In fact, you might believe you’re who you’ve always been, until something reminds you of the you you used to be.

No Kings Day reminded me.

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece as Saturday approached, questioning the ultimate merits of the rally in helping us avoid an inexorable slide into fascism. Some suggested that I’d become more negative and fatalistic, that they missed the me they’d encountered a few years ago.

While not completely agreeing with them, I couldn’t ignore the fatigue of the last decade; the collective sorrows accumulated along the way, the sad deja vu of, for at least the 30th time, heading out into a beautiful day to confront the very leaders entrusted with protecting our Republic and its people.

I may not have been despondent, but I’ve certainly been feeling the wear and tear of the draining dog years of this regime.

But, yesterday, as I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of similarly exhausted, equally disheartened, but still not ready to call it a day human beings lining the streets of our little North Carolina town, I found a few things I hadn’t even realized I’d lost.

I found joy.

There is a silent toll that witnessing so much suffering takes on compassionate people, especially when you work so hard to remain awake and aware. Being reminded every day of just how many human beings are experiencing such wasteful brutality can gradually suffocate the spirit, rendering us joyless. One of the first sounds I noticed as I found myself within the pulsating mass of humanity on that highway was the sound of laughter, and it was my own. I realized it had been a while since I’d heard it like this: easy, constant, booming. The joy was medicinal. It was infectious. This was not a dour, dismal acknowledgement of defeat, as much as it was a joyfully defiant dance party of pissed-off people who haven’t let a minority movement of misery make them incapable of restorative jubilation.

I found hope.

One of the goals of authoritarian regimes is to extinguish the lightness from people; to inundate them with a legion of emergencies and nightmares that require so much energy to confront that they begin to lose the ability to see anything ahead worth pursuing. When optimism dries up, the future becomes a bleak foregone conclusion. I hadn’t realized I had been chronically emotionally dehydrated. That is, until once surrounded by a swirling technicolor sea of activists, fighters, healers, helpers, and dreamers in the blazing North Carolina sun, I could feel hope returning within me: not a naive one that denies the gravity of the moment or the reality of the threats, but a hope that refuses to give this ugliness the last word.

I found another America.

There’s been a story that’s made headlines in my head lately: the one of this nation’s certain demise; the one where fascism’s presence will be permanent; the one where we are now hopelessly overrun in both the government and our electorate with violent, hateful, cruel people who find joy in the suffering of others. And while there’s no debating that a sizable segment of America certainly fits that description, the vast majority here (those who made their presence unmistakable felt throughout this nation yesterday by the millions) is comprised of beautiful, loving, patriotic human beings who don’t just believe in the idea of America, they embody it. I remembered that throughout its nearly quarter of a millennium history, this place has always been inside the crucible of conflict, because the country we aspire to be cannot be incarnated without it.

I found a bit of myself.

One of the greatest tragedies of the last decade is how wasteful it’s all been: the unnecessary emergencies generated by those in power, the unrelenting assaults on vulnerable people, the never-ending constitutional crises, the stupefying cruelty, and the collateral damage of trying to hold and attend to all of it.

I’m not who I was ten years ago, and some of that is a good thing. But for a couple of hours in the streets of our town that seems to finally be waking up, I was able to clarify what matters to me, the things and the people worth fighting for, and the kind of human being I want to show up in the world as.

Yesterday won’t magically rewind the clock pre-election and let us have a do-over. It doesn’t suddenly erase the unprecedented damage to our systems and safeguards. It alone can’t bend the arc of the moral universe away from fascism. That will require a sustained and organized presence, political engagement leading into the midterms like we’ve never seen, and very likely, a general strike.

But No Kings Day was a glorious reminder of how vital joy, hope, diversity, and our collective efforts are in resisting this Renaissance of hatred.

Our Republic is still in great peril, but we, its fierce caretakers who number in the tens of millions, are still not ready to consent to defeat.

With all we’ve had thrown at us for ten years by this batshit wanna be despot, his morally bankrupt accomplices, and his cultic disciples, that, in itself, is a victory.

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“I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

These words are a continual presence these days.
I hear them a couple of hundred times a day in one form or another.
I read them in desperate social media outbursts.
I overhear them in coffee shop conversations.
I find them in my inbox from friends and from strangers.
I hear them in my own head.

They are the symptoms of a shared sickness we now find ourselves afflicted with: a sprawling homegrown mental health crisis. They are part of a growing national neurosis brought on by a continual assault on decency, sanity, and goodness by those in power.

Mental health is a daily battle, even on our best days.

During any given year in America, one in five adults (nearly 68 million people) experiences mental illness; 10 million of these people finding their lives fundamentally impacted by their internal, invisible maladies.

The personal toll of these diseases is almost incalculable: debilitating mood disorders, propensity toward addiction, susceptibility to physical illness, and regular feelings of isolation and hopelessness.

Nearly 50, 000 people die here by suicide each year, with 25 attempts for each of these deaths. Many of these premature passings have direct or indirect lines to undiagnosed, untreated, or treated but ultimately insurmountable sickness. At any given moment, tens of millions of people are fighting a battle in their own heads, just to stay here.

This is all under normal circumstances, and these are not at all normal circumstances.

These are days that tax people’s already burdened mental defense systems and emotional reserves by relentlessly targeting their places of vulnerability:

the real and manufactured emergencies designed by our leadership.
the daily, incessant legislative attacks on vulnerable people groups,
the normalized acts of violence this president not only tolerates but incites,
the untethered behavior regarding matters of national security, international relations, environmental stewardship, and human rights.

