Social media has come to a consensus: “We are all cooked! The bad guys are winning! The good guys are going on Colbert and saying the system is broken! We might as well give up!” All of that may be true except for the giving-up part. But how do you keep fighting when everything seems hopeless?

I’ve learned the best way to get out of feeling lost and discouraged is to rediscover your why. It has been true for a number of challenging long-term projects I’ve dedicated myself to, like writing a book and getting healthy. But what do we do when the project is so massive and so beyond our control, like keeping our country from plunging into catastrophe? We’re sinking so deep into fascism that it’s now being used to sell jeans and coffee. We know we can’t use abstract and high-minded terms, like justice and humanity. We need something tangible that people can easily grasp and understand.

My why is our family.

What sucks about what’s going on in the world today, besides what’s going on in the world today, is that our family is going through some happy times. Our granddaughter will be starting middle school next week. Our son is starting his final year of community college and plans to get his bachelor’s degree. Our daughter is working on her health and advancing in her career. We all have exciting plans for the future.

It’s hard to be happy when you know other people are suffering. It takes some kind of sick individual who not only can be happy in the presence of others’ pain, but takes delight in it. But those are the type of sick individuals who run our government and corporations today.

But as Charlie Chaplin’s character says in The Great Dictator, “We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness–not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world, there is room for everyone…”

It’s not enough for us to want happiness for our family alone. We believe every family should have the right to be happy. We want immigrant families to be happy. LGBTQ+ families to be happy. Families in Gaza and Ukraine to be happy. We even want MAGA families to be happy, because their leader’s policies will hurt them the most. What we want for ourselves is what we should want for others. That is the Golden Rule, which is the core of most religions and moral teachings.

That is my why. That is why I fight. I want every person to live with dignity and have the freedom to live the life they choose. Politics becomes just a matter of how to build a functioning society from that principle.

Kamala Harris was right when she said the system is broken. We became so caught up with partisan allegiances and ideology that we forgot what we stand for. As the saying goes, “If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.” That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.

We as a nation need to rediscover our why. Fortunately, we wrote it down nearly 250 years ago:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Instead of throwing up our hands in despair, we need to roll up our sleeves and work. And with the why clearly in our minds, we can figure out the how.