Some Thoughts On Our Responses To Those In Positions of Power Today

Many ask how people can be capable of causing such great harm to other human beings, to nonhumans, and to the planet. And certainly I have reflected on that over many years now. And over time, this is what I've come to realize...

When we’re deeply wounded human beings who’ve never owned and healed the ancestral and cultural pain and trauma that any of us can carry, when we have been immersed in racism and misogyny and Christian nationalism, when we have absorbed American exceptionalism and have no depth of awareness of the true history of our nation, when we are indoctrinated into the poisonous propaganda of us versus an Other, when we are deeply instinct injured and disconnected from the wisdom of our hearts, when we are compromised and impaired in discerning fact from fiction, when we fear and resist truth and change and inquiry into our beliefs and perceptions, when we are surrounded by narcissistic sociopaths who are mirrors of our own injuries and unaddressed trauma, when we have become addicted to greed and power and control as a way to cope with the pain and trauma we deny, when we have buried our shame and self loathing and are therefore compelled to project it onto others, when we are severed from our capacity for empathy and compassion, when our perfectionism and image management have come to replace authenticity, when we are habituated to the normalization of dehumanization, and when we have been deeply indoctrinated into cultural systems rooted in imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy — all this and more results in human beings who’ve lost touch with their humanity.

In positions of great power, these are the ones who are incredibly dangerous, are at high risk of causing profound harm to others, and are blinded in their hearts and souls as to the devastating and pervasive suffering, destruction, and deaths that they are causing and responsible for.

Narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, and others who cause this kind of great harm don't just fall from the sky. They were not born that way. They are mirrors of our deeply unhealthy culture and often generations of unaddressed trauma experienced either as victims or as perpetrators or both. They are lost to who they truly are and therefore unable to truly see anyone else. And this loss of connection with the sacredness of life is the grounds upon which empathy dies and dehumanization grows rampant.

It is my belief that one of the great tasks for us in these times — and especially for those among us who have not experienced, or are healing from and transforming, this depth of disconnection from ourselves and each other and life on Earth — is to assume responsibility for doing what we can to not return hatred with hatred, dehumanization with more dehumanization, rage with more rage, violence with more violence in all of its myriad forms. This is the time to own our outrage, fear, heartbreak, and horror —and channel it into how it is that we embody what we and our world need to heal.

Bless us all in these dark times...

Molly