Our leadership is mentally unwell and lots of good, already hurting people see it clearly. They understand the gravity of these moments for our nation and they are rightly terrified by the lack of accountability, the absence of conscience, and the poverty of empathy.

Men and women, already prone to depression and anxiety, those normally driven to despair without any discernible cause or reason, now also have objective data that makes that hopelessness quite sensible.

The MAGA movement is making otherwise mentally healthy people emotionally sick and making already ill people much worse.

And a growing number of otherwise well people are developing a form of PTSD from continual exposure to a group of people in power whose malevolence and contempt for life are beyond comprehension. They, too, are finding the space within their own heads to be a dangerous one as they live within it all and try to make sense of senseless cruelty.

What’s worse, the GOP’s boundless assaults on human rights, their vicious crusades against science, their continual gaslighting of otherwise sensible people, and their reckless fake news conspiracy theories, aren’t just making those who oppose them prone to head sickness; they’re doing the same to their supporters.

Republican leaders are playing on their own rank-and-file’s paranoia, instability, and fear; ratifying their latent or active neuroses, and justifying the ways they now act out in both emotional and physical violence.

We are seeing daily acts of aggression in schools, churches, subways, city streets, and grocery stores by people whose own illnesses and frailties have been triggered by the incendiary language and calculated lies continually perpetuated from the top. If there is such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome, these are its symptoms.

America is sickly, and this regime is perfectly fine with that.

It’s no coincidence that the Trump Administration has drastically reduced funding for mental healthcare and removed barriers to ill people accessing firearms. This cocktail of chaos is what it thrives upon, traffics in, and desires.

In an environment populated by emotionally fragile and mentally unhealthy people, it’s much easier to act without accountability and to continue to take away resources, personal liberties, and human rights without recompense.

Mental illness is rarely treated with the same urgency and seriousness as physical illness, and the dismissal is even more profound in days when people feeling deep sadness and great empathy for others are derided as weak, overly emotional, or too sensitive. The callousness of these days makes brain maladies trivial, or worse, worthy of ridicule.

The President and those who support him in Congress are counting on exhausted people growing too weary from pushing back, too overwhelmed fighting their inner demons, and too hopeless to go on.

We can’t allow that.

We need to keep our eyes and ears open to the pain of others right now: to hear the suffering in their words or that is buried in their silence, and to move toward it.
We need to linger long enough to see people who are hurting; to notice their withdrawal and absence, and to make sure they’re OK.
We need to use the resources currently available of therapists, doctors, and counselors who understand these invisible sicknesses and how very real they are.
We need to gather in community to bolster and encourage one another, and to remind people that they aren’t alone in the wars they wage to get better.
We need to reach out to people in our own despair, in our sadness, in our own fight to stay here.
And we all need to carry one another and care for one another, realizing that the GOP has no desire to, and in fact is doing willful damage to the people they have sworn to protect.

We are not well, America.
Many of our leaders are really not well.
The sickest and most damaged among them sits in the Oval Office.
Together, we need to oppose the ugliness that collectively threatens us.
We need to care for our health and the health of those around us.
We need to work and vote to purge our nation of the curators of this chaos, so that we can get well together.

 

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How can anyone still support him?

Tens of millions of us still find ourselves asking this question, watching a staggering number of Americans somehow remain unflinching in their devotion to this President. Despite high crimes, sexual assaults, cognitive decline, reckless wars, and an authoritarian agenda, they remain seemingly giddy over his existence.

But Trump’s supporters aren’t necessarily pleased with the actual policies, tactics,
or methods, but with the results: pissing off the people they don’t like.

That is all that matters to them.
It’s the reason they vote the way they do.
It’s the reason their support is steadfast through pedophilia accusations and acts of treason and human rights disasters and wanton ignorance.
It’s the reason they remain emotionally infatuated with him despite his breaking every campaign promise.

Trump supporters have always seen his ascendency as a big “F— You” to his predecessor, to the identity politics that they feel has targeted them, and to an ever-diversifying nation that they see as a threat. More than affordable healthcare, unpolluted food, and economic opportunity, they want someone to stick it to the world on their behalf, and in their rage-addled state, they somehow believe he does that.

It’s a nationwide mental health crisis that seems both beyond repair and belief.

It’s terribly sad to admit that a huge portion of this nation is moved not primarily by party over country (which would be bad enough) but by spite: that they care more about flipping Democrats the bird than the sovereignty of our nation. To know that people you respected and loved and work with live with anger as their engine is a reason for mourning.

MAGA voters would rather give a strident middle finger to woke liberals, even at the expense of the air their kids breathe and the schools they attend.

They’d prefer to “own the Libs,” even if their medical bills bankrupt them, and businesses migrate away, and natural disasters go ignored.

Their white fragility is so profound that two years ago, they gave Trump another blank check because he’s reversing any recent advances by marginalized communities whose gains they see as threats to their own.

They still feel victorious, even though gas prices are astronomical, we’re immersed in chaos, nothing is trickling down, and America is not first.

Even professed Christians among them are willing to abandon any semblance of Christlikeness because they get back the nostalgic veneers and ceremonial trappings of God and Country that Obama couldn’t satisfy because of his pigmentation and his embracing of the world and its religions.

And so these people are now subsiding on Liberal tears and complete denial.

That is the only barometer for them in this moment of what is good, wise, or productive. It guides their vote, filters their media, defines their faith, and shapes their hearts. That’s why arguing policies or stating facts or attempting constructive conversation with them right now is almost impossible, because spite is irrational and stubborn and unmovable. It wants emotional food that feels good, even if it is filled with empty calories.

