Wisdom Snippet #3

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
— Audre Lorde

Gutter Philosophy

81 years ago some bloody cowards found an ounce of courage to declare unconditional surrender and thus ended a nightmarish war and sealed the end of a tyranny built on fear.
Now you might ask how a “Kommandeur der Wehrmacht” could possibly be a coward. But in an analogy to today, all high-ranking officials surrender to a tyrant when he can establish an environment built on fear. Nobody wants a Coke bottle jocked at the head, nobody wants to rot in a Gulag, nobody wants to “fall” from a balcony.
I have the feeling that most people actually like to live in fear. It’s so cozy within a cage, so consoling to just tag along, and so uplifting to belittle the Other, the outsiders. Living in a way that you can always answer the unspoken fearful question — “What will the neighbors think?” — with absolute conviction: “Only the best of me.”
It’s easier to follow orders, stay in line, accept authority, roll with the flow.
But there’s an alternative to fear — finding power means resisting the grind.
Yesterday, Tennessee legislators and other brave folks found the courage to resist a totalitarian AND at the same time racist approach to silence their voices and gut their representation. These folks need full support. Because resisting fear — whether in a Berlin suburb in 1945 or a Nashville chamber in 2026 — always becomes the same urgency. Only the uniforms change.
Nobody wants to imagine a scenario in which a certain Secretary of War fuels his courage with a bottle of Vodka to sign a Dogovor o bezogovo-rochnoy kapitulyatsii — overlooking the rubble of his moral decay.