This bonus episode features a short reading from my Thinking Out Loud section of my newsletter.
Is empathy a strength or a weakness? How do we respond to forces that hide behind masks and seek to coerce, intimidate, and terrorize? In the midst of the chaos, how do we make sense of living in a warming world?
There are lessons we can learn from the citizens of Minneapolis as they resist the masked men and their grasp at power, and from their efforts to maintain an unjust world, exemplifying the power of community, compassion, and empathy. These are the qualities that will lead us into a thriving future.
They thought we would retreat, dissolve in despair and disillusion.
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Who are they?
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They are men mostly.
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Hiding behind masks, masked in the streets.
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Faces covered, meant to intimidate and isolate, masked in the boardrooms, faces hiding behind titles, assumptions of power, corrupt mendacity and ill gotten wealth.
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It is all violence, physical brutality, psychological terror, torturing the truth.
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A world collapsing into delusion, demagoguery and division may not offer much hope for confronting climate change.
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That's understandable.
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When an American city is under siege, citizens are brutalized, neighborhoods are terrorized, and citizens are gunned down in the streets, we can lose sight of how it is all connected to the planet and each other.
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In a world driven by fear, avarice and conquest, tech bros led by the likes of US Vice President J.D.
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vance claim that empathy is a weakness.
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Their jutting grasp at strength reveals their frailty.
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Without empathy, we hollow out our souls just as we hollow out the earth, digging deeper until there is nothing left but ruins.
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That is the path we can choose, and many already have.
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But not everyone, or even most.
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The citizens of Minneapolis, Minnesota have shown us the strength of empathy and compassion.
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Instead of retreating into fear, a community comes together to peacefully resist the violence wrought by an absence of empathy, clear thinking and compassion.
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In the end, peace is the answer to climate change, human thriving, and how we learn to live together without destroying everything.
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When we become peacemakers, anything is possible.
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There can be no stable, livable climate without peace, and there can be no peace without a stable, livable climate.