The only course of action right now is for those of us motivated by things otherthan revenge and payback and vitriol to be clear, loud, and unified.

We need to reach across all the divides, and to be about what we’re about, and to declare these things with clarity and without relenting or apology.

Our intent should no longer be understanding these people who are still emotionally bound to him. We do understand them. We’ve listened to them. That’s why we know that they cannot be convinced by any previously used methods to connect with rational people. Their blind hatred of the Left and their complete adoration of this President make them, practically speaking, unreachable currently.

They also remind us who we do not want to be.

Being motivated by spite is a really horrible way to go through this life, which is why the rest of us can’t make our response now be about these people and the angry wars they want to stay immersed in. It cannot be shaped by our grievances and complaints and purity stances either. We need to gaze higher than that.

The human and civil rights of our people, the future of our children, the integrity of our nation, our standing in the world, and the defense of our Constitution are all far too important to squander as a middle finger to people we want to piss off.

We’ve seen what that yields.

We need to live and work and vote for equality, diversity, compassion, love, and justice—not for spite.

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I still remember the precise moment I stopped believing in hell.

Over two decades ago, I was at a Christmas dinner party in the home of a gay couple. From the outside, it looked like any holiday gathering: a warm, beautifully decorated room filled with people laughing and telling stories in the soft glow of the tree, while the silky voice of Johnny Mathis wafted through the air along with the heavenly cocktail of aromas from a well-used kitchen.

Most of the guests that night happened to identify as LGBTQ, which hadn’t really occurred to me until, as I smiled and surveyed the room, a sickening thought rudely interrupted: “Many Christians believe that these beautiful people in this room (other than my wife and me) are all going to hell. For no other reason than their gender identity or sexual orientation, every one of them is doomed to spend eternity beyond this life in perpetual torment at the hands of a God who apparently made them, put them here, and loves them passionately.”

And as a Christian and a pastor, I was supposed to believe and preach this, too. It simply no longer rang true for me. I couldn’t reconcile this with the character of an infinitely loving Creator. I lost hell right then and there.

And after that moment, I began taking note of the vast multitudes I’d also been taught were similarly condemned:

My Jewish friends from the gym.
The Muslim couple down the street from our home.
The gay couple I’d once worked for in college.
My atheist friends from high school.
My non-Born Again classmates from childhood.
Every non-Christian who ever lived.
Thousands of authors, musicians, philosophers, and thinkers have inspired me.
Gandhi, Buddha, and everyone from their faith traditions.
An estimated 69 percent of the people on the planet right now. (around 5.6 billion of them).

Lots of good human beings are in hell, and many more are on their way, at least, according to Evangelicals who seem all too happy about that fact.

Over the course of my life, I’ve met or known of so many brilliant, funny, giving, caring people, who for thousands of different reasons can’t or won’t declare themselves Christians, and the idea that God condemns them simply for that fact feels far more human than divine to me now. It seems more like the mind of people who are determined to exclude, judge, and shame. Hell doesn’t feel like the logical construction of a God who is Love, but of human beings who are hateful.

Few things get Christian leaders as excited as forecasting damnation for other people. It rallies their bases, gives them a common enemy to rail against (gays, Muslims, Atheists, Democrats, drag queens, etc.), and leverages the fear that we all have that God may be out to squash us. It’s also a big religious business, which doesn’t hurt.

And there’s a trickle-down judgmentalism that reaches the pews too, allowing ordinary, incredibly imperfect people to believe themselves safe from divine prosecution because they’ve said the magic words, and to simultaneously feel superior to those they can condemn from a distance based on any number of perceived things that disqualify them from Heaven: their sexual activity, their faith perspective, their political affiliations, their nation of origin.

Not long after this experience, I shared a social media post about being resigned to my own eternal punishment, and I received replies from all over the world; people from every walk of life, every life stage, of every religious tradition and color and orientation, who all expressed a similar sentiment:

I’ll see you there!

And that’s the recurring thought I often have now as I cross paths with people who I once believed were condemned, as well as those who confidently almost joyfully condemn them: If Heaven is supposedly filled with such petty, self-righteous, hypocrites, it doesn’t sound all that much like Heaven to me, and if so many beautiful, life-giving souls are surely bound for Hell, it seems like it’ll be one helluva time.

I received a gift at that Christmas party nearly twenty-five years ago. I found myself freed up to see people as they were: for their inherent worth and equally flawed beauty, none deserving of eternal torment, and each one like me: doing the very best that they could to be decent and loving and kind and to treat people well. I’m pretty sure God will be cool with that.

I’m well aware that many professed Christians believe that my doubts about the existence of hell all but guarantee that I’ll spend eternity there, and I’m sure that with great pride or pity, many will comment as such. But from the looks of it, I’ll be in good company in my hot-and-humid eternity, and I won’t have to look far to find diverse, loving humanity when I get there. I look forward to weeping and gnashing teeth alongside all the compassionate, creative, and open-hearted people who weren’t good enough for Evangelical afterlife, which is just as well.

The clearer the image of these people’s Heaven becomes, the less and less trepidation I have of my soul’s resting place somewhere outside of it.

Receiving their damnation actually begins to feel like dodging a bullet: I’ll be avoiding them.

To quote one of my favorite songwriters, the great Frank Turner:

And we’re definitely going to hell—but we’ll have all the best stories to tell.

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From Positive Reinforcement from John Pavlovitz

OK, so this was not the greatest of days.
It may have been far less than ideal.
Actually, it may have been total sh*t.

