Cup of Hope #3: Worth Fighting For

Practical Daily Efforts in Bite-Sized Pieces

Cup of Hope #3

I’m lucky to start most days meditating with my wife. While the headlines are roaring through the back alleys of my anxiety, meditation gets me to stop, relax for a moment and try and settle out the chatter of my monkey brain. You don’t have to be spiritual or religious to get something out of this; it’s like yoga.

People think they have to achieve Nirvana in the first 3 minutes of meditating. That’s not how it works. It works by falling into the habit. We listen to a podcast called 10% Better. It’s might be rebranded by now, maybe Happier Meditation. And the help you get could come from anywhere. But they meditate on topics like Acceptance, Gratitude, or Forgiveness. Things we need to affirm in all the hubbub. Find something, do it every day to ground yourself, to hear some Silence, and take it a day at a time. A famous Jewish philosopher said that we should not worry about tomorrow, today’s worries are enough. And Americans tend to live in the future instead of the present. There are many ways forward, if we slow down and focus on what is in front of us.

Luckily, I went to a gathering of concerned citizens called Worth Fighting For. It was at Epworth Methodist Church, 3207 37th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55406 in the Southeast. Put together by volunteers and organized by Michelle Hensley, of 10,000 Things Theater fame, it was very inspiring, very inspiriting. I was looking for some way to connect with like-minded people. They meet the first Monday every month; the next one is March 3rd 2025 at 7:00 p.m. You can get on the mailing list by dropping a line to Michelle Hensley at mhensley@usfamily.net and tell her Dr. Dean sent you.

It worked, because making connections is how we avoid despair.

They are collecting news and ideas of real value, and they recirculate them by email. They started with the news that after the election:“…there was a group Zoom call of 250+ organizations, 140,000 people, sponsored by Indivisible.” In other words, “a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”

Here are four examples of random pieces of heartening news:

-“Know your rights” training for immigrants makes the job of ICE very difficult.

-If 3.5% of the public can be mobilize for a cause, They Win. This is a superb piece of tactical and practical information.

-An employee of the Veterans Administration said “None of us are taking that stupid buyout, in fact we are more determined to stay. The administration is applying the Shock Doctrine to keep us all off-balance.”

-Cafe Accordion Orchestra is doing activist gatherings, as an example of how small groups can make something happen. There is a benefit on Feb. 28th at Celtic Junction, Arts Center, 836 Prior Ave N, St Paul, MN 55104.

The goals of this group “Worth Fighting for” is summarized here:

1-Block: Protecting vulnerable people.

2-Break: Mass Resistance to break the ugly momentum.

3-Bridge: Reaching out to non-participants, those stuck in apathy oof despair, Also to BIPOC, LGBTQ and other groups.

4-Build: Build groups like this.

-Being Public is important.

There is a lot of action going down around town and around the nation. Tracking it daily is impossible for me and many others, but we don’t have to, because Heather Cox Richardson is tracking it every day, and my ADD brain can only listen to about half of what she says anyway. But the Trumpistas are counting on us being off-balance. Ezra Klien of the NY Times has a great podcast out, “Don’t Believe Him.” It talks about Steve Bannon’s idea of “flooding the zone” and “achieving a high muzzle velocity” (Link below). That is, while Trump is blaring two ridiculous things over here, like invading Greenland and Panama, he slides in 6 things over there. The media can only cover a couple things at a time.

Penn & Teller, the Vegas comic magicians, will tell you that’s called “Misdirection.” Teller would hold a razor blade up to his eye, while Penn digs out a card from his back pocket, licks the back and sticks it to his forehead and says “Is This your card? So while Trump talks about turning Gaza into high-value beach front property, like it’s Atlantic City waiting for 4 more bankrupt Trump casinos, Tulsi Gabbard slides through committee, elegantly coifed and curated, and voila! A friend of Putin and Assad is going to start as Director of National Intelligence. What if she goes in there with 6 cyber punks who re-program our junk into a pipeline to the Kremlin?

One of the things that came up in one morning meditation is Acceptance. We have to accept the fact that the day after the election, we woke up in the same country that we went to sleep in. This country has been this way for a long time. If you don’t want to read history books, go back and watch the film “Chinatown.” The rich have been plundering the rest of us since the git-go, but we were told otherwise. It’s just never been so blatant or destructive before. We have to accept that, because the undertow of denial is like barnacles on the hull; it slows us down.

At the same time, remember that laughter is a powerful coping mechanism. If I can only watch one piece of comedy daily, I pick Jimmy Kimmel. He has a million nicknames for the President. There’s a list of 75 you can Google. Here’s 7:

Napoleon Bone-Aspur, Fiberace, Commander-In-Thief, Nostra-dumbass, El Pork-Choppo, MAGA Theresa,Count Flatula. You get the drift. Jimmy’s relentless.

Mockery is helpful dealing with him, but the attack on our government is both astonishing and unsurprising.

Move forward, be balanced, fight back, make jokes, get one thing done every day.

-Ezra Klien: Don’t Believe Him: