From John Pavlovitz’s Blog:
Some days I just want to leave this world.
Living here much longer simply feels like an emotional impossibility lately.
The cruelty is too prevalent, the atrocities too pervasive, the fractures beyond repair.
It is an exercise in diminishing returns each morning, expending the necessary energy required to protect the fragile embers of hope still remaining within me, with so much threatening to snuff it out. It’s difficult to breathe in this atmosphere, as if my chest can’t fully expand and I feel myself slowly suffocating beneath the weight of how not-right it all is and how few people seem to notice.
Every day I do my best to gather my strength, redouble my resolve, and step out into the brokenness and enmity, bleeding heart affixed to my sleeve—but a disorienting spiritual nausea soon grips me as I try and navigate the now wildly-shifting bedrock of what I once believed and the people I thought I knew and the home I imagined I had. No ground feels solid anymore.
To be a deeply feeling person in a time when empathy has become a middle-index, partisan slur doesn’t seem sustainable and neither does staying—and today I just want to leave this world.
This describes pretty exactly how I feel today. He goes on to say that it is his sadness talking, and he still has hope. It’s much harder for me to find hope. But today, I find hope in Bernie’s successes in New Hampshire (I voted for him), Iowa, and Nevada. He certainly didn’t win because he had money to spend. He won despite all the money that bought ads to defeat him. Especially the ads that promote hate and fear on social media. It isn’t just Bernie who is winning. Our Revolution is working to elect progressives in Congress, state and local governments. Maybe the tide has turned. The folks in the dirt, the roots of the grass, are waking up and finding that they are strong.