This day may have beaten the hell out of you from the jump and left you here feeling exhausted, brokenhearted, frazzled, and not sure why the hell you even bother.

Two pieces of good news:

The first is that it’s over, and you’re still here.

The last twenty-four hours may have put you through all manner of fresh hell and f*ckery, and done their level best to bury you, but you refused to consent.

That means you’re either fortunate, blessed, strong, or stubborn enough to still be here, which in days like these is a bona fide miracle. Sometimes, survival is a win.

The second piece of good news is that if you’re lucky, you’ll get another one of these days tomorrow. And if you are, it too will come with all manner of fresh hell and f*ckery, and you’ll get through that one, too.

You always do.

And here’s the deal: it likely hasn’t been all bad.

You may have heard a song you loved, tasted something delicious, or been caught off guard by laughter.

You might have felt a breeze, or hugged a dog, or made something with your hands, or been held by someone who made you feel you were home.

You may have loved and been shown love.

That’s not a bad day’s work.

And I guess that is the point of it all.

Beautiful things still grow in the sh*t.

Sleep well.

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America, he is not worth this.

This unrelenting chaos that we find ourselves emotionally drowning in: the manufactured emergencies, fabricated culture wars, and conjured crises that hound us from the moment we rise exhausted, until the second our besieged nervous systems finally allow us a brief, though uneasy respite.

He is not worth this prolific corruption, the boundless breach of ethics and legality that is enabling a tiny cadre of billionaires to gorge themselves on the lunch money of hungry schoolchildren, the salaries of public school teachers, and the insurance subsidies of sick seniors.

He is not worth this incomparable political malpractice; a kleptocratic Cabinet filled with the grossly unqualified, the morally compromised, the emotionally ill-equipped, and the unrepentantly cruel.

He is not worth this division; the billions of relational fractures he has, if not created, then purposefully exacerbated with a decade-long verbal torrent of incendiary war rhetoric, bottom-feeding dehumanization, and all-or-nothing tribal demands.

He is not worth this bloodshed; Good Samaritans assassinated in their neighborhoods, immigrant fathers dying alone in glorified dog kennels, young women expiring on hospital gurneys, cancer patients denied sustaining medication, Iranian schoolchildren buried beneath a senseless war of distraction.

He is not worth the end of our Republic, an imperfect but two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in Democracy having its life and liberty choked out by a sneering, narcissistic, intellectually fetal, morally bankrupt bottom feeder.

It could have been so easily avoided if, for a day two Novembers ago, we had simply come to our collective senses and chosen a steady, empathetic prosecutor and public servant instead of inexplicably embracing a felonious, predatory carnival barker with a lengthy resume of filth and fraudulence.

Had we done so, we’d have avoided having our military weaponized against our citizens, being illegally taxed for a year on nearly every expense, and battling an Attorney General who is harboring sexual predators. Hungry kids would have food support, our allies wouldn’t be abandoning us, and women would have body autonomy.

Most of all, had we spoken wisely at the polls in 2024, we wouldn’t have to spend nearly every waking hour defending ourselves from an authoritarian regime we alone coronated.

And yet, despite how far afield we’ve found ourselves from the nation our founders dreamed of and our forebears fought for, we could still course correct.

We could be delivered from this preventable, seemingly permanent hell scape in this very day, if our representatives in both chambers of Congress weren’t afflicted with fearful spirits, stilled tongues, and feet of clay.

We could be immediately emancipated from the clutches of a heartless, joyless, dementia-brutalized sociopath if our elected leaders had the courage to abandon their unwavering tribalism, to stop worrying about saving their own political asses, and to do what the entire world knows they should do, and is waiting for them to do.

We could be delivered today if he were simply removed as our Constitution and the consciences of good people demand.

And if our leaders still refuse to bravely and righteously meet this moment, as they seem determined to do, what are We The People going to do?

How are we, as the shared heirs to this place, as beneficiaries of the activism, sacrifice, and bloodshed of billions, going to respond?

When our systems and safeguards and representatives have all failed, what are we willing to do together in order to pull ourselves from the abyss?

We will need to respond to these unprecedented existential threats in a way the people who have called this place home for a quarter of a millenium have never had to.

He is not worth being the hateful, bloated, spray-tanned hill this beautiful nation dies on.

How are we going to make sure that he isn’t?

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Don’t Forget To Be Happy

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Welcome to another day.

You probably didn’t give much thought to the fact that you’re here, that you woke up.

You likely haven’t stopped to breathe in deeply, to feel the air expand your chest, and to let it fall slowly as it departs.
You probably haven’t taken a second to realize that you’re alive.

There’s a good chance your mind has already been overtaken by all the things you need to do, the tasks at hand, the appointments you have, everything filling up the small white block of your calendar assigned to today, all the worries that made sleep difficult last night, the clattering parade of bad news you’re already scrolling through.

You’re already running so fast, so quickly.

Because of all that urgent and terrible and necessary pulling at you from every direction, I bet you went from zero to 6,000 in a matter of seconds, not giving your body and mind a chance to ease into it all, to be intentional about this moment, to decide not what you’ll do today, but how you’ll be today.

You’re likely going to be really busy, and since you are, I don’t want you to forget something important:

I don’t want you to forget to be happy.

I don’t want you to fritter away the next 86,400 seconds as they skyrocket by you from the present and into the past, never filling them with the things that give you joy or generate gratitude or register contentment.

