This is a response to the question posed in the article “What follows indignation fatigue?” I received an email from a friend, Elizabeth, from the USA. I thought it was such an uplifting and eloquent response that with her permission I decided I would publish it as its own post. The article wasn’t any attempt to try to illicit “pats on the back” or “kicks up the arse,” but rather to share the conundrum of wanting to continue to voice my truth without being exhausted by the ongoing indignation that seems required to do so. What Elizabeth has written reminds me to value what we voice and never to undervalue the power of what our own unique contribution to the greater whole can actually be. It’s always nice to feel we are not on our own 🙂 Here’s what she had to say:

By Elizabeth Horstman

Yes, Ewan. Yes, the world does need another blog booming out its slant on outrage, because a worn-out quieted voice is one that has fallen in line with what the powers of evil want it to think and feel and do. Voices of outrage stick together. They form an angry mob. They riot, they rebel, they start revolutions, and they change the world. The more people voice their outrage, the louder that collective voice becomes, until the world starts to take notice. If you allow your discontent to live only inside your mind, you’re part of the problem. Would we have ever ended the slave trade if thousands of voices had just said, “Well, I can’t make a difference with just my own dumb opinion. I’m no one of influence. I’ll just let the more important people handle it?” Would we have stopped the Third Reich? Would we have brought forth accountability for abuse in the Catholic Church?

Yes, those who are fighting DO need also to remember what’s right in this world. That’s how we find balance between our personal selves and our collective selves. We look at our children, so unaware of our adult outrage, and we see that these wonderful beautiful little people deserve a better world, and it’s our job to fight for it. It’s our job to teach them how to fight for it, too, and not to lie down in the road and get run over by the compliance our governments would have instilled in them. Our children still see beauty in this world in ways we can’t anymore, the ways that Tolle and Chopra try to help us see, too. They see us display compassion, and they imitate that. They see us fight the good fight, and they will, too.
But our children are also privileged. They have opportunities billions of children in this world don’t, and it’s our responsibility to ensure they use those opportunities to help their less-fortunate peers as much as they can as they grow, to ensure they voice their collective outrage and change the world. When we quiet down, they will, too, and that is the point when one more blog won’t matter. The world is changed by those who fight through their exhaustion, because the energy of the collective self re-invigorates the fatigue of the individual self.

“Nature is at ease with itself, though we seem not to be. We seem dis-eased.” That is true poetry. That is why your thoughts deserve a voice. Please do not give up. You well know your efforts are not yours alone, but part of a larger collective effort that, at the end of your life, you can feel good about having put forth such a tiring effort to participate in.

God is not in a faraway heaven. God is among us, within us all, within the sun, stars, land and seas. He is our conscience, the inner voice that gives us an outer voice to fight against what’s wrong. The Christian sense of God is merely a personification of a concept of positive flowing energy lesser minds couldn’t otherwise grasp without a face on it that looks like ours. Voices who allow themselves to be stifled are those who have succumbed to the negative energy, what Christians call Satan.

You are correct that you will never win every war, inwardly or outwardly, but transcendence is really the ultimate aim for all of humanity, anyway.