By Amanda Moreno

Two things have become pressingly clear to me this week. The first is that I’m more committed now to the idea that love is the only thing that will save us. The second is that we have to stop fucking around, compromising our beliefs, living in denial, and pretending like what we as a society are doing to staunch the flow of our collective misdeeds is enough.

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

I say that, and yet I know at the same time that so many of us aren’t fucking around. We are doing what we can to contribute. But what if it’s not enough? When do we have to stop making excuses for the ways we conspire to keep a broken system running?

I’m starting to feel like I — we all — need to start making bigger sacrifices. Perhaps it’s not OK to hop on a plane for a beach vacation in Mexico. Those avocados I love to eat so frequently? Definitely not locally or sustainably grown, and probably not appropriate for me to be eating.

But is that level of militancy helpful? Is it militant to say that it is never acceptable to waste fossil fuels at this point or is it just realism? What if we all agreed to just stop using gasoline in any way? What if we all agreed not to pick up a weapon? Are there social codes that can span cultures? Doesn’t enforcement require militancy?

I go down that rabbit hole of questions and it all just seems pointless. Give up. Start over. Ignore. Carry on. Fly away.

There are just so many issues to tackle and difficult decisions to make. I’m pretty sure we have to stop ignoring things, even when the feeling of being overwhelmed is too intense. Maybe we can’t address genocide in Syria directly. But we can address climate change, which plays a large part in driving genocide.

Then those echoes rise up: It’s too hard! Too uncomfortable! Why do I have to make these changes if not everyone else does?

I once had a lover who said that any time he was with his dog at the park and saw someone fail to pick up their dog shit, he wouldn’t pick his up either. If they didn’t, why should he?

Needless to say, it was a short-lived affair — but what a common mindset! It is our right, after all, to get on a plane. To tune out to television. To buy a new phone well before the existing one has worn out. If only we were cultivating an educational system steeped in imagination and logic, so that we could come up with clean energy sources that would allow us to maintain the little gadgets we love and the quality of life we feel so entitled to now.

Perhaps we do need leaders to enforce and take responsibility and hold all of us accountable. I kind of despise that model, however. As it stands, we have leaders who seem to have no backbone. It’s more than that, though. We have a population who by and large treats elections like a football game, and once their side wins, they tune out.

We have a political system that requires an educated public to participate and advise elected officials as to what steps to take. Instead, we elect and then ignore, expecting the leader to make the best decision, ignoring the fact that that “best decision” typically involves corporate interests. It’s a maddening system devoid of personal responsibility and accountability at all levels.

Wealthy nations want poor nations to take out loans to finance their ability to be like us. Which is really just gross at this point, not to mention problematic and unrealistic and also quite predatory.

The current mess with student loans is emblematic of this problem. I got a notice last week that my renewal paperwork had been processed for my student loans. The amount I owe per month has more than doubled, and yet my income has gone up by maybe 2%.

For an income-based repayment plan, this seems a bit ridiculous to me, but alas, I have to take responsibility for the fact that I took out the loans — and I do! I’m also aware that the system cannot hold. Or perhaps they’ll just start locking up the thousands of us who paid entirely too much fake money for an education.

It’s overwhelming. It seems impossible to fix. I am drawn time and again to the truth that rings deep within my soul: we have got to figure out how to bring spirituality back into our society. We have to heal the fragmentation wrought by thousands of years of wounding at the hands of religion. We have to tap back into the fact that we live in an inherently connected universe so that our hearts can guide us, hopefully helping us to make the decision, one by one, to choose love.

I came across this piece by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes the other day. I found that it helped to ease the tension of the paradoxes I was grappling with. And I remembered: we don’t have to shoulder the entire weight of the world, but rather claim whatever part of it is within our reach and make the intention to heal it in some concrete way. If each of us will do that, in whatever way has heart and meaning, perhaps we can span the globe.