Today it’s going to be difficult for you to remember that this is life: that you are not waiting on a day that is coming in which to do all that you dream of doing or to say everything you should say to people you love, or to create and build and write and make the beautiful things stored up inside you.

If not reminded, you may not remember that this is not a day to RSVP for some future living you’ll do somewhere off on the horizon.
You and the daylight are both here now.
I’d hate to see you procrastinate away living for another time, when this is the living time.

Because it was not a guarantee that you’d wake up today.
Many people didn’t.
They didn’t get to feel the rise and fall of their chests.
They didn’t get to stop and notice they are alive.
They are missing this day you and I are present for.

If they had opened their eyes today and joined us here, they’d likely already be running too, and also in danger of making the same mistake you and I can make if we’re not careful.

They, too, might be seduced by the calendar and distracted by their obligations and weighed down by the tragedies, so much that they would forget to fully live in this small twenty-four-hour sliver of time and space in front of them.

I realize that conditions aren’t perfect today for any of this, but trust me, they will not be tomorrow either.

There will again be things you need to do, tasks at hand, appointments you’ve made, everything filling up the small white block of your calendar assigned to that day, all the worries that will have made sleeping tonight difficult, and the clattering parade of bad news you’ll be scrolling through should you reach the morning.

All the more reason you need to do, in this imperfect day, something that declares you will not be so overwhelmed by all that is not right, that you refrain from living well, from being human.

Fill your time with those who make you feel loved, with moments spent in the places that refresh and inspire you: creating and making and dreaming the glorious stuff that cannot wait because they can only be born today and by you.

Please put joy on your agenda today.
Don’t make it wait.
Create space for it.
Meet with it.

Work for justice and be outraged when it is denied.
Passionately oppose every bit of inhumanity that you can.
Never grow comfortable with cruelty or brutality.

But amidst the countless appointment reminders, calendar notifications, and sticky note prompts that you have to keep you focused on all that seemingly needs to be done, include one more critical reminder, even if you have to tattoo it on your heart:

Welcome to another day. Don’t forget to be happy.

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Don’t Let Them Gaslight You

Friend, I may not know you, but I’m pretty sure I know some things about you:

I know you feel something breaking inside lately, an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of, one that seems to grow deeper by the hour.

I know you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those qualities in them.

I know you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with, the people who once felt like home.

I know you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched-out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question the grip you have on reality.

I know the crushing disbelief you feel when you look around and see so many people who don’t seem the slightest bit bothered, who are carrying on as if this is all normal; people who appear fully oblivious to the Category 5 shitstorm that you’ve been screaming about for a decade, now.

I hear the nagging question that careens inside your head, the one you ask yourself a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”

It isn’t you.

You’re quite fine, and this is, of course, both good and terrible news because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.

The fact that you see how wrong this all is means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.

This is why you need to hold tightly to that humanity because it is rarer and more valuable than it has ever been.
It’s why you need to kindle this holy unrest in the center of your belly, because it can push back the numbing flood of apathy threatening to swallow up the beautiful fury of good people.
It’s why you can’t allow your right but troubled mind to make peace with such abject madness.

If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can start to get used to feeling sick. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable, even ordinary.
Little by little, they can gradually allow their hearts to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.
Either that, or they come to believe the damage to be beyond repair, and they collapse inward, a hopeless, lightless shell of who they once were.

I need you to hear this, friend:
You’re okay.
You’re not overreacting,
you’re not stupid,
and you’re not crazy.
You’re also in good company.

Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted but still pissed-off warriors who realize that the bad people are counting on them to become so disheartened that they give up—and who refuse to give them the f*ckin’ satisfaction.

You and I, we’re seeing clearly, friend, which is always the more painful path; staring down the terrors and refusing to look away from what so many willfully choose not to see.

We know that this movement assailing our nation is an assault on decency, a rebellion against goodness, a mutiny against sanity, and that’s why we need to keep resisting it.

We need to shout down the legion of professional liars working so fiercely to convince us that it’s we who have gone mad.

We need to refuse to be gaslit by people who try to diminish our worries, mock our outrage, or dismiss our despair, even if we have once called them friends.

We need to press on undaunted and unafraid, knowing that the jittery chaos-makers realize their time is short, and they are rightly terrified of us because our goodness makes us dangerous.

So, breathe, gather yourself, and carry on.

Work to find your people, those who are as heartbroken and furious as you are. Find ways to care for human beings in peril, to organize against the legislative and physical assaults, to be focused and effective in your response, and to be strengthened by loving community.

You’re not crazy, but these days surely are.

You’re not upside down right now, friend; a good portion of this place is.

People of faith, morality, and conscience together, from every corner of this nation, will right it.

Grieve, and move.

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The Only Thing More Powerful than Hate Is Love

Sometimes you can forget the point of it all.

It’s easy when the horrors have become commonplace to become so beaten down and disheartened by the fight that you can lose sight of why you’re doing it.

The repeated brutality and the relentless sorrows and the never-ending crises can squeeze out and suffocate your imagination, gradually rendering you unable to see a future worth walking into anymore.

And then suddenly, when you least expect it, there it is.

Suddenly, you find those long-dried-up reservoirs of hope bursting open once more.

Caught up in the throes of a stirring rhythm that you cannot resist, you find your way back.

For thirteen minutes on a football field in San Francisco, from thousands of miles away, we could see it again.

This America: diverse, creative, joyful, colorful, unified.

This America, where fear is banished, where fierce embraces find each of us, where no one is left outside.

This is it.

This is what we’re fighting like hell for.

This is why giving up isn’t an option.

