Litany of Doing Something Imperfectly
I wrote my first newsletter and promised more to come twice a month. That was 5 weeks ago. I have found it challenging at times to organize my thoughts in ways that I can share with others. I have been navigating my own daily work and personal life amidst facism as I seek to show up as best I am able for my communities.
I struggle to begin - what can I say that contributes to the time we are living in?
Things are bad; people are doing good things.
We have been witnessing and experiencing harm that has landed first on those already so vulnerable - immigrants, trans people, disabled folks, people already living in precarity under systems designed to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the rest of us. And it continues to escalate.
And yet. I have something to try to say and you have said you would like to read those experiments. So:
Litany of Doing Something Imperfectly
It is easy to feel helpless as we witness war begin with Iran, continued suffering in Palestine, our cities occupied as our neighbors continue to be taken, and trans life under escalating threat. As public health and environmental protections are stripped away.
We are being told a lot of different things as we witness what might feel like an end. Collapse. Undoing. There are direct narratives of self-care - put on your mask first, turn off the news, scroll less, focus on what you can control in your daily life. Or the siren blaring constantly, the shouting that everything is awful look it’s horrible and you are going to lose everything and you are going to die and and and -
We are given the message that we are both powerless and responsible and that can result in paralysis. Scrolling, posting, longing for the world to change and hoping someone with power somewhere will do something but surely it could not be us.
I do not have a grand theory of this moment and what it means to act in the face of collapse. What I have is how I am moving and where I turn to help me do that. Not everything we are working on now needs to be shared publicly; simultaneously we want to demonstrate what is possible and invite others into action. Rather than craft an essay repeating the wisdom I am encountering in work from Kelly Hayes, Dean Spade, Mariame Kaba, Garret Bucks, Margaret Killjoy, and myriad organizer, activists, theorists, and everyday folks contemporary and historical, I want to offer a sketch of how I am moving in my communities and how I am experimenting.
I think about responding to the litany of griefs with a litany of doing something imperfectly.
I have been working with people in my community to respond to the reckless and secretive construction of a fracked-gas power plant to power a data center and Concerned Residents of Western PA (CROW) is becoming my organizing home. We began by talking to one another about our concerns one on one, sharing our fears about the environmental and health impacts this project would inevitably bring to our rural county and sharing our frustration that everyone around us seemed either in favor of the project or sure that it was inevitable. With support from regional environmental organizations, we have cultivated a grassroots group working together to stop this project that is beginning to have an impact on our community. The relationships inside of that organizing are also deepening my connection to the people in the place where I live and I can see more meaningful opportunities for creating a future with my community.
I started this newsletter with the question, “How do we live together?” and the impulse to find a way to articulate some of what I am experimenting with and experiencing in this time. It is not a surprise that relationships are a key part of this living together and I am noticing how much more possible change appears as I create more connections with different people. And this is what we are hearing from folks in the Twin Cities as they continue to show up for one another in response to federal occupation - relationships are deepening and expanding to respond to crisis with mutual care.
Another place I have been developing relationships is with incarcerated people. I have been writing letters to trans people in prison for a while and recently have had the chance to collaborate with Let’s Get Free, a Pennsylvania organization that works to end death by incarceration and build relationships across prison walls with a focus on women and trans people. I have such gratitude for being trusted to collaborate here and am experiencing an urgent necessity to build relationships of care across difference.
I am also supporting a reading and discussion group of Mutual Aid by Dean Spade in a few weeks. We noticed the energy bubbling in our community as people look for ways to support and protect their neighbors and a new friend and co-struggler offered to facilitate a conversation around Spade’s book about building solidarity. Creating more opportunities for people to think and build together feeds the budding relationships of care that we need to survive together.
These are some examples of how I am learning to live now.
When I am feeling lost or helpless in the face of such large systems and death making institutions, I think about the poem Paul Robeson by Gwendolyn Brooks. The poem is about the performer and activist Paul Robeson and also about what his work inspired in Brooks:
Warning, in music-words devout and large, that we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
I am reminded that when I cannot reach the levers of power directly, when we are struggling under and against these crushing cruel systems designed to benefit and enrich a very few, I can reach people close to me. And I can invite more people to be close to me. By knowing one another, making things together, sharing one another’s aches alongside one another’s celebrations, we will increase our sense of connection and responsibility.
To be responsible to my people and find that they are also responsible to me sounds like a way that I can live.