This is exactly who we are.

“This is not who we are,” feigned every white politician and pundit speaking about Wednesday’s armed invasion of the USA Capitol. “I don’t understand how this happened.”

It’s glaringly dishonest to deny our connections to the current state of our country, or pretend we don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. We all get trained up through the same education system and fed by the same media. We’re all gears in the same predatory capitalist economy, explicitly created and maintained through oppressive race and class hierarchies. We’re all propagandized by the same political parties, which are the left wing and the right wing of the same bird.

When we deny our connections and renounce our understanding, we aggravate our complicity. We fail to act, or act in meaningless or ineffective ways. Some of us even go beyond inaction to willful disregard, ignoring politics and current events when “they don’t really concern me”.

The lies repeated by all those people on television and spread throughout social media —they actively hinder our capacity to effect change. They conceal from us the changes we can and must make within ourselves. Those changes are essential, because they separate us from the training and the propaganda and the automated machine of our culture. They give us the foundation for all the other work of creating a more just society.

Acknowledge that this is who we are. Then start working on who you want to be.