Vanquishing Evil Clowns: Rising into Courage

This week I answered a frightened social media plea from someone in Irma’s path. “Pray for me!” she begged. I agreed to send prayers, but I also sent her a wish for courage. Courage. We’re used to expecting it from our film heroes. But many of them have super powers or super gadgets or are extraordinary human beings. What about the rest of us as we wish we could squeeze our eyes shut until the scary stuff goes away? The best part about horror movies is they aren’t true; the evil clown isn’t in your closet. But right now, trouble is in your yard as well as mine. Who will save us? Are we the film extras who are destined to die?

The hard answer is we have to save us. We’re already doing it because we have no choice, because deep down we love one another and want to maintain our world. It’s time to set aside the notion that our troubles are someone else’s responsibility. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our present administration it’s that we need to inhale deeply and take charge by ourselves, together. The adult truth is our troubles are only beginning to expand. The super storms, earth disturbances, and fire-hungry droughts scientists predicted have begun. We can keep our eyes closed and say, “No!,” but the Earth doesn’t care what we say. We’re supposed to be the stewards.

Fear and hate are powerful, debilitating enemies. They make us ignore practical solutions that could help. When we concentrate on instant cures that will make it all go away, we miss seeing what we really can do to make our situations—not perfect but better. We miss seeing what we can do to improve—not today, perhaps, but tomorrow. This is not merely about climate, but also diet and exercise and tolerance of differences between human beings and how they live their lives. If we wait until the tsunami strikes or the arteries burst or people are killing one another in the street, it’s too late. All we can do is cling to the strongest float we can reach and hope we survive.

One poster I read accused the white supremacists of being very high school. Immature people think blaming makes problems go away. Even genocides around the globe only made the world a lesser, darker place. It’s time for us all to grow up emotionally. We need to take a hard look at what we treasure as civilization, what we treasure as beautiful Earth, and then look at ourselves to see what we can do right now, personally, to make it work.

Courage is the stuff of maturity. It’s the stuff of people who believe in love, who believe life and people can survive. Sometimes it’s the stuff of sacrifice. And sometimes it’s the quiet voice in the storm, saying, “It’ll be okay. We’re going to be okay. Just don’t give up.”