What They Can't Take Away From Me

When you think all is lost, remember this.

Tunnel on the Camino de Santiago, Spain. Photo by Nancy Rosulek Kramer.

My son Bryan says that we are entering a new world, that the axis of our lives is turning inexorably, that the change arriving now is unstoppable, that our country, our world, our civilization is transforming at such an exponential pace that we have reached an inflection point where things will never go back to the way they were before. We are entering a world we cannot imagine, that I cannot imagine.

What if the horror show we are facing, the constriction, intimidation, and assault on everything we value and hold dear, is the gateway to this brave, new world?

I roll that thought over in my mind again and again. It almost makes me hopeful. But then I return all that is being destroyed. So much at stake, all of it on the table, the chopping block, their sharpened knives gleaming and ready, greed and cruelty etched into the blade. Their goal is to overwhelm, to destroy, to take, to diminish. To suppress and liquidate, to rob, vanquish and destroy.

I recall a Temple Youth group retreat I attended as a 14-year-old, an age where impressions are made that are never forgotten. There were probably twenty of us in the youth group, twenty teenagers on one side of a nondescript basement room. The walls unremarkable, the carpeting thin and industrial, the chairs molded and sturdy. We sat on one side of the room. On the other side were half a dozen tables, each with some kind of construction toy: Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, an Erector Set. Art supplies were spread across a fourth table.

Toys from the olden days

We were put in teams and instructed to move to a table and to create something together in silence. And so, we approached our group’s table. Without words, we began to build together. We discovered how to speak to each other without words, how to share ideas, spark each other’s creativity, and cooperate, making something grander and more glorious than anything we could have made alone. Absorbed in our task, our creations grew. I don’t know how long they gave us, but it was a long time. At the end of the exercise, still in silence, we walked from table to table admiring the results of our cooperation, innovation, collective intelligence. We saw what we had made, and it was good.

Then we gathered back on the other side of the room, and the rabbi guided us in a conversation about what it felt like to create, to build, to work together. I imagine it was as much of a revelation for the others as it was for me. We did not learn these things in elementary school or at Long Branch Junior High School.

After a natural lull in our celebratory conversation, the Rabbi gave us one final instruction: “Now, get up and destroy everything you just built.” There was only a moment’s hesitation, and then we all got up, good instruction followers that we were, and in no more than a minute, everything lay shredded, discarded and broken on the floor. Destruction was exhilarating and thrilling. The power of it. The glory of it. The satisfaction of expressed rage. The permission for maybe the first time in our lives to let out the demons we didn’t even know were there.

Was I horrified afterwards? I don’t remember. But I recall the conversation we were guided to have when the destruction was complete: how much easier it was to destroy than to create.

I haven’t thought of that exercise in more than fifty years, but it seems apt today. The blizzard of documents, the horrifying, empowered stroke of one powerful deranged pen, orchestrated by minions who have waited in darkness for this moment, for permission to come out of the shadows into the glorious sun. They have the power now, each signature designed to destroy, to undo, to hurt, to diminish, to undermine, to dissemble, to confuse, to confound, to overwhelm, to control, to vanquish utterly.

But they can’t take my soul away from me. They can’t take my heart away from me. They can’t take the beauty of the world away from me. They will not scare me into immobility, silence, numb survival. Because the power of the heart, of love, of compassion is immutable; it’s not the strength of greed and destruction, but the strength of mother earth, of stars and moon and women rising as we have risen every time the men who wield their pens and fists and guns and penises and courtrooms and prisons and fires think they can suppress us. They cannot suppress us. They cannot destroy all that we have built and learned, all that is implanted in the earth and in our hearts.

So, take heed, wielder of pens and knives and fists and decrees. You will not have the last word. You cannot take away what we have because you don’t understand it, because you don’t know it. Because it is what you lack, what you crave and need in your quest for dominance, money and power. The underground force of who we are, our resistance will not stop. Will never stop. No matter what you do to us. Your greed cannot undo us. Because we are legion. We are here. We say no.

Schwan Lake Park, Santa Cruz, California, photo by Laura Davis

Now it’s your turn to write. And here’s your prompt:

PROMPT: Tell me about what you refuse to give up. What they can’t take away from you. Make it a rant. Make it fierce. Say it like you mean it with every shred of your being. This is your manifesto.

As always, I invite you to share your thoughts or excerpts from your writing in the comments.

How To Get the Most Out of Writing Prompts:

If you’re new to my Substack, here’s my advice for how to mine the deepest material in your writing:

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