Hello darkness, my until-recently-mostly-silent friends. For over two months, I have been calling out to you—sending sonic probes into deep space to see if there was any life out there. Just in case you were listening, I told stories—sent them out to awaken you and also hopefully soothe you, even more optimistically perhaps to give you some courage to come back from wherever you had retreated to for shelter. I had begun to think we had lost you, until some of you began to make some noise this week.

It hasn’t helped that for nearly three months, we have also experienced a near-vacuum of leadership and strength from those we did manage to elect to defend our democracy…at least that’s how many of us felt until this week, when the horror of our situation began to wake those electeds up, and many more who had gone into hibernation. If you’re already awake, aware, making some noise, and moving into action, the following story may not apply to you, but feel free to take what you like from it and use it on your friends who are still afraid to come out and roll up their sleeves.

If you’re still finding yourself unable to or uncertain how to engage, today, I’m going to do something my old friend Roberta used to do with me. When she saw me mired in disbelief—or just failing to act because I didn’t feel equal to the situation, she would look me right in the eye and say, “I’m going to take the kid gloves off with you now.” And then she would break through all my denial, blind thinking, and stalling, and give me the verbal equivalent of Cher’s smack to Nicholas Cage in MOONSTRUCK—along with it’s perfect poetic line: “Snap out of it!”

Roberta had the keen eye to see in me a too-frequent reluctance to deal with reality; and she had the courage to confront it. I loved her fiercely for it. She made me better. And that’s where I think I might need to pull a well-meaning-but-potentially-harsh-two-handed-Roberta on some of you and try to stick the landing.

To do this—(by now, you know how this goes)…I’m going to start by telling you a story. Because in addition to teachers like Roberta who have helped me grow, I have learned some wisdom from being in the WILD. This tale is about a time just a few years ago when I was hiking with my wolf companion Chaco in the foothills of the Rockies on a trail that led between slabs of uplifting red rocks to a pinnacle with a breathtaking view over thousands of acres of undeveloped rolling meadows and forested slopes. On this day, a beautiful blue sky stretched above us dotted with a few cotton-puff clouds. The sun warmed us, and the birds—as they usually do when the wolf enters their territory—had gone silent in the nearby trees. I stopped to drink in the tranquility. I had things on my mind, and the problems I had carried when we started this hike had begun to unravel and dissipate. I felt an exhilarating sense of clarity about one issue in particular that had been troubling me for days. This is the gift of both beauty and silence.

As I took a sip from the valve on my hydration pack and prepared to share some with Chaco, he suddenly bolted to the rear, his lead tugging me back a few feet on the trail to where he had made his retreat. And then I heard it. The low percussive rattling sound that grew louder and erupted into a piercing hiss. The rattlesnake was right there, not three feet off the path from where I had formerly stood, coiled up to strike. The snake’s head rose higher as did the volume of hissing and rattling, a forked tongue pulsing rapidly out between the viper’s frightening fangs. Chaco and I backed slowly away, then turned and bolted back down the trail to a fork where we paused to recover our breath. Now that I was awake to the very real danger in the way we’d been headed, I was forced to choose another path, or give up and go home. I was not going to go back home because a viper had taken over a section of the trail. We took a longer, harder way because we had to. It took some strategic backtracking, more climbing, more time, more effort, and more teamwork. But we got to the pinnacle.

I thank Chaco for saving me that day. Sometimes you need someone to give a big tug on your proverbial chain.
Or, as Roberta would do, take off the kid gloves and give you that verbal smack. And help you redirect.

So, let’s do this. If you have been licking your wounds since last November, okay, you did that. But now, snap out of it.

Or if you think you can go on with all your plans just like you always have…la-la-la-la-lah… you know now that you can’t do that, right?

Think of France and Germany when the Third Reich was taking over and start making other plans.

Or if you have been awake—like many of us—but only because you’ve been unable to sleep, (and not because you’ve been working night and day to prepare, find answers, build ramparts and coalitions)… well: it’s time to stop spinning in circles and back up, pull your focus out to the big picture and re-direct and re-engage.

Or if you’ve been twiddling… you know… twiddling?  STOP!

Stop whining. Even worse: stop making small, impotent posts and pledges on social media that serve only to make you feel likeyou’re doing something. Stop making little snarky jokes that point to the other side’s stupidity. The threat is real. They know better than most Americans what is really going on here right now. Spend your snark and joke rations helping people realize what is happening, not joking about it. The slithering things are trying lots of stuff, yes, and some of it isn’t initially flying, but they have been planning this for decades and they have a lot of very clever people who know that once is never enough to push through some of this cruelty; and chaos works to their advantage. They are committed to continuing until they have “deleted” our democracy. Do not do shit that involves looking away, that minimizes or jokes about where we really are. Haven’t I warned you about getting distracted?

And if you’ve been indulging in none of the above but simply sitting contemplatively in the silence so you could gather your strength and know for certain how best to move forward, then ffs!, wake up now because the snake is coiled up and already striking! It’s time to get moving. The threat is real. Time to snap out of it. The vipers have already poisoned the veins of our democracy with lies, struck repeatedly at it with illegal orders; they are choking it with unqualified, illegitimate cabinet members, with thieves and oligarchs claiming power, they’ve sunk the fangs in with orders to defund the government while escalating their grift and corruption and nepotism and cronyism, summoning more vipers by pardoning criminals and abolishing justice, and slithering about endangering our citizens, our allies, and our future, hissing about how democracy is so over, and what we need is a dictator.

On the ground, wherever you are, find someplace to get in the fight. Join your county Democratic party, call all your elected representatives and keep the pressure on them to stand up and oppose, not to cooperate or capitulate. Run for office, any office, even dogcatcher. Start or join an Indivisible group, volunteer for a legal aid group, a shelter, a food bank. Find out how to help protect immigrants in your area. Stay informed and hold up the truth and suffer no one’s lies or bullshit without countering with facts. Connect with those in your community who are already back to the battle. Support good sources of truthful media and cancel your subscriptions for those outlets who lie, minimize, both-sides, and/or capitulate to the head of the snakes. Inform yourself, engage and bring others along with you, and even if we have to do a lot more climbing, or take a longer route, we will find a way forward together.

Wherever you are on your own path, I hope you will stay alert, follow the wisdom of our wise teachers now and those who showed so much courage before us in defending our democracy—and take steps to help ensure that it survives the onslaught of the oligarchalypse. For those already fully engaged, my heartfelt thanks, and I mean it. Please post a comment about your own efforts in the chat. And become a subscriber to sustain this work, or share this blog with your like-minded friends. It might help them on their journey.

This has been Sandi Ault—Reporting from the WILD. You can also listen to my stories on the companion podcast to this blog—wherever podcasts are found.

Find out more about what my production team is doing at OurDemocracyCollective.org, and while you’re there, find the link and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Take care.