The flood of awful, outrage-inducing, and flat-out insane news lately has made it hard to focus on anything else.
Just in the day prior to my writing this:
- The U.S. Senate confirmed a wildly unqualified Christofascist woman-abusing drunkard to lead the largest and best-funded military in the world
- Trump summarily fired seventeen inspectors-general at the offices of State, Veterans' Affairs, HUD, Interior, Energy, and Defense, effectively removing any capacity for oversight
- ICE raids have begun in earnest, and have included churches, preschools, and schools; among those arrested/harassed have included a military officer who was born in the U.S. but happens to be the wrong color, and, in a height of irony, Native Americans
- The Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C. was called "nasty" by Trump, and has received death threats from his followers (and a threat of deportation by a MAGA congressman) for... of all things... urging mercy, kindness, and empathy toward those who are suffering
- By executive order, Trump removed the $35 cap on medications for people on Medicare and Medicaid, profiting pharmaceuticals companies at the expense of the elderly and poor
- Elon Musk has doubled down on his Nazi salute at the Inauguration by making a series of sick puns about names of prominent Nazi officials, followed by a laugh-till-you-cry emoji
- The GOP has proposed revisions to the budget that include eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, making it harder for working-class people to afford to purchase a house
And those are just the ones that come to mind immediately.
It is unsurprising if we're feeling overwhelmed by all of this. I've had to limit my time reading the news -- given my capacity for spiraling into depression even in normal times, I can't risk letting all this take a sledgehammer to my mental health. And keep in mind that this is what Trump and his cronies want; the nuclear bomb of lunacy that has marked the first two weeks of Trump 2.0 is, at least in part, intended to create a Gish gallop of horrors so demoralizing that the opposition simply gives up.
That is exactly what we cannot afford to do. Instead, let the barrage of bad news stiffen your resolve. There's a line from the song "Turning Away," by the fantastic Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie MacLean, that applies here: "Words cannot extinguish us, however hard they're thrown."
And this brings me to a documentary I watched last week that you all must make sure you see.
It's called Porcelain War, and was the winner in the documentary category at Sundance last year. It's about two brilliant Ukrainian porcelain artists, the husband-and-wife team of Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, whose delicate, whimsical, and stunningly decorated animal sculptures charmed me the first time I saw them, in an online ceramics workshop Anya led that I took about four years ago. I've followed them ever since, and their work never fails to make me smile.
Then came Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the horror show that followed.
Slava and Anya live in Kharkiv, which has been heavily attacked, but have refused to leave. Slava volunteered to train infantry, so he's away from home a lot of the time, and has often found himself in the middle of the battles. In the film, he talks about how much he hates fighting -- and, in fact, hates the guns and other weapons he is training his fellow soldiers to use. ("They're only for one purpose," he says -- "killing other human beings"). But he is unequivocal that defending his home and his fellow Ukrainians is nothing less than an absolute duty. The only other choice is to let Putin win, and that is simply not an option.
But then, when he gets leave to come home -- he and Anya go back to creating sweet, beautiful pieces of art.
The juxtaposition of the atrocities of the invasion with the staggering loveliness of Slava and Anya's delicate porcelain work is both inspiring and heartbreaking. "If the fighting makes us stop creating beautiful things," Slava says, "we've already lost."
So as counterintuitive as it sounds, we need to take inspiration from Slava and Anya, and fight hard against letting despair freeze us into inaction. That's what Trump and his cadre want. And not only do we need to push back against the flood of evil that threatens to engulf us, we need to commit ourselves to continuing to create beauty. As Slava Leontyev points out, the world can still be a beautiful place, if we work to make it so -- despite what is happening around us.
"It's easy to scare people," he says. "But it's hard to forbid them to live... Ukraine is like porcelain. Easy to break, but impossible to destroy."
May we show such resilience, dedication, and spirit in the war we will fight over the next four years.
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