Strike While the Iron is Hot

If you're like me, you've been inundated for weeks, months, with email and blog posts and youtube videos and news about the election. So many calls to action that the weariness is not merely imagined. Now it's done, the phone calls and contributions were made, the votes were cast. Won't it be nice to settle once again, into the usual routine. Yes, I am going on vacation. But only for a week. Because we have to strike while the iron is hot (a suitably protean metaphor, yes?).

In my post-election post, I said I don't trust hope. I don't trust Hope because, like the American Dream, it is an idea, and ideas cut both ways. Hope can motivate action or replace it. Hope can give one courage to confront the dark and terrible, or it can be a naive whistle in the dark. Hope, according to Greek mythology, was in Pandora's box along with all of the evils of the world. Why, I wonder, was Hope locked up with suffering and death? In his presentation at the Bioneers conference, Michael Meade said that there were two kinds of hope- the naive kind that is little better than wishful thinking, and the sober kind that arises when despair is right at your elbow.

I didn't vote for Obama because I thought he would deliver the change that I seek. I voted for Obama because I want a chance to be part of the conversation, because I want the solutions that I support to get a fair hearing, because I know many, many intelligent and dedicated people who could not get a chair at the table under the old regime. Now we have to use the rhetoric of "change" to insist upon our right to participate. The opportunities are endless. It can be as simple as signing up for email alerts from a few groups you know are important and yes, reading them, replying, and carving out a permanent space in your daily routine for civic action, no matter how modest.

Strike while the iron is hot, for in the words of Edward Abbey, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."