A ghost walked with me today. She put her small hand in mine and led me: down the hall, up the stairs, into the sanctuary, into the cafeteria. She sat beside me while the volunteers talked about what to do if a man a foot taller than you and 180 pounds heavier than you starts to shove you, and she sat behind me when I accidentally gave slightly too specific advice for suppressing a fight reflex when being threatened with a gun. She didn't say anything, and she didn't look at me, might not even know me. I held her chilly hand and let it kill my appetite and numb my social anxiety.
How embarrassing, though! How humiliating to imagine this past as not just long buried, but decayed. The corpse is fresh; her skin looks almost warm. I hold my wife's hand and remind myself that I am alive, here, now.
The internet.
I've read a lot of thoughtful discussions about nonviolence lately, but I've also read some blisteringly stupid stuff, mostly out of towners telling us that we should "fight back" and that we are heartless if we don't interrupt an abduction, etc. I find this discourse interesting because it is the most extreme version I've seen of the leftist tendency to refuse to articulate a strategy, advocate for specific tactics, or identify a win condition for a campaign (or sometimes even a single action). It's a cliche that leftists only want to read theory, critique but not have power, etc, and while I do agree that there's some interesting political self-marginalization going on, I think the main issue is related but meaningfully distinct: American leftists are so captured by credentialist industries that many of us genuinely think it's impudent or offensive to think with our own brains and formulate theories of power and action.
My experience in a lot of spaces has been that it's seen as inappropriate to actually baldly say "I think we should pursue strategy x because of y and z and I think people are overlooking a, b, and c". That's not to say that these conversations don't happen, but rather that many people genuinely believe that you need some form of institutional legitimization to be qualified to have these thoughts. At a minimum, you are expected to appeal to authority. Even synthesis of authority is viewed as suspicious: like hey, you already have a menu of flavors of communism. You're supposed to pick one and stick with it, not invent your own arguments.
In times like these, this impulse runs headlong into 2edgy4u burn-it-all-down types (or faux-intellectual armed resistance fetishists), and too many people fight with these types of leftist without ever asking the most salient questions, like what do you think would happen if we started shooting or how many people do you think would be required to win a civil war against US armed forces or why are you referencing the Civil War and World War II as crises that could only be resolved with armed conflict while eliding that in both cases, the victors commanded sovereign nations' militaries. Like, these are questions that are reasonable to ask! It's not arrogant to think you can make your own argument! It bugs me.
Also, obviously, the idea that violent resistance would work right now is ridiculous. But what I find most striking about the argument itself is the terror it reveals. Any casualty in a nonviolent resistance campaign is one too many (and there had been many times too many before the Minnesota surge even started), yet of course it is an inevitability when your enemies are fascist paramilitary thugs. It is scary fucking work. I think that a lot of the start-shooting agitation, which rests on the assertion that too many people have gotten hurt and we have to "make it stop", is about visceral realization of that danger. Understanding that the danger is ever-present, that we are out of low-risk options for making this go away. Because being in a hot war with your own government is not actually the lower-risk option. That is the option that guarantees many, many more casualties, and is statistically less likely to succeed (assuming your goal is a democratic society). So when I hear people advocate for violence, even when they're deliberately doing the tough-guy act, I do often think: Christ, you poor fuck. It's gotten too real.
In a similar vein: no, the neighbors observing ICE, getting the abductee's name and taking video and calling hotlines, are not heartless. It is an act of profound love, requiring discipline and commitment, to restrain yourself from your initial impulses for the sake of the person you're trying to save—and often their family's sake, too. The people you're insulting are going home haunted. For some of them, those ghosts will never, ever go away.
2 Republicans and at least 3 streamers today: WHOOPS!
I'm sending awkward Spanish texts and receiving an overflowing of gratitude for stuff I barely helped with. No one should ever have to endure what this country is doing to my neighbors. Every single caretaker locked inside an apartment with dwindling food stores and no machine-washed laundry in the dead of fucking winter deserves the entire world, and we are instead begging the state to prevent them from being evicted en masse.
This isn't an optimistic blog post, is it? We're already talking about them as a pair, "Renee and Alex". I put a prayer in for Victor Manuel Diaz today (and Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, may they return to us soon). I have work to do tomorrow, and by tomorrow I'll have work to do Tuesday. When this is all over, it won't be all over. We'll have to remember how to live. But despite it all, I still know they won't break us. I know it better now than I did yesterday. Even at my absolute lowest, I'm still annoyed at how inconvenient this all is, how tedious, how much we're all missing, and I'm still incandescently furious at how much has been stolen from my neighbors, and I'm one of thousands who feels this way in my city alone, and there are still neighbors to be furious on behalf of, and there are still children to protect. There's still life in the soil.
