“Thank you for all plants and animals, especially elephants and rabbits,” my younger kid said, finishing his grace for dinner. Most of us had already eaten half of our food, but no matter. Saying thank you, showing gratitude, was the important part, whenever it was.
I’ve long worked to practice gratitude, but recently it’s felt more and more like a radical act.
On one side, the people in power want to consume everything they can for their own use, regardless of the amount or who it hurts. They see everything as theirs for the taking, whether it is theirs or not. There is no gratitude or thankfulness, just unrelenting consumption of everything in their path.
They want everyone else to be the same way too. Capitalism feeds and thrives on consumerism and competition, the constant fight to have more, do more, and be more than those around you. It rejects gratitude because gratitude is celebration of what you have instead of striving for more. It wants our kids to grow up and be good little cogs in the machine who don’t consider what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who benefits from it. It wants to exploit them without them complaining or even being aware of it.
On the other side, people are starting to succumb to despair. “We are in the worst possible timeline” is a common sentiment on social media. It’s easy to slip into that attitude. Admittedly, things are bad. Very bad. I won’t deny that fact.
But the idea that this is the worse it can be is wrong. So many groups of people have lived through their own apocalypse, their own dystopias. The genocide of Indigenous people in North America and elsewhere. Chattel slavery for Black people. The AIDS crisis for LBGTQ folks. The Holocaust. As Annalee Flower Horne has said, “Dystopian fiction is what happens when you take what happens to marginalized people and apply it to everyone.” Similarly, Tannarive Due says, “Dystopia has been a reality for many families for generations.” This cannot be the worst timeline when it’s repeating history that has happened already and we failed to learn from it. Saying it is both denigrates what has happened in the past and how much worse it will be for some groups than others.
In addition, despair is paralyzing. It keeps us in statis, from moving forward. It says that what we do doesn’t matter or make a difference. But that paralysis is what the people in power want. They count on it, in fact.
In contrast, gratitude and joy have long been tied to survival and sustainability. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the Honorable Harvest. It’s a tradition in many Indigenous cultures to thank the plants and animals that people are killing and eating. The Honorable Harvest recognizes the inherent value of all natural things. It brings attention to the fact that we are not entitled to consume natural things merely because we have the power to do so. A key aspect of the Honorable Harvest is taking only what is necessary rather than taking as much as you can. This philosophy is far more sustainable in the long run than the endless growth promoted by capitalism.
Gratitude and embracing joy where you can also reminds you of what you’re working to protect and the future you want.
As writer Dan Savage said (or is credited as saying), “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
Similarly, we can see this during the Civil Rights movement. People hosted dinners in their homes that were full of both planning and laughter. Activists like Georgia Gilmore cooked amazing food to feed people and raise money for the cause. Constantly being dour is not an effective activist technique.
For me at least, these moments also give me the energy that I need for long-term activist work. In a beautiful piece about what she learned from her civil rights activist parents and SF writer Octavia Butler, author Tannareve Due talks about the importance of spending some time to escape the horrors so that we have the capacity to fight at other times.
Admittedly, it can be very hard to express gratitude when the world is falling down around us. You don’t have to be grateful for everything, for goodness’ sake. This isn’t a call to toxic positivity.
I find it most helpful to be grateful for very specific things. I keep a gratitude “journal” on my phone. Really, it’s just a page in the Notes app. Keeping it as simple and accessible as possible means that I have it on hand when I think of something to write down. I try to write down at least one thing every day that brought me joy. Usually, it’s something simple, like watching a funny TV show, playing a game with my kids, or looking at the silhouettes of trees in the park against the dusk sky. There are many times my neighbor’s flowers or Christmas lights have kept me mentally afloat.
Keeping this list also helps me keep a look out for things to be grateful for. I actively seek out these moments of beauty to light up my day that I might have passed over otherwise.
In the hardest of times, joy and gratitude are essential, not luxuries. You can’t live on fear and anger. Find what joy there is to be had and hang on to gratitude like the radical practice it is.
The federal government is attempting to erase transgender people. One way they are doing it is requiring trans students to use their assigned gender at birth on forms (like the FAFSA forms) and removing non-binary as an option. Another way is by making the same sorts of changes to issuing passports. But there is something we can do! Just like any change in policy, they have to collect public comments on a rule making. They *must respond* to every comment, so even if the rule gets implemented, more comments will slow the process down. Tell them to allow people to not use the gender they were assigned at birth and keep non-binary as an option. Please make a comment today on both the FAFSA rulemaking and the passport rulemakings.