I wish there had been a call to action and a rise to meet that call like there often is in stories. A moment of clarity, of undeniable need, that drove the hero/community/leader to action against the foe that had appeared on the horizon. A series of events that would create a moment to inspire a movement. A tipping point where the imbalance was so undeniable that it inspired a mad scramble to fix the scale. Reality isn’t like that, unfortunately. Calls to action are usually ignored, excused, or defused, preventing the necessary rise in response in order to preserve the status quo. We’re all too tired, too poor, too scattered, to divided to respond to a call, for the most part. There’s so much between the people who need to rise and the thing they’re rising to meet that it often feels impossible to ever effect change. I know I often feel that way, like I’m fighting for a hopeless cause or that there’s no reason in putting up a fight because I’ll never gain ground, let alone win. Too much bad stuff keeps happening in the US unopposed by those who were supposed to safeguard against this kind of fascism and consolidation of power for me to seriously believe the idea that our current leaders will ever take meaningful action of any kind. It’s kind of devastating, to be honest, because of the things I was raised to believe about this country and people in general that I somehow still clung to after all these years. I don’t know what I’m going to do about these large scale things as they break beyond repair (but hopefully not beyond replacement).