Living in the Upside Down

As I type, the world outside my window is quiet. The special kind of quiet that exists only during a snow storm. Little moves but the wind and the snow. Drifting about wherever it is driven, settling for a moment before lifting again. The occasional plow rumbles along as we all wait for the snow to finally cease so the process of digging out can begin.

I love the quiet of snow, but it is deceptive. It feels peaceful and insulated. Snow days are one of modern life’s few opportunities when we feel justified to just BE without an agenda. Snow days give us an “excuse” to not DO all the things on our never ending list. They are nature’s way of pushing humanity’s pause button.

I can think of no moment more necessary for that pause than now. We are living in the upside down. We have been for quite a while, though narrowing down the exact moment when things flipped over is an exercise in futility. Really, it matters more that we are here, hanging upside down yet continuing to live like things are normal, when they very much are NOT normal.

I’ve been hanging from my metaphorical seatbelt for months. The internal debate has gone something like this…”Do I release the buckle? Because falling is going to hurt and I might not be able to get out of the car even if I am no longer hanging upside down. Or do I just keep hanging here, even though a limb is going numb and all the blood is rushing to my head?” Now clearly this is an imperfect metaphor, but I think it is an apt one for many. Humans are built to seek comfort and avoid pain. As our society has devolved recently, it has done so unevenly. For most people, particularly those less melaninated, life has continued as usual. Sure there were signs we had walked into the upside down but only once we were there. It was a bit like that scene in Gene Wilder’s original Willy Wonka movie when he goes into the optical illusion rooms, things felt wrong but looked right. Or felt right but looked wrong. Most of us were not sure what to do, so we did nothing and continued on our way.

Those with foreign sounding names, any skin tone beyond milk toast, for women, they did not have such a luxury. The upside down arrived sooner and upset their normal lives much more dramatically. It is only now, when things have systematically become so glaringly obviously upside down that their reality is finally, slowly, painfully beginning to become the reality for all of us, and still some seek to deny they are hanging by seatbelts because they would rather cling to power, or be adjacent to power, then to exist in actual reality.

This upsidedownness is not about immigration, or abortion, or taxes, or foreign policy or health care or voting or any other political issue. Those issues are important. They need to be addressed. We need viable, long term solutions that benefit everyone who lives in America, not just citizens or whites or men or “Christians” or heterosexuals. This upside down moment is about the protections laid out in the Constitution and the fact that the founding documents of our country are only as as strong as the willingness of the government, its leaders and employees, to follow those rules. Rights and the rule of law are only viable when followed. Civil society only occurs when the people governed, and the government, abide by the same contract. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin etc, could not have imagined our modern world. But they did understand the need for a government founded on protected rights with the flexibility to adapt to the needs of the moment. This upside down moment reveals the absolute fragility of America’s social contract.

I am no scholar of American Government (for someone worth listening to on this topic PLEASE go check out Dr. Heather Cox Richardson – she is legit and her daily Letter from an American greatly helps make sense of this moment in our history). But even with my basic knowledge of our system I can see that in the last week, let alone the last year, our government and those running it have violated at least half of the Bill of Rights (Amendments 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, possibly 9 and definitely 10) and have completely abandoned the will of the people, by the people, for the good of the people.

When the founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they stated:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government… Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Americans of all colors, nationalities, ethnicities and backgrounds have been protesting in the streets for a year now. By some estimates there have been protests and rallies against our government every day since the last Inauguration, small protests and large ones. We do not do this for “light and transient causes”. As the DoI notes, humans are more likely to suffer evils than to abolish what is familiar, precisely because humans are creatures of comfort. It is sadly ironic that on the 250th anniversary of our nation, the list of King George’s violations against the colonies in the Declaration of Independence are eerily identical to the violations of our current leader and Congressional enablers. So if Americans are on the streets protesting, and filling online spaces with calls for change and reform it means we are tired of “a long-train of abuses and usurpations…to reduce [us] to absolute Despotism”. If the government refuses to follow the contract or “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends”, then we the governed are within our right and power to throw off said government and make a new contract. That IDEA provides the foundation for our entire country. This is what the Despots fears most. When the governed are docile, unthinking, and willing to follow Despotism is easy, and in America, profitable.

Years of laxity, of enjoying a stable system that appeared to function with only our perfunctory effort of occasionally voting, created apathy. Our geographic and literal population size create wide chasms in experience. The internet and social media exacerbate and isolate these chasms. So while technology can allow us to bridge the geographic gaps it reinforces the schisms in thought and belief. Our size is both our defense and our obstacle. It protects us to some degree from government overreach, because the government quite literally cannot reach all of us physically at once. However, our physical size is also our greatest obstacle because it allows us to pretend that the problem is “over there” and “not about me”. Our population size results in mental isolation, reinforced by social media. Yet that same social media/internet exposes us, if we choose to see it, to a reality happening physically far from us. We have access to more information. It is harder to keep thing secret. Everyone and anyone can document reality in real time. But we have to choose to believe the evidence before our eyes. Isolated in algorithm silos, this rarely happens, especially for those moving in politically/religiously conservative circles.

Humans gravitate towards those like them – same skin, same language, same beliefs – and ostracize what is unfamiliar or what we do not understand (If you don’t believe me, witness any lunch room in any middle/high school; humans self-segregate. The younger generations are more inclusive, but the urge is still very present). We are adept at creating us/them mentalities to reinforce our own beliefs and sense of belonging. Those tendencies allowed large swaths of our society to be easily manipulated, by leaders inside and outside the government. We didn’t just arrive suddenly in the upside down. Like a live lobster boiling in a pot, the process has been both slow, and willful on the part of our leadership. This entire upside down reality is at least 40+ years in the making. The water took a long time to come up to boiling temperature.

The existential problem with the upside down is that we cannot simply flip back to the right side up. Too many systems and reinforcements have been broken to arrive here. We must, as the Declaration of Independence insisted, “provide new guards for [our] future security.” While I have no grand scheme for how to systematically do this, I do know it will not happen if We the People, do not shake off the apathy and disconnection. It will not happen until we can see beyond us/them to WE. We all want Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

This is not a zero sum game where if someone else gets more you have less (billionaires excluded, that’s a whole other problem). Protecting rights for those who previously had none (racial, gender, sexual orientation) does not functionally take anything away from those who traditionally enjoyed those same rights. Someone else being able to vote, go to school, get a job, have an abortion, own a home, take a loan or be married does not prevent you from also exercising the right to do or not do any of those things according to your own beliefs. Creating social/monetary safety nets costs us each a small amount individually, but guarantees protection should something catastrophic happen in our own lives. You might never need it, but when you do the system is there, precisely because EVERYONE is protecting EVERYONE ELSE. Societal life is not pie. Just because some else is served a piece doesn’t mean they took yours. American’s have long been fed a steady diet of individualism and it is killing us. When we create laws, and fund systems that help the least among us we raise everyone up. America was founded on some pretty lofty ideals and to date we have achieved very few of them. For decades America has preached democracy to the world. It is high time we start implementing it at home.