And this is why centering something other than Love is the only way we lose.

Bad Bunny reminded us that in this war for the nation we’re still renovating, it is not might, or force, or eye-for-an-eye violence that will cause us to prevail; it will be our refusal to become as miserable and hateful as those we oppose.

He, a man faced for months with the undeserved scorn of tens of millions of strangers, the target of the worst poison human beings are capable of, chose not to stand upon the largest platform and fly some bitter, middle finger contempt.

He simply showed his humanity and reminded us of our own.

He refused to allow his enemies to defeat him by becoming them.

Love wins.

Words can easily feel like hollow platitudes, like empty cliches, until they aren’t.

Until they are the truest truth there is in this life.

Until we can feel them in the marrow of our bones.

Until those words towering above a beleagured multitude that has been starved of Love.

That love is what those grim-faced, joyless exclusionists are afraid of, what they are working so tirelessly to eliminate.

That’s why this was more than just entertainment, more than songs and set pieces, more than pop music and sentiment.

We cannot lose sight of who we are.

Our compassion is what makes us different.

We do wield those open, bleeding hearts they ridicule us for.

We are a people who believe that the open hand is greater than the clenched fist.

Now, I’m not so naive to believe that a 13-minute show is magic: that violent mobs of masked men are going to suddenly disappear from our streets, that the cruel and calloused hearts all around us are going to soften, that the people so addled by racism that they needed an alternative to this celebration of our commonalities are going to be moved to alter their allegiance to a monster.

In fact, witnessing such a bold and beautiful declaration of diverse coexistence will likely make those threatened by such things double down in their attacks, but that doesn’t matter.

But what I do know is that for thirteen minutes, it all became clear again.

For thirteen minutes, we could see the future.

We have had our attentions redirected, our spirits lifted, and our strength returned.

We have been reminded of the place that we might still be if we refuse to stop doing the hard work; if we continue to make sure that everyone has a place here, that everyone finds welcome, that everyone gets a chance to dance.

Over the span of thirteen minutes, Bad Bunny gave his detractors lessons in empathy, diversity, unity, and geography.

He gave the rest of us the eyes to see what we may have forgotten.

He, Love, and America won.

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Sometimes you don’t have to work to figure out where the racists are. Sometimes they out themselves.

Back in the Fall, within nanoseconds of the NFL announcing that Latin rapper Bad Bunny would be performing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Trump cult tore itself away from Charlie Kirk martyrdom, MAGA church shooter retcons, restaurant logo crusades, and pro-ICE posturing to launch into a full-on frenzy of performative histrionics in protest.

Since then, they’ve continued their tortured pearl-clutching unabated, with the white supremacist stalwarts at Turning Point USA recently announcing an “alternative” halftime show (called, of course, The All-American Halftime Show), featuring Olympic-level cultural appropriator-turned MAGA bootlicker Kid Rock and an undercard of similarly pigmented, patriotism-peddling, Bible-brandishing, shameless deep South virtue signalers.

You see the “alternative” they’re offering here, right?

If you’re over 25 and, like many older white folks, have remained permanently trapped in the amber of Classic Rock radio, you may have never even heard of Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. (I’d be willing to bet my house that 90 percent of the Conservatives who are currently rending their garments online hadn’t, either.)

Born and raised in Puerto Rico (which a terrifying number of MAGAs don’t seem to know is an American territory), his father was a truck driver and his mother a school teacher. He spent his formative years singing in the choir in a Roman Catholic Church his family attended, and began writing his own music at the age of 14. Bunny was signed to a record label at the age of 20 after being discovered online.

Today, Bad Bunny is an international superstar, the second most-streamed artist of all time, with 100 billion streamed songs. He is a multiple Grammy winner, has crossed over into professional wrestling and acting, is a coveted brand ambassador, and does millions of dollars in philanthropic work through his Good Bunny Foundation (Fundación el Buen Conejo), which he started in 2018.

Ocasio is the literal embodiment of the American Dream that the GOP has spent decades waving in our faces and flying up the flagpole.

So, what’s the problem?

Let’s just say it’s primarily a melanin issue, with a side order of MAGA cultism, a heaping portion of Christian nationalism, and a healthy dash of homophobia thrown in.

As a self-described gender-fluid Latin musician who sings predominantly in Spanish, has previously criticized Donald Trump, and repeatedly lamented the inhumanity of ICE as recently as during his Grammy acceptance speech last week, Ocasio must be condemned, vilified, and eradicated because membership in the mindless death cult of white American intolerance they now call home requires it. This asinine mob mentality vitriol is what Trump’s movement has fostered and fomented, and what it demands.

Ocasio opened his recent Grammy speech with these words:

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say: ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”

This is supposed to be what America stands for: decency, diversity, humanity, and yet it is precisely the message MAGA is burdened to shout down and suffocate.

The fact that the Right feels compelled to create an “alternative” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance speaks eloquently about their desire to secede from a culturally and racially diverse nation, how committed they are to perpetuating the myth of oppressed white Christians, and how determined they are to manipulate every event into a racist holy war in order to keep their rank-and-file foaming at the mouth.

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a statement that the show “is an opportunity for all Americans to enjoy a halftime show with no agenda other than to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.”

But whose faith are they celebrating?

Not the spiritual beliefs of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians, or non-MAGA Evangelical Christians.

Whose family are they talking about?

Not Latino families, or black families, or immigrant families, or LGBTQ families, that’s for damn sure.

And exactly whose freedom will take center stage on Sunday?

