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“Radical,” in its historical definition, is synonymous with “vital”—“designating the humour or moisture once thought to be present in all living organisms as a necessary condition of their vitality.”
“Hope and grief can coexist,” Kelly and Mariame remind us, amid millions lost to the pandemic, amid rising fascism, amid many-sided attacks on our most basic bodily autonomies—“and if we wish to transform the world, we must learn to hold both simultaneously.”
But I eventually learned that the answer is always the same: when you feel trapped by an oppressive inevitability, you never stop trying to escape, because every jailbreak begins with a decision to reject the inevitable.
To understand the past, we must investigate the stories we were not told, because those stories were withheld for a reason.
It’s important to both ground ourselves in the here and now and also remember that the world is much bigger than this moment, bigger than us and our experience of it, and much bigger than we imagine when we are afraid.
Our politics are the product of this world-building process. And storytelling is a fight for the future.
Creating connection, potential, and possibility is creative work. We are in a moment when we must hold prediction and possibility all at once.
There is no way out of the spiritual battle the war is the war against the imagination you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance it is a war for this world, to keep it9
Our work is set against all probability—and it is in that space of cherished improbability where our art will be made, where our joy will be found, and where our ingenuity will fashion ways of living and caring for each other, even as the ground shifts beneath our feet.
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic. —Hazel Henderson1
the world is not transformed primarily by what we think of it. Transformative change happens when we are willing to build the things that we know must exist.
Activism encompasses all the ways we show up for justice. It can take a multitude of shapes, depending on a person’s skills, interests, and capacity. An activist might conduct research, canvass, fundraise, or attend marches or meetings regularly, or they may simply practice a skill in their own home, such as art making, in the service of a cause or campaign they support. Activism can be done on our own, in which case we are accountable to ourselves.
Organizing, on the other hand, is a more specific set of practices. It is a craft that requires us to cultivate a variety of skills, such as intentional relationship building and power analysis.
No matter how we choose to take action, we are usually working toward a future that we will be unlikely to see. It’s a future built on the hopes and the sacrifices of our ancestors upon whose labor and love we stand.
Facts are not enough to mobilize people into action.
fear alone doesn’t usually hold people’s attention, let alone inspire them to action.
As organizers, we’re repeatedly disappointed by others’ lack of response to urgent crises.
If someone is unmoved by the facts, we might conclude we simply don’t share the same values. But things are rarely this simple.
When a fact or set of facts prompts people to change course, it’s usually because someone or something has interrupted the narrative they knew and told a story that feels more true—one worth making changes over.
but opening with talk of their inevitable doom simply caused them to shut down.
Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling.
If spitting horrifying facts at people changed minds and built movements, we would have overthrown the capitalist system long ago, because the facts have always been on our side.
When it comes to many of the issues around which we’re organizing, most people are aware of the problem, even if they are not acquainted with all the horrid particulars.
While many people will acknowledge that conditions are not ideal, they also often believe that certain people bring negative experiences upon themselves.
Beliefs about the inferiority of Black and Native people, for example, did not precede chattel slavery and colonial genocide but emerged to justify violence that was already in motion.
Over the course of our movement work, we have learned that people understand the world in stories. This means organizers must be effective storytellers.
As Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning write in Re:Imagining Change, “Narrative power analysis starts with the recognition that the currency of story is not necessarily truth, but rather meaning. In other words, we often believe in a story not necessarily because it is factually true; we accept a story as true because it connects with our values, or is relevant to our experiences in a way that is compelling.”
Some people react to a public health crisis with what scientists call “monitoring” behavior. To cope with uncertainty, monitors seek all available information, such as reading as many news updates as possible or checking for new information on government websites.
“blunting” behavior, which involves “the distraction from, and minimizing of threatening information.”
Still others exhibit what’s known as “unrealistic optimism bias,” characterized by the belief that they are more likely than others to evade harm and experience positive outcomes.
Rather than speaking from a place of authority, or lecturing people, Martinez-Lorenzo explored the topic with people, searching out answers to any new questions that arose and sharing her family stories of vaccination.
Human consciousness can be overwhelming, even in the absence of an existential threat, but when we add something like a pandemic, or the climate crisis, or other extreme threats to the mix, people cope in a spectrum of ways, some of which are helpful, and some of which are not.
To inspire constructive behaviors like these, we must embrace storytelling that centers support and inspiration not just fear.
Ultimately, she says, when we ask people to process a fearful message that they are not prepared for, we risk losing them altogether. But when we tap into the diverse spectrum of human emotion, we have an opportunity to inspire people to view themselves as part of a larger story—and to make moral decisions about who they are in relation to other human beings.
When people comply with an action or tolerate a situation they know is harmful or wrong, fear is often a factor.
Fear—of punishment, of the unknown, of one another—often prevents us from protecting and connecting with each other.
We know that the military and corporations are the primary drivers of climate chaos. We know that governments maintain conditions that generate despair and therefore produce interpersonal violence.
We know that in a society where everyone’s needs are met, we would no longer need to fear being unable to pay for our health care, or losing our jobs and going hungry, or being hurt by desperate, disillusioned people.
The idea that disasters autogenerate panicked, aimlessly violent hordes of people who must be controlled with an iron fist is an authoritarian fever dream.
Capitalism requires an ever-broadening disposable class of people in order to maintain itself, which in turn requires us to believe that there are people whose fates are not linked to our own: people who must be abandoned or eliminated.
By expanding our relationships and embracing interdependence, we can leverage power against the threats we face and extend care amid crisis.
individualism—a violent ideology that has siloed us and stifled our collective potential.
Unraveling our fear of one another is a multilayered cultural project.
We must also continue to create our own works of visual art, fiction, and poetry that drive people to envision cooperation and mutual aid as our primary responses to crisis.
Our belief in human potential must outweigh our fear of human failure. Our imaginations must be courageous.
Our atomized and alienated society leaves little organic space for political communion or even shared compassion. And in the spaces between us, fear grows.
Fundamentally, people who have been conditioned, out of fear, to view their own interests in isolation, rather than to find strength in collectivity, must learn to anchor themselves to one another for the sake of survival.
Normalization is an insidious process, and it can warp people, reshaping the views and actions of people who have made no conscious decision to abandon their beliefs or other people.
People come into movement spaces for a variety of reasons, but one that we rarely name or recognize is that we have a basic human desire to belong, and our competitive, commercial, individualistic society does not foster belonging.
The disconnection of modern capitalist society has left many people hurting in ways they cannot make sense of, with injuries that cannot heal in isolation.
