We Love People!

I had the grand pleasure last night of seeing Josh Kornbluth’s show “What Is to Be Done?” If you live in the Bay Area, get thee to the Marsh in Berkeley and check it out! I went to many of Josh’s solo monologue shows in the 90’s and aughts—Red Diaper Baby, The Mathematics of Change, Haiku Tunnel (made into a movie) and others and always found them with the perfect combination of funny, engaging, humanistically heartfelt and often profound. It has been a long time since he’s performed like this, but the wait was well worth it.

 

The essence of the show was a back and forth between his personal depression and his dedicated resistance to fascism. I’m not talking about being “depressed” by the news, but true clinical depression, the kind when you lie in bed for five months and never leave the house, feeling empty inside and unable to contact any vestiges of emotion or even enough ambition to stand up and take a shower. Which is exactly what happened to him. Far beyond —thankfully—anything I’ve ever experienced and an important insight into what many people go through. 

 

But a few months ago, it lifted as suddenly as it came and this show was the result. He spoke to the audience’s mutual concerns about the shitstorm of fascism raining down on our heads, now taken into new territory with the canceling of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. Out in the lobby, he had free sewn patches made by his wife with witty and serious little protest statements— one was “Trump is the worst president since Trump!”

But this second Trump is actually far worse than the first. In the first Era/ Error, I consoled myself that he was not Hitler, who the moment he came to power shut down free speech, took over the courts and eliminated term limits. 

None of which happened back then. But now… these canceling of shows for people who speak the truth as they see it, the joke of the courts convicting the Orange Man with 42 counts of felonies with no consequence, the Supreme Court granting immunity and in his pocket and his threats to eliminate future elections. This is some serious shit! Pay attention, people!

 

In one of his first acts that helped him come out of depression, Josh went to a protest in Berkeley and was inspired by people marching together and chanting something he had never heard before: “We love people! We love people!” And it struck him that indeed this was a major difference between the people gathering and the people they were protesting against. The latter wakes up in the morning like Uriah Heep, rubbing their hands together and chortling, “Who can we hurt today?!” And then feeling great glee in their successes in making people suffer. They hate people because they hate themselves, because they try to avoid the inevitable pain of simply being a human being by masking it with hate and projecting it outward to other people they’ve been brainwashed to hate for being different. I’m talking both about the people in power and the people who vote for them and stand behind them or support them with their big money. 

 

And let me be clear. The “we love people” group hates their behavior, hates the choices they’re making, but is open to loving the people these people could be, but instead banish some hidden, scared-child, hurt-human part of themselves and lock them in the dungeon of their iron-barred hearts. So no contradiction to chanting “We love people” while appearing to hate the people out to hurt others. Not easy to separate behavior from people, but at the heart of the matter, that is what needs to be done. 

 

Josh then told a hilarious tidbit, how someone at the protest took him aside and gently told him, “You’re chanting it wrong. They’re saying ‘We the people!’” — as in the opening line of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence…” Josh was fine with the second version, but actually liked the first a bit more. And so do I.

 

As the show waffled between hope and despair, there was a profound moment when Josh was talking to a fellow protestor and not knowing where the voice came from, but knowing it felt like truth, blurted out, “We’re going to win.” The audience was hushed in the powerful grip of that prophecy. And then he went on to cite someone who had done some research and discovered that whenever fascism sought to overpower democracy, there was significant evidence that if a mere 3.5% of the people resisted and refused it, it went away. So I did the math and counting infants and children in the population figure of 340 million, that means some 12 million people need to stand up and speak out. 

 

On June 14^th, an estimated 5 million turned out for the No Kings Rally across the United States, in both blue states and red. The next No Kings Rally is scheduled for this October 18^th. If we can double that figure (plus a little bit more), this could be the tipping point. So my friends, cancel all your plans for that day, spread the word and let’s take to the streets and turn this around. And while you’re marching, why not chant “We Love People! We” Love People!”