The Dippin-Dot Snowflakes

Snowflakes melt and vanish, but we don’t. We are the dippin-dots.


We don’t melt. We linger. We bend, but we don’t break.

There was a time when “save the owl” was common sense. In 1990, the northern spotted owl was listed as threatened, and logging in huge stretches of the Pacific Northwest simply stopped. Not paused for debate. Stopped. Crews packed up. Contracts froze. The forest stayed standing because a law said the owl mattered. Now, in this season of wanting to dismantle the EPA, letting tailings from open mines run straight into creeks, fiddling like Nero while we jog back toward a future where the Cuyahoga burns again, it earns a smirk. The kind that says, that’s cute, but we’re talking about real things here.

Somewhere along the way, the language of care became the language of weakness. It didn’t happen overnight. It crept in over years, while power hungry leaders aligned with big money interests, selling the story that saving an owl or a whale was against business, against progress, and somehow un-'merican. People were taught to see conservation not as common sense, but as a threat to their livelihoods and their identity.

Snowflakes melt. We don’t. We harden. We keep our shape. We’re like those frozen beads you get in paper cups at the fair. Small, separate, maybe even ridiculous to look at, but cold enough to bite your tongue and still here after every wave of heat passes.

Well, the analogy only goes so far, and we’ve stretched it as far as it will go. Anyway, the bottom line is we’re going nowhere. Again and again, we’ve been pushed into corners, driven toward near extinction. Reagan tore the solar panels off the White House roof in 1986, but in just four decades they’ve crept back, now on more than 5.5 million U.S. homes.
We act shocked that people can support measures that run against their own interests, and more importantly against their grandchildren’s well-being. But it’s as if the world has been pulled under a thick fabric - sight dimmed, sound muffled, everything dulled until cruelty feels ordinary.

And yet, even in this dulling, there are patterns that repeat. History is full of these unlikely survivals. Abolitionists, mocked and threatened, kept going until slavery cracked. Suffragists, ridiculed as hysterical, won the vote. The Civil Rights movement held its line against fire hoses and dogs. Over and over, values that looked fragile, caring beyond the self, insisting on fairness, protecting the vulnerable — were dragged to the brink of erasure and still endured. Not cleanly, not fully, but enough to light the next corner of the road.

So what do we do in the face of the jugular cuts happening right now? The Clean Water Act narrowed so fewer wetlands qualify for protection. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act weakened so companies can kill birds without penalty. Drilling in the Arctic Refuge reopened after decades of protection. Air quality rules loosened so coal plants can keep running longer. Protections for wolves rolled back, with whole packs shot from helicopters. Each step framed as common sense, as efficiency, jobs, freedom, while the arteries of the living world are severed one by one.

And it’s not just environmental law. Public libraries gutted. Teachers harassed for teaching history. Journalists branded as enemies. Voting rights carved down until the idea of democracy limps. All of it part of the same campaign: to make care look weak and cruelty look strong. So, what do we do now?

WE DON’T DIE. We resolve not to die. We don’t give up. We don’t resign. We retreat under pressure, yes, but always with resistance. The resistance is building. Protest songs are surfacing again, reminders of other seasons when voices rose together. Some old ones still ring true: This Land Is Your Land. Or even that ancient refrain, To everything there is a season.

Yes, businesses and narrow interests are winning. Winning so much that we are getting tired, as we were promised. But underneath the fatigue, we hold the soul of the universe in us. Beneath all the military garb, we still crave softness, care, connection. We will not die. We will not melt. Because we stand on the side of life: the wellness of the human race, the wellness of all sentient beings, the wellness of the planet.

They call it melting. I call it staying.

I’d genuinely welcome your thoughts — whether you agree or disagree. But if you feel like sharing, I’m especially interested in your personal reflections… how you navigate these questions, if they matter to you. And if this resonates, feel free to share it with others who think or wonder along similar lines.

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