remembering, again, how wide the world is

If the first duty of a revolutionary is to survive, the second may be to remember. To maintain awareness, to stay connected to vision–both vision of how dysfunctional the system is, how much unnecessary suffering and injustice the wheels cause in their daily grinding and vision of the amazing, everpresent potential for relationships based on consent and compassion, for wild and free blossomings of community and care.

Despite the insistent individualism of the dominant culture (within the United States) each of these–survival, remembrance and connection–requires support, requires interdependence. Requires radical community. If you’re currently active in radical community and movements you may not be aware of the need for these things, as they are so foundational. Able-bodied runners probably don’t often think about how their running is contigent on so many bodily factors, so much continuing to go right within their muscles and nerves and bones. I tend to think though that it’s sometimes hard for anyone to remember, to stay connected–the realities are so overwhelming sometimes, so painful and there is so much pressure from mainstream culture to deny, to pretend as if the system were sane and fair and not an out-of-control engine grinding up lives deemed as worthless because of the color of their skin or the people they love, grinding up lives on the way to bulldozing the planet. Yes, this is hard to remember (although for some the knowledge is inscribed on their bodies and their hearts and thus forgetting is in some sense impossible, but I’d say that denial is a strategy available to everyone–although sometimes it might mean shutting your eyes, sitting down and waiting to die). As Mike Ferner says in his great article It’s Our Turn Now: Resistance As If It Really Mattered:

It is not pleasant to conclude that, contrary to what you’ve learned all your life, the place you call home has become just another empire intent on enforcing its will on humanity. Our discomfort is trivial compared to the suffering of those living where our missiles land, but still there are days when the latest news from the colonies leaves you screaming with anguish and rage against the terror rained upon the innocent without end.

For me, I need community to remember and even to see the totality of these realities. I need support to deal with the intense emotions that arise when I confront these truths. For a while now, I have been denying these truths, closing my eyes, running away, waiting to die. I’ve been overwhelmed by dealing with the personal trauma of childhood sexual abuse, I’ve been coping by disconnecting, pushing the world away, inhibiting a smaller and smaller space where I could pretend that my father had never violated my body/where I could get as close as possible to the illusory comfort of living in a place where no one could touch me, a place without connection, without risk/where I could express my anger by withdrawing, by refusing to participate in a world where such things happen. A lot of things have been going on at the same time, shifts and transformations and it’s all rather complex. But going to the NASCO Institute helped me open my eyes widely again, helped me reconnect and remember.

I need to hear stories of people aware of the monstrous scale of injustice. I need to speak my own stories, my own truths, my own brokenhearted cries for justice. I need to hear stories of people actively doing what they can to resist all forms of domination, including capitalism. I need to live my own stories of resistance, to live the revolution. In many, many ways my life right now is not what I want. Transforming it is ultimately not only an individual project but a matter of collective liberation.

I’m writing this in something of a frenzy, so it might not be structured the best. But I think watching films and reading articles (like Mike Ferner’s) and poems and novels about resistance is one way of remembering. But I also need face-to-face conversations. At NASCO, I spoke with a friend who I haven’t talked to very many times, who’s been active in the movement against expanding I-69 across the country, to make it easier to exploit the workers and land of Mexico and further corporatist domination. I talked to him about some of this, how I was realizing again how crazy and fucked up the system is and he listened and we shared stories and I talked about being really active in the anti-war movement and then feeling so burnt out and discouraged when the war actually started and he told me that he realized how much he needed radical and progressive community, how that was one of the things that made him the happiest. He told me, towards the end of your conversation, “There’s lot of people who see what you see. You’re not alone.” At the root of it, that’s what we need to remember, to remain aware of: I am not alone. You are not alone. No is alone, ever. As we are interconnected, the chains and wounds inflicted by the system hurt all of us, and we can only truly dismantle them together. Not alone. Together.

Tags: anti-capitalism, connection, denial, domination, radical community, remembering