You’re chatting with a jogging buddy at Starbucks or eating lunch at the company cafeteria with a co-worker when he/she points to the omnipresent television screen where Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is announcing that her Save America Stop Socialism fund will donate money to all candidates who run against any congressperson who votes for the Infrastructure and Jobs Investment bill. He/She jumps to his/her feet shouting, “You go girl,” then turns to you, shaking a fist in approval, to tell you in no uncertain terms, “She gets it, she knows about those f—ing elites who worship Satan and traffic children for sex and blood.”

Outlandish scenario? Barf your snack, a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifteen to 20% of Americans believe in that outrageous, stupefyingly moronic core tenet central to the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory movement.

What can you do in response?

You clench your sphincter muscle equally taut when a clip comes on showing thousands of desperate Afghans at the airport in Kabul, throwing themselves at the landing gear of a giant jet already lumbering down the runway, risking death rather than life under the Taliban.

What can you do in response?

You shudder to imagine your two girls, sitting quietly in the back of your sedan, suddenly bleeding on the upholstery, shot dead by two assailants who mistook your nondescript Honda Accord for the car driven by a block leader of the Gangster Disciples.

And what can you do in response?

Do you have any recourse in response to the surge of thirty voting restriction acts now in front of legislatures in eighteen states, or the one third of the populace who are anti-vax and spreading the Delta variant like seeds on a windy day, or the wildfires sweeping across the west burning forests to ash, or the rising seas drowning shorelines on both coasts and around the world?

What can you do in response?

Is it simplistic to answer… do what you can do. We can vote. Donate. March in protest. Trusting that the votes will add up to a majority, the donations totaled to a significant funding source, the marches swelling to multitudes too large to be ignored.

But the most effective response takes place on the Lincolnwood bike path and all the paths in all the cities in all the states where we walk in silent meditation and take in the earth’s chi. We find the answer from the whispering breeze and the sunlight strobing on the upturned leaves of aspens and birches: be the best of who you can be.

When we quiet ourselves and allow it to be felt, we tap into the flow of energy present in all living things, humans, animals, trees and plants as well. It is our planet’s life force. A universal life force that tells us what we can do to filter out the currents of evil that have entered the flow, and return to a purer state of being.

It tells me to do my best to live my life with integrity and ethically; to be the best of who I can be. It asks that I trust you to join me, to trust that our energy will go into the universe and merge with the good vibes from thousands, hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions, creating a flow of good energy that will absorb the evil and return our society to its ideal.

It’s the faith that we take to the polls, believing in the power of our one vote to make a difference in the final tally.

The nation is floundering now, we’ve lost our way as greed and indifference and tribal fear and hardened biases obscured the beacon’s light. The boundaries of red states and blue states became insurmountable walls. And the QAnon ferrets and fundamentalist terrorists and soulless gangs found breeding ground in the shadows.

Regretfully I don’t think we can change them with argument and logic. The task is to resist them at every turn, take responsibility for how we live our own lives, and trust that the universe is Love and Light.