More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As climate-driven migration continues to intensify and droughts and other disasters cause food shortages, the consolidation of wealth will continue, and the disposal of human beings who have no place in the economy will escalate, unless we fight for another way of living in relation to these crises.
The pandemic gave us a preview of how the government will address future experiences of catastrophe and collapse: by prioritizing the economy over human lives.
They will rely on us to doggedly pursue normalcy instead of rising up and upending the culture of greed and human disposability that has
Our oppressors are wholly unprepared to confront a multiracial, intergenerational movement of people who share a loving practice of grief and who are prepared to care for one another and act in one another’s defense.
We know that hope is essential to social change because in order to make change, someone must first imagine that it can be so.
Everywhere land and water have been stolen from their Indigenous stewards, contamination and extraction have followed.
Yet amid all these crises, Gali told us, “There has to be hope.” How does she cultivate it? As ever, hope comes through community.
Gali notes how scientists and society at large disregarded Indigenous knowledge until it became horribly apparent that “the Earth is being destroyed.” Climate scientists in recent years have stressed the need for a return to Indigenous practices.
The Haudenosaunee principle of planning for the well-being of the next “seven generations,” as opposed to simply providing for one’s own family and immediate survival, is widely invoked by Indigenous people.
It means that leaders must be accountable not only to themselves and those around them but also to the next seven generations to come.
They say every step is a prayer. Every step is a prayer, and with every movement our ancestors are with us.
“We wage acts of care, and that’s how we navigate loss and create hope. We say, ‘We will wage this act of care in defiance of the state, which tells us that our bodies are worthless and expendable.’”
In his essay “The Walls of the Tank: On Palestinian Resistance,” author Andreas Malm writes, “How do you keep on fighting when everything is lost? Ask a Palestinian.”
it is not unusual for Palestinian families to send one of their own children to another home while welcoming someone else’s child into their own, in the hopes that a single bomb will not destroy an entire family.
If we discover that we may have less time with someone than we had hoped, time does not become pointless or less meaningful; it becomes more precious.
Sometimes we expect the energy and feelings that we need in order to build movements amid crisis to flow naturally, as though they are embedded in our personalities. That is the influence of individualism.
Just as patience is a practice, rather than a feeling, hope and grief are not simply things we feel but things we enact in the world.
Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference.”
Hope, too, requires us to reject indifference.
As Macy and Johnstone write, Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have.
First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.
Memorials can also be biting or disruptive, and that, too, can be a source of healing for participants. As politicians and corporations push us to accept a society that does not grieve mass death, our grief and stories of the dead can function as resistance.
Cynicism is a creeping enemy.
Poetry, like prayer, can provide a sense of communion—a joint hope, plea, or promise projected onto the world.
The system we are raging against erodes our compassion and confines our imaginations. In the face of such violence, poetry is a fitting weapon. We should wield it often.
As James Baldwin emphasized at the close of his book Nothing Personal, “The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”26
Efforts to build diverse, intergenerational movements will always generate conflict and discomfort. But the desire to shrink groups down to spaces of easy agreement is not conducive to movement building.
Oppressed people, on the other hand, often demand ideological alignment or even affinity when seeking to interrupt or upend structural violence. This tendency lends an advantage to the powerful that is not easily overcome.
Instead, organizing on the scale that our struggles demand means finding common ground with a broad spectrum of people, many of whom we would never otherwise interact with, and building a shared practice of politics in the pursuit of more just outcomes.
if we cannot organize beyond the bounds of our comfort zones, we will never build movements large enough to combat the forces that would destroy us.
It’s really as simple as being attacked by fascist police in the streets. Once the attack begins, there are two sides: armed police inflicting violence and everyone else.
Effective organizers operate beyond the bounds of their comfort zones, moving into what we might call their “stretch zone,” when necessary.
How much discomfort can you navigate for what you believe is truly at stake?
Most oppressed people spend their entire lives being told that their experience of oppression is natural, correct, or their own fault.
But political transformation is not as simple as handing newcomers a new set of politics and telling them, “Yours are bad, use these instead.” Instead, we will sometimes have to accompany people along messy transformational journeys.
And we must also remember that no matter how far we have come, we are still on our own messy journeys, and our own transformations will continue as we grow.
For Wane, resisting reactive responses was key. “I found that by not reacting, and [by] drawing out that person’s story, I became a much more effective organizer, because people who I thought I would never have been able to be in conversation with were at least receptive to what I was saying in ways that they weren’t before.”
Encouraging people to talk about their own families’ hardships opened up a space for exchange,
the beauty of the rule against cross talk.
I swear, half the problems of this country can be traced back to the Fox News model in which people talk over people they disagree with. Then that model went to other networks. Next thing you know it's in political debates. Ugh.
Like so many other aspects of organizing, listening is a practice, and at times, it’s a strategic one.
Poetry circles are another activity that can deepen a group’s ability to listen, reflect, and grapple with ideas together.
When young people (or adults for that matter) see something of themselves in a piece of literature (books, poetry), identify with the work, reflect on it, and undergo some emotional growth as a result of that reading experience, this can be considered a successful anti-violence intervention.”
And this is why so many books are being banned....
Platforms like Twitter have helped facilitate tremendous accomplishments in movement work, but they have also created an arena for political performance and critique that is often divorced from relationship building or strategic aims.
For many people, social media is not an organizing tool but a realm of political performance and spectatorship.
When the performance of solidarity via the replication of the right words or slogans becomes our central focus, it’s not surprising that responses might read as empty or even insincere.
Sloganizing is not organizing, and paying righteous lip service to a cause, in the preferred language of the moment, does not empty any cages or transform anyone’s material conditions.
Policing language, as though our phrasing is written in law, misunderstands that pursuit and the purpose it serves.
Mainstream liberals often fall prey to this line of thinking because liberal politics play very heavily into political identity as being determinant of whether a person is good or bad (Democrats are good, Republicans bad). But the left can fall into its own version of this trap by treating politics as a test of how well we can perform language or recite ideas.
Fumbling is inevitable, but, as Gilmore tells us, “practice makes different.”
Therefore, she says, a key part of organizing is building bonds of trust, and that can only happen within a context where people are allowed to be vulnerable and make mistakes.
!!!!!!
