There’s a thousand things happening at once. It’s all too much. We’ve got a Fox-News-host-turned-Secretary-of-Defense sharing military plans on insecure phones, then lying about it to Congress. And that’s also how most of us heard that the US was bombing another country, by the way. Israel is committing genocide in the Middle East and now, when people speak out, our government is disappearing them like we’re in Pinochet’s Chile and they are being housed like we’re in Hitler’s Germany.

Then there are the countless civil and human rights violations, the rejection of the rule of law, and supine congress on top of the constant barrage of destabilizing bills which restrict the rights of people to have access to resources at federal and state levels, the wholesale gutting of political infrastructure, and uncountable other things compounding daily with interest.

Given all of this, a sense of overwhelm is pretty natural. And when we feel overwhelmed, it is natural to try and figure out what to do. What is the right thing to do here? Now?

The Overwhelm Response

I hear it daily: “what am I supposed to do?” Because we’re all feeling overwhelmed.

Like many natural questions, it is reactive and often shortsighted.

What we’ve got is a situation like a student who has four dozen assignments due tomorrow. All were assigned over the last few days. No fewer than four new ones will come out today, as everyday. To this, our response amounts to “which one should I do first?” Even when there aren’t enough hours in the day to do them all, or to do enough to get a passing grade, we’re still trying to deduce a right strategy for digging ourselves out of the hole we are in.

Tell me this isn’t a familiar feeling!

Many know this through the crushing reality of poverty or living paycheck-to-paycheck. When you have bills to pay and they keep piling up. And then a new thing hits. School loan interest rates go from 2% to 9%, for example. And suddenly the monthly payments balloon.

Our problem isn’t me

And even when we know it isn’t right, we still feel guilty that we aren’t doing enough, that we haven’t kept up, that there must be a way to keep up. Even when the evidence shows we can’t — it is an unrealistic expectation — the guilt remains. It feels like this was all about us, it is up to us, so we are the screw ups here.

Another natural response is to get pissed off at the teacher and think he is being deeply unfair. And, of course this is true, isn’t it? There is nothing fair about any of this we’re experiencing. It is cruel, hateful, and built, not on a logic of fairness or efficiency, but on one of supremacy and control.

When we focus our emotions on our hate toward the teacher, however, it doesn’t actually help us do our work, does it? It serves as a kind of avoidance mechanism that allows us to continue in our overwhelm and frustration. We can rage at the injustice of it, while neglecting our conditions.

Now multiply ourselves.

Yes, the natural response to overwhelm is to ask what “what can I do?” But it’s most common response is just as vague: “do the next right thing.” Yes! Right. Of course. Um….which is what again? And the wise guru up on the mountain who most certainly will relieve our tense anxiety about all of the things will tell us that the next right thing is to make a singular action. Sign up for a mailing list or contact your representatives. Good. A first step.

Now, they may also offer a similarly vague and undirected notion of “act local.” This is more conceptual and proverbial than a real-world guidance. It is like the principal of “states rights” which sounds like something but could also really be anything. Like, I understand that my governor has no more interest in me than my president does, so I don’t actually need him to have more power, feel me? And he isn’t local. The dude did a fifteen minute photo op in Terre Haute with two “locals” from another county. Besides, what even is “local”?

This is all a further distraction from the real problem. The problem that we feel in the midst of our overwhelm; that builds it and grows it, feeding off our situation and metastasizing.

We think we’re alone.

And that question: “what can I do?” is an isolating one.

It depends on our being separate. And comes from an expectation that someone else will have the answer. It assumes there is someone else who has done the work (another individual) who needs to reach out to us (as individuals) and give us work assignments (as individuals) that will alleviate our sense of overwhelm so we can go back to living our (separate) lives.

There is a companion to this atomizing overwhelm: the Jaded Activist who responds to the atomized overwhelmed person with a cynical take online. The Jaded Activist is totally all for doing the right things and building the right coalitions, but let’s be honest: our leaders are incompetent, so we’ll just offer hot takes online.

