Contributor: What’s Really Happening at No Kings Protests Across the Country

As I travel to write or talk about the faith, the people in my audience are full of torment and confusion, anger and revenge and vengeance. Or anyway, I am.

Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend: “But I am very weak and very stupid today and hate everybody and everything.” This might be my favorite quote of all time. And nothing makes me feel this more than the current state of airplane travel. Yet when I reach a point and have a sad, fearful audience, I dive deep to share what I’m positive works to restore hope, no matter what, and that helps me.

What could these things be? Love, compassion, laughter and non-king protests are big ticket items for me. They put me back together briefly, overcome with defeat and despair.

When I mention these words to the audience, I also break my forehead in my heart, because I forgot again.

Let’s start with love. And please, really? Love like a vampire? No, no, love like your best friend who picks you up for a run to a goal when you call her channeling a Darwin quote. Love like “We Are the World” and the Berrigan Brothers, Dolly Parton, Vivian Gravy.

I recently spoke in a theater in North Carolina, where all day I heard bits of news from DC that convinced me the Confederacy was growing. That night I was on stage with the great theologian Kate Bowler, who happens to be very funny. One of her books is called, “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I Love to Tell Myself,” and yet everything we talked about—the political scene, fearful childhoods, life’s inevitable disasters—was ultimately answered by good old love.

compassion My husband defines it as the love that arises from suffering, and one often feels it naturally, certainly more often, for someone who votes like you. But 75 million didn’t happen in November, and now people like me, who were born harder than the average bear, fear for the young in our families, for the Constitution, for our Earth, for the world’s poor, and of course for ourselves. And my heart stopped.

I look at people’s sometimes disappointed faces, and hear the desperation in their questions. I wish I knew something that would work like magic hair. Sometime around 2018, my pastor shared a line from Martin Luther King Jr.: He said that in times of evil and violence, don’t let us hate them. Then we are truly doomed – hatred means we lose ourselves, and our greatest strength, our goodness.

This line crosses my wall of anger. I’m starting to realize how I have the seeds of everything scary that some politicians show, but it looks like they’re on steroids, while being relatively mild compared to me, a young Sandy Lou with PMS. I am also capable of wisdom, foolishness and (God knows) judgment. Also, I know that some of them were raised in harsh conditions by drunkards, abusers and fundamentalists, so I feel sorry for them.

Thinking along these lines has softened my stone-cold heart for a long time, and it’s a precursor to hope. I haven’t felt that way very often lately.

I see through the fog most mornings due to the Bay Area ocean layer. I might walk across a band of brown herrings, and beyond that the thin strip of a lagoon, behind which a little hill rises, and then above it all the gray is drawn like a wet curtain. I am separated from the sun.

The way things feel these days, my thoughts are clearly distinguishing lies from lies, but unable to see the way. The fear and pain that I feel every day about what is happening in this country, and what really exists here, makes me feel isolated and isolated. On bad days, I can’t even remember the great spiritual truth that binds us together. We are in this together.

And that brings me to the nine kings marches, which is another one Next Saturday, everywhere in America. People who didn’t vote like I did last November say it’s a hateful march of old die-hard hippies and anarchists, but in reality it’s going to be friendly and happy, diverse and full of the nation’s core believers of everyday people, even if it loses its way.

I would pretty much suggest that a million of those 75 million voters will be with us this time.

They have no more clue than the rest of us about correcting recent mistakes because of all this shit. But those who do show up will see peace, solidarity, care and lighthearted laughter in the signs and light clothes at these protests.

Love, compassion, peaceful gatherings. I spoke at Gettysburg a few weeks ago during a truly awful day in America. Before walking and driving through the battlefield, realizing America’s most enduring tragedy, the ownership of mankind, I wondered what on earth I could say after that might bring hope to people. And then we went to the statue of Jennie Wade, the only civilian killed at Gettysburg. She was attacked by a stray bullet while cooking for her sister, who had just had a baby. And I realized that I could preach it: the arbitrary hardness of loss, the sweetness of small human things – a child, a sister, bread.

Most of what we are left with in this dark time is each other. One of us might remind others to look around for proper lighting as a basic practice. It changes us. In my front yard, even in the mist of autumn, I see the vigor of the trees in full leaf, and with a few lemon-like rays of sunlight, I can breathe freely.

Ann Lamott, author of fiction and nonfiction, lives in Marin County. Her latest book is “Something: Thoughts on Love.” X: @annelamott