taylors valley

Coming up with the energy to do battle with the forces of evil means that I can't waste my energy, a finite resource, tilting at windmills. Although I am not a religious person, I respect the wisdom found in the basic prayer that alcoholics recite before AA meetings, known as The Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

This prayer, jointly attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr and Winnifred Wygal, became popular in the 1930s. Like many godless heathens in the recovering community, I substitute a belief in a higher power in my mind instead of a deity, but I think folks should do what works for them. My higher power is the collective wisdom of the people I respect. It works for me.

Learning what can and cannot be changed is life's challenge to us all. Some folks believe "you can't fight city hall." Then you have Rosa Parks. Finding out what is possible within our limitations is not easy, but I have learned a few things since I was introduced to this way of thinking. We are all powerless over the past. I wish I'd made all kinds of different choices through the years, but what's done is done. I've learned not waste time wishing my life away on regrettable mistakes.

Another learned skill is when I finally began to differentiate between what I wanted and what I needed. I say that like I'm batting 1.000 in that department, but it is still a work in progress. In 2025, I need to be involved in the struggle against fascism. As an older straight white man, I could easily sit on the sidelines and suffer minimal losses, but I'd have no self-respect and rightfully so. I know that in the current struggle, there will be many defeats, but there will be some victories too. I think it's OK to want to win certain rights back from the right-wing, as long as we can accept that we won't actually get to pick the wins we achieve. This is where courage enters the equation. It's what makes us different from the people we are going up against. They don't have courage. They live in fear; fear that they might get treated the way they've treated minorities, fear that they won't get preferential treatment from employers and the courts. They are not striving for equality. They shudder at the idea. They feel entitled to supremacy.

One of the primary lessons learned in my life was that people have power together. Organized groups of people are what emancipated the enslaved, gained women the right to vote, stopped Jim Crow 1.0, and gave workers in this country what power and rights they have in the workplace. Part of my own received wisdom is to be a part of as many collectives as I have energy for. Isolation and some naive belief in rugged individualism results in the death of a movement. We need each other. We need to give voice to our anger, our fear, our outrage, and our determination. I'm not one to corner an unwilling listener to harangue them on anything, but I am one who will speak in the public square, whenever I find myself in one. People who are too privileged or too lazy to be concerned with what is happening to large swaths of the people in this country might want to police conversations. Good luck with that. I have people I love who are being targeted, a son-in-law who depends on veterans benefits because he was severely injured in combat, a grandson with a debilitating disease, LGBT family members, trans friends and the list goes on.

So, yeah, I need serenity, wisdom, and power and so do you.

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