Personal Acts of Conscience

Choices we can make when rage and apathy threaten to take over.

There’s a strange cocktail of rage and apathy going around in some people I’ve been talking to lately. I notice it even in myself. When I see the news coverage about Trump rescinding environmental rules governing emissions, for instance (in the same week that we’re watching the Amazon burn down), I feel furious — but I also feel powerless to change it.

You can site any number issues and that’s the template: rage and apathy. The detention centers at our Southern border. Climate change. Election tampering by the Russians. Racism. Sexism. It never ends.

And that’s the point. It’s never going to end. There will always be something horrendous out there to shock and paralyze the populace. Which, if we play our cards right, brings us right to the control room at the center of the universe. Us. Me. Today.

When you start spinning out about the latest breaking news, no matter which political party it’s about, stop for just a second.

I mean it.

Stop and feel your feet. Are you sitting? Standing? Driving? What’s the quality of feeling going on right now in your body — just physically. Do you feel a sinking in the chest, or fire rising up in the arms? What exactly, if you had…