What's Weak This Week?
When I was living in Seattle in the early 1990s my friends and I used to watch some late-night local show, the name of which, for the life of me, I cannot remember. At some point during the show, some of the fellas from Soundgarden and Pearl Jam would appear on the screen, all lined up with their long hair and flannel shirts, and in unison, say (err…yell), “What’s weak this weak?” And then we’d hear a list of lame things happening in the area and world. For years now, that question has been popping into my head regularly: What’s weak this week?
I do believe that 2025 will be a year for us to ask “What’s weak this week?”, all the time, and here are some responses to get the ball rolling.
(t)Rump’s fanciful showboaty signing of numerous Executive Orders on day one (and then throwing pens out to his sycophants)
Attempting to end birthright citizenship (my word…)
ICE raids focusing on Latinx people in major (Blue) cities
The White House website - have you seen it? (I have no words…)
The menacing portraits of (t)Rump and Lady (t)Rump on the website. Are they headshots or recruitment images for the Camorra? (Or do they fancy themselves as Boris and Natasha?)
Meta forcing all of us to follow POTUS and VP on Instagram (I had to block them because they kept on popping into my feed. Same was true on Facebook)
Ending funding for Cancer Research and the NIH
Cutting off funding to emergency services, among other federal organizations
“Cancelling” DEI (smdh)
Firing the security details for people who received death threats from his MAGAtts.
Inviting the death of the planet (and thus humans) by pulling out of the Paris Agreement and pushing the growth of fossil fuel
Releasing violent criminals (January 6th insurrectionists) many of whom went on to vow retribution to the people who locked them up
Oh, and along those lines, DJ Jr tweeted that exact sentiment, showing us that Fascism is real
Musk the Nazi
I guess this is our new normal. So, how should we deal with the daily barrage of what’s weak this week? I needed some re-grounding for my work (to live deeply into my vow), so I turned to an old favorite: Dr Betty Reardon’s 7 R’s for peace-making capacity (found in her book “Comprehensive Peace Education” originally published in 1985).
I’m inviting myself, my students, and any of you to engage with these practices:
Reflection - such as listening for understanding and/or sitting with your thoughts/learnings/feelings to do deep processing
Responsibility - taking responsibility for things (from the personal to interpersonal to communal) and responsibility to things and people and planet (who/what should we be protecting and supporting)
Risk - actively getting involved in efforts to make change
Reconciliation - which could involve personal healing as well as finding ways to address harms done
Recovery - returning to wholeness and finding/replacing what has been lost (such as Indigenous ways of knowing), or living into an ethic of love and care
Reconstruction - envisioning the world we want to live in, imagining how we will get there, and then living into the actions (or modeling them) to build the community we believe in
Reverence - living in awe, wonder, and deep respect for not only our own existence but for all life