Both of these above paragraphs describe me, by the way.

But there’s a problem with both of these analyses of the situation. They assume acting alone is normal.

We are being atomized.

The overwhelm doesn’t come from an absence of ideas because we have many already. Nor does it come from an absence of desire to make the world better, for there is plenty. And “politics” is a big ol’ catch-all bucket we throw our disgust into, so let’s not pretend that is discerning or even helpful.

No, the problem is our obsessively individualistic response. And we are attached to the simple idea that “it shouldn’t be this way.” That we should be able to rely on our institutions or that we should be allowed to go about our business or that we should be able to live in peace without all of this overwhelm. Yeah, OK, sure. Granted. But also, we don’t have that. And these passive constructions hold us back.

Watching industry leaders and tech giants go to Washington to “kiss the ring,” coming after a year under the previous president when schools like Indiana University brought police onto campus to beat protestors, to train snipers on students, and to expel them for exercising free speech rights the school had enshrined during the civil rights movement, displays the insidious weakness of individualism. Each of these leaders, worrying for the health and future of their own institution, broke from precedent and good judgement. They sought to protect themselves by undermining their own rights, and future.

It’s about us together.

The idea seems so obvious to many of us, that we respond with a sense of “what else could they do?” Yeah. I get it. What else could they do? They probably picked up their phone and called their lawyer and convened the board and they all said we’ve got to do this otherwise we’re sunk. Because, under the heat of Sauron’s gaze, you know you are a target.

What probably didn’t happen? The university president didn’t call other university presidents to discuss the common threat. A threat that isn’t coming from potential students, but activist billionaires. But what do Harvard, IU, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Michigan, Cal, et al. have together? Millions of people, billions in endowments, and all of the moral high ground.

The solution to overwhelm, to this cloud of frustration, is not to wait for the right methodology to be bestowed to us from on high, bringing with it moral clarity (answering that honest question “what should I do?” with a simple, clear, and comforting reply) but instead a loud and proud collected response of FU.

The Confessing Church

Take the lesson of the Confessing Church, which was a collection of Protestant churches in Germany that arose in response to the rise of Hitler. Their response, until it was too late, was tepid and individualistic.

The struggle for the Confessing Church was that the majority of the German people genuinely liked the message of Make Germany Great Again and felt the karmic pain of the post Great War humiliation brought upon them by France and Britain. The vast majority were sympathetic to the Nazi nativist argument.

What many people didn’t like were Hitler’s methods. This meant the Confessing Church struggled to find a common message or defense. They struggled to resist and often allowed the SS threat to silence or break their unity. In short, they didn’t work together until it was too late.

The Confessing Church didn’t serve as a proper counter to the Nazi regime because they wouldn’t unify against it. They refused to stand against it together, often seeing the politic of the time as too controversial. By the end of the war, the Nazis murdered most of them for opposing the regime.

Too many were afraid to stand together against Hitler until it was too late. And yet they were punished for it regardless. Had they acted sooner, together, they may have prevented the Holocaust.

We need a new civil rights movement

The civil rights movement didn’t spring up with protests. It was years of political organizing and building community action, methodologies, teaching, civic engagement, and family-inclusive practices which fostered a movement over a long period of time before the big public demonstrations.

Today there are many people fostering such work in nearly every city in the country. There are groups who don’t just have similar political positions to most of the people reading this, but have familiarity with the organizing tools for movement building. And there are those like the Rev. William J. Barber II who are organizing on the national level for a moral conviction for the elimination of poverty and the protection of the rights of all people.

This is the action we need most.

To work on building a movement — to ally with those in our neighborhoods, communities, and around the world in radical solidarity. This is why looking for the thing you can do today to make yourself feel better will never lead you to an answer — because it isn’t real. It is a natural impulse we are taught to funnel away from community and toward individualism.

And because humans are wired for connection, not isolation, this is the more natural response: to work together. To build together. Dream together. Hope together. Love together.

Build community together and we can act together, protect each other, and make the world more just, humane, and peaceful.