Not the people with brown skin being relentlessly terrorized by ICE, not the thousands of sexual assault survivors brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators, not the tens of millions of women who deserve autonomy over their own bodies, and not the migrants and refugees being persecuted by these cosplaying Christians.

The Turning Point halftime show, like every venture in the MAGA/Trump ecosystem, is a grim, sinister, mean-spirited fight against progress, evolution, and diversity disguised as sincere virtue.

This isn’t about Bad Bunny.
This isn’t about a halftime show.
It’s about who we collectively want to be, the kind of nation we dream of living in, and the future we want those who follow us to inherit.
It’s about the cost of standing up to the bullies, of rejecting racism, of being intolerant of intolerance.
This is about what we will demand and what we will not accept when it comes to the rights and voices of people of color.

Trump and his supporters don’t want an alternative halftime show; they want an alternative white, gated community nation where only they benefit.

In these days, we are in a brutal battle for an America where everyone will find opportunity, safety, and welcome.

It’s time we all got in the game.

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In days like these, information is hazardous.

Yesterday morning, before my feet had even hit the floor, I opened up Instagram, and sitting at the top of my feed was a video of a group of ICE agents driving a man’s face into the pavement and pepper-spraying him at point-blank range.

Just below that, a petrified and screaming child alone, surrounded by masked thugs.

And underneath that, a wide-eyed content creator was alerting viewers about a pregnant woman’s wounds suffered under ICE detainment.

I instinctively scrolled through, bombarded by one image of staggering inhumanity after another.

Click.
Share.
Swipe.
Click.
Share.

Before I realized it, I was on an algorithm-propelled descent into a rabbit hole of horrors that triggered another fight-or-flight rush of Cortisol into my already taxed system.

Suddenly, I was jolted from my phone by a thought: What the hell am I doing here?

I’d barely been awake for five minutes, and I was already drowning in the same hellish scenes I’d gone to bed to a few hours earlier. I’d taken a brief respite of broken sleep and stress dreams and had immediately returned to my now permanent waking condition: emotional exhaustion.

I inventoried the last few weeks and realized that this jittery internal panic has been my default setting. Day after day, from waking until sleeping, I’d mindlessly absorbed countless hours of video, sounds, and photos that the human mind cannot properly make sense of. Not only that, but thousands of times, I’d reflexively boosted this nightmare fuel to friends, readers, followers, and strangers, contributing untold gallons to the fierce flood of terrible they too have been drowning in.

Right now, we are all in danger of killing ourselves with bad news, of willfully dying on the altar of information.

When does our noble desire not to turn away from the violence become something self-destructive and injurious, something counterproductive to an effective response to that violence? How do we know when we’ve passed from knowing what’s happening to a crippling fear porn addiction that is doing nothing but rendering us hopeless and overwhelmed? When is our newsfeed doing more harm than good?

Please hear me, I’m not advocating checking out by any measure. We’re here in this perilous and heartbreaking place as a nation because tens of millions of Americans have spent years averting their eyes, turning away from unpleasant news, and burying their heads in the sands of distraction instead of facing the reality in front of them. We sure as hell don’t want to do that.

It’s critically important to be aware of the atrocities this Administration is perpetrating with ICE and elsewhere so that we don’t lose sight of the gravity of the moment. But at some point, we move from being adequately informed to being profoundly addled by the scale and velocity of the bad news.

I can throw a bath towel onto a flooded floor, and it will immediately fill its fibers with liquid until it becomes fully saturated, at which point it cannot take anything else in. Once it reaches its capacity, it becomes completely weighed down and useless.

You’re probably pretty close to such a state, friend. I know I am.

So how do we pull ourselves out of this precipitous spiral into despair?
We all need to be asking ourselves the questions:

How much devastation can we responsibly hold?
What purpose does the doom-scrolling serve?
How does it actually help us or anyone else?

I can’t tell you how much information you need to be adequately informed, or how much carnage your brain and body can sustain and still function, or when you’ve reached a place of ineffectiveness.

What I do know is that every second we spend on social media, staring at the horrors on a screen is a second we could spend moving out into the world and doing something that affirms our agency, something that generates a tangible response to what breaks our hearts, something that helps another human being.

My friends, stay informed.
Stay engaged.
Be aware.
Don’t fall into apathy.
But please, don’t let the bad news kill you.

We need you here to help twist the plot.

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Saturday’s Pavlovitz

Dear President Trump,

It’s taken me a while to realize and admit this, but I’m grateful to you.

I’ve spent a decade openly lamenting your presence and the poison it has so effortlessly released into our nation’s blood system.

Today, I find myself horrified at a second term that is doing even greater damage than I ever imagined it would. My heart has been hourly broken as I’ve watched our country imploding, our public discourse become polluted, our daily existence grow ever more corrosive, and I’ve wrongly assumed you were to blame.

Yet, I’ve come to understand that you haven’t manufactured our current national ugliness; you’ve simply revealed it and leveraged it.

By generating a limitless torrent of hateful, mean-spirited ignorance, you’ve given other like-minded people license to do the same. You’ve opened up the floodgates for their collective moral sewage to flow fully. People no longer hide their malevolence behind feigned politeness and phony civility; they now revel in it, they broadcast it, and they celebrate it.

You’ve made bigotry, misogyny, and racism socially acceptable again, and that has been a kind of twisted gift because it’s allowed me to really see people, not as they pretend to be on the surface, but in the very depths of their calloused hearts.

Over and over throughout the last decade, your supporters would always tell me that they liked you because you “speak your mind,” yet I realized a long time ago that it is because you speak their minds. You’ve given credence to their phobias, sanctioned their prejudices, and normalized their contempt for their neighbors.

