The Connection

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is right when she says Europe must "take its fate into its own hands" because the United States is turning its back on its destiny and succumbing to its fate as polarized fractions submerge our role as a world leader. Perhaps the biggest divide has emerged between forces of globalism that have pushed the world into complicated, interrelated relationships (a place humanity is destined but the movement has been too intense and fast) and forces of nationalism and populism that are turning our nation’s attention back to times of former greatness. This looks safer than pressing forward into an unknowable future, but this is an illusion, for no one can step into the same spot of a river twice because it constantly flows forward, just as consciousness flows forward through time. Turning our backs on where we are going is as good as sailing blind into oncoming rocks.

We are undergoing a “pretty big” identity crisis where the thin veneer of what we thought was a normal and healthy democracy is cracking, and now we boldly step into the children’s fairy tale of the “Emperor Wearing No Clothes” (or perhaps this is just liberals feeling this way today as conservatives used this same metaphor eight years earlier). Regardless of whether liberals are justified to feel this way now or conservatives were justified to feel this way before, the more important question is what do we do when more than half of the country feels left behind?

I don’t have answers, but protest is a start. It is a sign our democracy is still resilient and flexible enough to self-correct when the pendulum swings too far to the left or right. Protest is a counter force that emerges to hold the center when the collective balance gets knocked off center. After protest, comes the hard work of finding a way forward that does not exclude, abandon, or diminish any group of people in this country (or world) — one that can stay cohesive and evolve.

When I made a documentary of the Women’s March, I didn’t understand any of this, but rather was compelled by a fictional narrative (begun five years earlier) to go down to the mall and gather voices of the hopes, fears, and concerns of people coming from all over the country to the march. I am not a journalist, a film-maker, or community activist, but this moment felt bigger than me and, like so many of the people I talked with, this is a time when we are called upon to get involved in ways that don’t always feel comfortable but are essential to hold the center on our core democratic values such as truth, justice, and human dignity. This includes holding the center for middle class Americans who are being squeezed out of the economy by globalism. It also means holding the center for every person regardless of if they are black, white, brown, rich, poor, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhists, immigrant, legal, or “illegal” for every person is part of our collective reality and essential to the fabric of this moment in time. When even one person is left behind, injured (physically or psychologically), expelled, or banned from entering our country due to fear and discrimination, our collective fabric is ripped. Thus, the work of moving forward needs to include every voice so a bigger, better narrative can form, one that is more conscious than the one Trump has temporarily tapped into — a strangely one-sided, warped, off-center, immature, and backwards looking story. Why is this important? Because narratives are powerful devices that act like high-powered antennas capturing and focusing an individual’s attention onto narrow bandwidths that can be harnessed by the narrative creators for good or bad.

To move forward and recover our destiny, we need to create a new narrative that unites our voices. We do this by listening to each other — and, most importantly, understanding and respecting diverse points of view. In this way we can repair the damage being inflicted through the current rhetoric, rebuild a bridge where true discourse can take place again, and wrestle back control of our collective destiny from forces that have taken advantage of healthy differences between the left and the right, made them starker, widen the natural gap, and then pushed both sides to the very edge of the chasm that opened where the destructiveness of the human psyche looms larger and more threatening than it has in a long time — hurtling us into this moment. As one of the march signs so eloquently says, “None of us can move forward, if half of us are left behind.” We choose the quality of the thread we contribute to our shared reality — so infuse yours with wisdom.

Deborah Wunderman, an Arlington resident, is a grant/proposal writer and author of an unpublished novel about a near future world where humanity does not make the decisions needed to avert worldwide climate disasters. She has made several citizen-style documentaries of recent protests motivated by her novel's narrative. See https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2sNIMUCEbYV3hNrSrEu47g.