I get it. It’s easy to want to give up. Just sit here stuck, like Pooh stuck in Rabit’s hole. Head out facing the world, big ass stuck inside. Oh bother. I can watch old TV shows and listen to old music and swim in the comfort of the warm seas of nostalgia or forge ahead into the cold, fraught water of the unknown world ahead.

Thing is, our head end is out in the world, like it or not. We can try and wriggle our way back into the hole where there might be more “hunny,” but the future’s coming, and there will be some difficult days ahead, whether it’s work to avoid ecological collapse, or work to rebuild a more ecologically sustainable world afterward.

A few years ago I wrote a song, Rolling Past Cape Girardeau about traveling through a divided America. Cape Girardeau is located pretty close (at least visually to my eyes) in the geographic center of the continental US. In the chorus I sing:

You’re my sadness and my hope
Rolling past Cape Girardeau
Traveling America
Feeling what divides us

At the end I sing:

Tell me about a dream that binds us
Instead of this broken promise

Go vote. Get unstuck. Participate. It’s what we do in a democracy. We make our voices heard. minimal participation is voting. In the last mid-term elections half of us did not vote. We sat stuck in the hole, watching the future roll on by. What if everyone voted for a candidate that represented the future they want to wriggle out of that hole and join. I don’t know what it’d be. Maybe I wouldn’t even like it, but at least then it’d be the actual future we chose as a collective, not one that was chosen for us by some of us.

Okay, everyone…Heave!