Thanks to the terrible ground you’ve broken, politicians, pastors, friends, and strangers, both in person and on social media, now regularly out themselves as cruel, intolerant, and malicious. They remind me just how close they are to me, just how deep the sickness in us runs, and just how far a nation we have to go to become worthy of our songs and anthems.

You’ve emboldened people to be open about things they used to conceal for the sake of decorum, and though it turns my stomach, I know that this is the only way we can move forward; to have that cancerous stuff exposed fully so that it can be dealt with. Our progress as a nation is predicated on authentic dialogue, no matter how brutal and disheartening that dialogue is.

In other words, you’ve let us know what we’re really dealing with here and while it’s been rightly disturbing, it’s also been revelatory. That’s the thing about that kind of harsh light: you’re forced to see everything; beauty and monstrosity equally illuminated.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I think you are the most malignant President in our nation’s history, and I fear gravely for the world my children will inherit, should America survive your Presidency at all. I believe you’re a soulless, loveless, irredeemably hateful bottom-feeder; the very worst of what humanity has produced.

But regardless of what happens now, you’ve already allowed me the blessing of discovering the truth: about me, about my neighbors, about my friends and family members, and about our country.

And in the process, you’ve also shown me that I am not alone in resisting you and the sickening, grievous things you’ve revealed about us.

You’ve generated an equally loud, equally passionate response to it, and this is where I find my hope these days.

I find it in those for whom equality, freedom, and justice aren’t just cheap buzzwords or hollow sentiments; they are the most precious of hills to die on.

I find it in those people who refuse to be silent in the face of our moral regression.

I find it in those who are willing to be more bold in defending the inherent value of all people.

I find it in the growing army of those true patriots who will not tolerate hatred as a core American value.

I find it in human beings who fiercely reject white supremacy in every form.

I find it in those who reject violence as a default response to dissension.

I find it in the ever-rising voice of people who will not let your malice and bitterness represent them in the world.

I find it in the ordinary activists who will not allow us to repeat the worst of history here.

Today I find my hope in those who, like me, will not be complicit in allowing exclusion to become a source of national pride, who will not tolerate an America that is bereft of empathy and drained of diversity, because we’ve seen where that leads.

Yes, President Trump, you’ve unearthed our hidden afflictions, and you’ve paraded them unapologetically in the light of day.

You brought every awful thing about us out into the open so that we can face it without myth or misunderstanding.

You’ve shown me that America is greater than you and your sycophantic disciples’ plans for it, and that it is worth fighting for with everything I have.

And for all of this, I thank you.

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Dear Concerned Friend

Dear Concerned Friend,

Thank you for your kind note letting me know that you’re worried about me, and you wonder if I realize I’m coming across as angry lately.

Your assessment is correct, and yes, I do realize it.
I am angry.
I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry for that.

I understand your discomfort, as I can imagine I’m not all that fun to be around right now, and that from time to time my words may come across as combative or abrasive or unhelpful. I’m probably more than a bit of a downer lately.

You’re going to have to bear with me, as I haven’t been sleeping well for a bit. Admittedly, I’m not at my best these days, so please forgive me because I’m chronically overtired. I’m exhausted from having to give all the sh*ts about people that you’re supposed to be giving, along with my own.

I’m worn out from keeping up on legislation and watching hearings and staying on top of details and remembering deadlines and imploring action, while you go about your day as if such things are an annoyance, as if they are a disruption to your plan, as if the expiration date for my outrage should have long ago passed.

I am absolutely burnt out from trying to make my voice loud enough to counteract not only the bad people’s incredible volume but your deafening silence. Both of these things are doing similar damage right now, sadly.

Believe me, I understand that my activism is a problem for you. Please know that your inactivism is similarly problematic for me. It’s part of the reason I am as angry as I am; because I’m not only having to fight against those who seem furiously bent on hurting people—I’m having to fight against those who don’t seem give enough of a damn that they are doing so, to say anything.

Look, I get it, I really do. It’s difficult to see so much bad news, to fully face the relentless flood of terrible, to try and wrap your brain around seemingly boundless cruelty around you. It’s tiresome to spend so much time with a closed fist. I know it’s even a pain in the rear end to endure the continual rantings of people like me on your news feed and in your timeline and across the dinner table and in the break room.

I’m tired of me, too.
I’m over the fight, as well.
I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.
I’d rather not be doing this either.
I’d much rather prefer to forget about it all and just enjoy life, to only post pictures of puppies and my kids and to simply ignore all that “political stuff” that you ignore.
But that is what privilege looks like: to even believe I have such an option, to have the great luxury of living without urgency because I can seemingly shield myself from it all.

That is what the bad people are counting on. They’re counting on good people being too tired, too apathetic, too selfish, or too oblivious to sustain their outrage. I am not going to give that gift to them.

As long as they’re fully invested in putting people through hell, I’m going to be as invested in pushing back against it.
I think the people I love are worth it.
I think you and the people you love are worth it.
I think people I’ll never meet are worth it.

And that’s the rub here: love will often look a lot like rage as it fiercely fights on behalf of those who are being brutalized.

So yes, angry is not all that I am, but I am rightly and quite angry.

And it would be really helpful if we could carry the load of outrage right now.

That would actually be a source of rest and joy and breath for people like me.

Friend, if you really want me to be less angry, you might try being a little more angry yourself. We’re all in this together.

I am angry, concerned friend.

I wish you were angry too.