“If you are feeling despair, you might be suffering from individualism.”
— from Dr. Sarah Ray on “How to Age Up on a Warming Planet.” (from Atlantic Magazine podcast How to Age Up)
There is a story Americans tell ourselves: that we are each on our own. That self-reliance is the greatest virtue and what cannot be gotten through one’s own effort, strength and perseverance is not worth having. That there is nobility in silent, solitary struggle. Cowboys and Indians. Manifest Destiny. Pioneers across the prairie to the Pacific and then… ride rockets into space.
Rugged individualism.
This story tell us we are all in competition with one another for jobs, money, houses, energy, political power, recognition, dignity. A sickness that says the strongest, quickest, most cunning get the goods and everyone else is evolutionary dross and dead ends.
This is the tired myth we have been rehearsing for the past 40 years: some of us are heroes, the rest of us are victims. And so, we have taught ourselves to wait for some hero to arrive. Some Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr to lead the way. But Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr didn’t fall to earth like Superman. They didn’t wash ashore in a basket like baby Moses. They didn’t make the people possible. The people made them possible with their stories, their aspirations, their hopes. The people created the conditions for heroic acts by working in groups, lifting each other up with encouragement and imagination for the better days that could be ahead. What the better future looks like. What the better future feels like. What it will bring. What it will be.
No super-strong someone is coming to save us. We won’t have heroes. All we have is ourselves. We can be enough.
Inspired by:
Ubiquitous. Quotidian. 