getting in the game
Lately, to cope with the stress (and now devastation) of the election, my husband and I have been self-medicating by rewatching Ted Lasso. One of the episodes in season 2, “Rainbow,” contains a scene I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
At this point in the show, Roy Kent, fresh off his retirement from professional football, is begrudgingly working as a TV sports commentator. Before a game, one of his fellow panelists asks what he expects to see from the players today. He rolls his eyes and says he doesn’t know.
“All we do is sit around here and guess what a bunch of little pricks are gonna go and do out there,” Roy says. “Then we come back at half time and we complain because they didn’t do exactly what we thought they’d do.”
“We don’t know,” he continues with a smile, like he’s explaining to children. “Of course we don’t know. We’re not in the locker rooms with them, we’re not on the pitch with them, we can’t look them in the eyes and encourage them to be better than they ever thought they were capable of being. We’re just on the outside, looking in.”
Then he leaves the studio in the middle of the broadcast, runs to the football stadium like a leading man running to get the girl before she’s gone forever, and takes on his new role as coach. He doesn’t want to be on the outside looking in anymore—he wants to be on the pitch with his old teammates, making shit happen.
—
On Monday, Adam Conover shared a YouTube video explaining why he wasn’t worried about the election. Why? “Because worry is a useless fucking emotion that does nothing but paralyze and control us.”
He argued that we’re glued to the political news machine for the same reason sports fans are glued to their TVs during close games: Worry is what we feel when we fear an outcome over which we have no control. It’s an emotion of powerlessness.
But while the crowd frets, the players aren’t wasting their energy on worry. They’re down on the field, giving everything they have to change the outcome. Conover’s overall argument was that we need to stop thinking like spectators and get in the game. This means more than just voting: It means taking direct action, getting involved in our communities, organizing, helping, doing.
In Conover’s case, he got involved in a neighborhood homeless coalition and volunteered his time to help get more than 100 people into permanent housing. Then he supported one of the coalition’s founder’s bids for Los Angeles City Council, which she won. Since then, homelessness in his district has decreased.
“We didn’t just wait for a candidate so solve our problems,” Conover said. “We showed up and put direct action into solving them ourselves—and we made fucking progress. And I cannot begin to tell you how powerful it feels to do that.”
—
It’s easy to feel hopeless in times like this, to capitulate to despair and give up on the future. It is much harder to imagine a better world and work for it. But it is necessary.
Today, I am throwing most of my mental energy into rejecting despair’s tempting advances. As Andreas Malm writes in How To Blow Up a Pipeline, giving into despair amounts to saying, “I can make no difference because I am unwilling to make a difference.”
I am researching opportunities to make small but meaningful changes in my community, changes that have the power to build on each other and slowly reshape the world around us. We may not see the changes we’re pursuing in our lifetime, but we owe it to each other to plant the seeds.
I am reminding myself every minute that even though I can’t stop Donald Trump from catastrophically altering the conditions my loved ones and I must endure for the rest of our lives, I am not helpless. I can find a local scrimmage, put a jersey on, and get in the fucking game.
And you can too.
—
We all have to start somewhere, so I’m starting with lists: issues I care about, specific ways those issues take shape in my community, and existing organizations that are doing the work to address them.
The climate crisis is my ride or die, my main anxiety squeeze, my one true dread. In Denver, people are addressing it by advocating for less car-centric infrastructure, better urban development, building political power, etc. These are some of the organizations where I’m going to try to lend my time and energy:
I am also worried about my neighbors who are unhoused, new immigrants, or generally struggling to get by in this Reaganfucked hellscape we were born into. Some organizations I’ll look to support in this area are:
Help me build this list. If there’s an organization you recommend—either national or local to your community, please tell me about it. I’ll compile any responses into a resource to share in a future email.
Let’s be teammates. Let’s get in the game. Let’s fucking go.
