I know it’s not just me.  So many people I’ve talked to this week are feeling it.

It’s a kind of low-grade malaise, nothing you can put your finger on, just a weary, burned out sense of ENOUGH ALREADY.

Enough bad news.  Enough of the stock market endlessly gyrating downward.  Enough unmanned drones picking off clerics in desert hideouts.  Enough executions.  Enough police brutality.  Enough racism.  Enough bullying in the schools, and in the Congress.  Enough global warming.  Just ENOUGH ALREADY!!

But you know what?  There is no magic wand that can make these problems go away. We’re sleep-walking in some kind of collective cultural trance, living through a waking nightmare in excruciating slow motion.  What we need to do is WAKE UP and stop our goose-stepping death march.

That’s what the people sitting out in Liberty Plaza Park, Wall Street, are trying to do.  They’re trying to break the trance by doing something radically unexpected.

In our country, we sign online petitions and donate funds by cell phone, but we don’t sit out in the rain and use our collective voices as natural amplifiers. We don’t publicly put our bodies on the line.

Or maybe we do.  I am too young to remember the Civil Rights protests or the Stonewall riots.  I’m way too young to remember the workers’ strikes of the 1930s.  But these acts of resistance live on in our American collective unconscious, and it’s time to tap into them now.

The antidote to the vague sense of despair and depression that so many of us seem to be feeling these days is, quite simply, ACTION!  If we let this creeping malaise get to us, it’s all over.  We might as well just admit defeat.

And that, my friends, is unthinkable!  So let’s rouse ourselves, let’s prick ourselves in the flanks, let’s get out there and fight the good fight!  It’s the least we can do for the country and the planet that needs us–terribly.