The Free People's Village Quotes

“Maybe 99.99% of our lives will be spent stuck trudging down the narrow sidewalks afforded to us by capitalism. Roads have taken away our land, our right to roam and play. Artificial scarcity forces us to work ourselves sick at shitty, soul-crushing jobs or we risk death from starvation, homelessness, or medical neglect. Environmental destruction has severed us from our nurturing nonhuman relatives. Colonization has erased our ancestors and histories. Step out of line, raise your voice against the state, make a mistake, and you’ll be crushed with swift and brutal violence. But once in a while, for a brief bubble in time, enough of us get together to defy the ruling classes. To step out in the street and carve our own path. And even if I get to experience that for less than 0.01% of my time on this earth, I’ll take it.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“When it comes to defeating capitalism, I’m not so naïve as to think we can win. Not how you think. Not decisively, for all time. All our protests, all our organizing, they can’t defeat the tanks and gas and guns and greed machines—at least not forever, not right now. So what I think, these days, is you have to accept that there’s no winning, and learn to live for the joy of the struggle. And for maybe. Maybe someday.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“This mutual aid work we're doing here--that's the mycelium, the roots of the fungus that spread underground, forming a network through the forest that can spread for miles, unseen, strengthening and feeding the whole organism. Then when conditions are right--the right amount of rain, sun, press exposure, public outrage, whatever--" Shayna made an exploding gesture with her hand. "All of a sudden, little mushrooms pop up all over the forest. All of a sudden, you've got mass protests springing up across the country. And... the thing about mushrooms is, they shoot out spores. Millions of 'em, spreading their fungal secrets everywhere the wind blows. And just like that, each time we have a protest, we're sending out millions of spores that take root in people's minds."

"Now, once a spore lands in fertile soil, it takes a while to start growing. It's got to build up its own network of mycelium."

"So protest movements always spread the spores for the next protest movement. Like mushrooms, they're only meant to last a short while. Hell, the Free People's Village was a sturdy little mushroom--we were out there for months! And since then, all the zillions of spores we sent into the world? They've been growing. Trust. Now we just got to wait for the next time the conditions are right--and be ready. In the meantime, we grow our network--we spread our mycelium, we strengthen our community.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“We keep at the work, because the work is good, and we couldn't live with ourselves otherwise.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“I'm just saying, if there comes a moment when you can take a step for the movement? Take it.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“High ground? Look, Shayna's just playing by the ruling class's rules. She's protesting in exactly the way capitalism loves for us to protest. You take the collective rage and grief of a thousand people, give them a permit to march down the street, then let them shout until they're tired and go home. They let us feel like we've done something--only we've disrupted nothing.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“Christianity claims to hold the only path to salvation from eternal punishment. It creates a pathological fear of that punishment in adherents--a hell complex. It teaches subservience to your oppressors and provides a moral justification for ethnic cleansing, colonization, and genocide. It is a trillion-dollar pyramid scheme selling afterlife insurance! It is the opiate of the masses! It is the carceral--fucking-surveillance state of religions!”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“What did he steal? Why did he steal it? What if he needed it to survive, or for his family? What were the material conditions that led to the theft? And why is stealing a crime anyways? What is property? What is ownership? Why is it valued more than a man's life?”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“That was before I realized just how precious pride is. How dangerous it is to the people in power, and that's why they want to take it away from you. That's why they scare little kids with stories of burning for eternity just for having a backbone.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“where many people said, “What do you do?” That question, he said, reinforces the false capitalist construct that we are defined by the labor we do to generate profit for our corporate overlords.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“Imagining what the world would be like if all of us suddenly knew the stolen secrets of our ancestry.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“felt dizzied by a sudden sweeping understanding of our collective grief—kids ripped from their homes in Palestine, kids shot in the streets of Gaza and Houston and Rio, the greed, the oil, and guns—it was the same struggle everywhere.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village