We’re All in this Together

The neighbor with Trump flag. The neighbor with the rainbow flag. The neighbor who’s here illegally (because “illegal” is not a noun). We’re all on the same Spaceship Earth. The idea that we could “get rid of” the opposite political identity or ship our problems outside of our borders is just laughable. You can’t kill an idea and the natural world doesn’t care about borders. Whether we like it or not, we either work together or we fail alone.

If we hunker down into tribes, if we isolate our nations, if we offshore our exploitation and pollution—we will fail. Our societies will crumble and our planet will die. The greedy rich who are responsible for most of it already know all of this. That’s why they’re building bunkers and megayachts and coming up with “neo-reactionary dark enlightenment” ideas to try to survive. Again, it’s all laughably stupid. Who do they think will grow their food or fix their machines or manufacture the parts?

In the process of closing the iron grip of tyranny, they only cause the people to rebel all the more. Just look at what Republican constituents are yelling at their own representatives over Trump’s hateful and illegal actions against immigrants. There was a similar response to the misconduct of DOGE. The problem, though, is that too many of us on the ground are ready to tear each other’s throats out over all of it.

I get it, I’ve had my share of hate towards the evil that maga produces. But I also recognize that most of these people are operating based on lies. They’ve been lied to and so have we. How many Democrats have bought into our leadership’s false promises and weak concessions for decades? It’s always the same excuses for inaction. We have the solutions; it’s not that they don’t know what to do. They just don’t want to. They’d rather keep the status quo and keep making money, regardless of the fact that our people are suffering, our prisons are full, and our planet is on fire.

There are liars and hypocrites and snakes; people hungry for power and predators looking for easy prey. We can and should call them out for what they are, but we need to stop acting like anyone outside our personal tribe is automatically one of them. I, myself, have had little but disregard for those who have voted for Trump and now complain “this isn’t what I voted for,” because yes it is. We told you what he was, he told you, his first admin told you, and they even wrote their plan down with Project 2025. You called us liars.

But that’s still an assumption. I had a friend at church who is a very intelligent, kind, mostly discerning person, but she doesn’t follow the news. She’s got a lot going on in her own life and whether she should or not, the fact is that she doesn’t. So when I told her about the Christian Nationalists, she was shocked. She’d never heard of them. I was blown away because I thought it was a common fact that we now had a Christian Nationalist leading the Senate and Nationalist ideology guiding the Republican party. She’d just been living under a rock.

I think it’s important to be educated on the happenings and issues of our nation and world, but if I were to treat her as a liar and a fool and a snake, would that help anyone or anything? She was just uninformed. Much the same can be said for those immersed in Fox propaganda. They are worse than uninformed, they’re misinformed with disinformation. Misinformation is an honest mistake, disinformation is on purpose, to push an agenda.

We need to separate the victims from the perpetrators. We also need to look at things from other’s perspective. That doesn’t mean cater to hate and bigotry, but we can still focus on real solutions. Look at immigration; it is a problem and it’s going to get worse. Not because of an “invasion” of criminals like Fox screeches about, but because climate collapse is fueling conflict and destroying their land. Experts have estimated that by the time we hit 3C warming (which we’re on track to hit by the end of the century), some 2 billion people will have to migrate or die.

Does that mean we should lock down the borders? For one, that doesn’t work, but for two, we need them. The tariffs issue has proven how interconnected and interdependent our global economy is. Nations around the world rely upon one another for food, resources, components, and labor. The answer then, is not to fight them, but to help them. We should be introducing Zai farming techniques and exporting expertise and engineering to help the global south adapt and overcome. That way they won’t need to migrate in the first place. Not only that, but their security helps our security (yes, we also need to stop exploiting the hell out of them). Of course, we need to stop letting the greed of the rich destroy our planet, but the sorry truth is that we are well past the point where we can ever truly stop climate collapse. We can only mitigate and adapt.

No war but the class war. If we let the power-hungry rich divide us, then we will fail. Our planet will die and our children will have no future. I know we can do better. I know that human ingenuity and determination can persevere, but only together. We simply don’t have time to fight each other. We need to put aside our old hang-ups and be willing to shake hands with anyone who is actually willing to work towards something better. This is all hands on deck and we only have once chance to get this right.

Buy me a coffee.