the other day a friend (can’t remember who) reminded me of one of my favorite lines from harry potter. cedric diggory and harry are in the maze hunting for the goblet of fire (book 4) and it becomes clear very quickly that he and harry are about to have to enter a wizarding fight. cedric looks over and says to harry “wands out, d'you reckon?”
i’m really feeling that idea right now. like… the idea of getting your wand out because… well… you’re gonna need it and soon. and it’s not the first time either of them had needed their wands during their time in the maze, but cedric had identified that a moment was coming that harry seemed not to be ready for.
there are a couple of other things floating around for me that also make the “wands out” phrasing interesting, mostly in relation to how important imagination is to the future. i really love the work of intelligent mischief and a tagline for one of their projects: “when reality becomes absurd, it’s time to get surreal.” i also really like bayard rustin and one of my favorite quotes of his is on my website: “i believe in social dislocation and creative trouble.” finally, for a while i was really into simone campbell’s idea of holy mischief.
anyway, over the weekend i had something like six or seven different meetings (some physical, some virtual) with friends and different groups. i’ve also been collecting different resources, some old, some new (i may or may not have thought about myself as preparing for my o.w.l.s… >_>).
here’s some stuff i gathered, but i’m curious what other people are learning and getting skilled up by…
the ten days following trump’s election were really off for me. i couldn’t focus or think clearly, my normal routines didn’t feel right, i didn’t enjoy things i usually enjoyed. i’ve started to adjust to a new normal and thankfully that means i’m getting back to listening to my podcasts.
yesterday, i started catching up on harry potter and the sacred text. the episode i listened to had a great moment from vanessa. you should listen for yourself (this hyperlink goes right to the timestamp in the episode and if you listen for abotu two minutes, you’ll get the whole thing i’m referring to – Harry Potter and the Sacred Text: Control: Dobby’s Warning (Book 2, Chapter 2)).
if you haven’t listened to it, vanessa is sharing a point about why she fasts every year. she says that around hour 22 of fasting, she becomes incapable of kindness and thinking. she says that getting to this point is an incredible reminder that there are types of oppression that make it difficult to be your best self. in this case, hunger makes her a person that, had she eaten, she would not be. having fasted for many days myself, i can totally corroborate that experience. everything changes about how you see the world when your stomach is empty.
this was just a really solid reminder of my friend erin’s favorite quotes:
everything changes. everything is connected. pay attention. — jane hirshfield
last week, a bunch of people started wearing safety pins in solidarity against hate. it’s a gesture that was borrowed from brexit (here’s an article explaining a bit of the history and long-ass snopes piece, too). the general idea is that the safety pin is a symbol that says “you’re safe with me.” my sense was that it was a gesture for people who wanted to show that they aren’t down with trump’s bigotry and the increasingly public hate for oppressed folks.
i actually heard a story where it worked. a women wearing a hijab was being harassed on a train. she saw someone else on the train wearing a safety pin. she walked over to stand by the person wearing the pin. the harasser stopped.
that said, as the internet does, the critique began to create more energy than the pins themselves. there was a small war in my facebook feed about whether or not people thought it was a good idea.
this article is indicative of the backlash, but there are many others (including this which is actually the best overall coverage of the phenomenon i’ve see so far).
to be clear, the point i’m getting working towards in this piece is a system one. people are allowed to be as angry as they wanna be at whatever they want. anger policing is oppression. full stop. but bear with me…
i’m gonna be a little blunt because i’m writing fast, but basically, my perception was that it seemed like more radical people shat on the less radical people. “i see you wearing that safety pin but if you’re not also down with my cause and my framing of my cause then fuck you and your symbol because you’re fake and weak.”
now i do see a point in that the pins as a symbol could actually backfire for the people who are increasingly the targets of explicit hate. in the best case scenarios, things like this tweet can happen:
in a worse scenario (because why not just be straight out with it), if the woman from the story earlier had walked over to the safety pin person, but then that person was actually a trump supporter and hurt her… like… fuck.Â
but MOST people i saw backlashing didn’t say that. i mostly just saw people say this:
now i’m seeing people say that they were interested in wearing the pins, but have decided to stop. i’ve totally stopped seeing them on the trains.
this hurts me real deep because i’m thinking about strategy and winning. if the effect of people wanting to show solidarity is rejection with anger and critique, how the fuck are we supposed to get them to take even more radical steps? (which is what’s needed to break down all these oppressive systems we’re all drowning in).
on an alternate note, my friend, felicia, posted an amazing note about the value of the safety pins for people organizing outside of cities:
i wish people had organized some active bystander trainings and harnessed the energy of the safety pin crowd to move us all forward (i guess i should do that if i’m over here complaining about it… i hear mit has some resources for this…). not only did we miss an opportunity, now instead we have even more division and a whole new wave of people who have learned to stay silent and do nothing (which is less than wear a symbol) because even their well-intentioned efforts get them attacked (similar to the starbucks #racetogether backlash).
hurt people hurt people. literally everyone has the right to be angry about whatever they want. but from a strategic standpoint, i’m not sure how any of us people who are in the sights of an increasingly explicitly white nationalist government are going to survive if we can’t constantly be building power.
earlier this week, i had lunch with my friend danya and she made a really insightful comment (rough paraphrase): “part of what’s so weird right now is that we still don’t know how big this problem is. it seems different everyday. it’s weird to know how to act when you’re not sure what you’re responding to.”
i think she was dead on. last week and at the beginning of this week, i was still in mourning and definitely wasn’t ready to act. now i’ve started to see some ways to act, but it’s definitely still not clear to me what’s going to be the most strategic.
every morning it seems like there’s some new front to be paying attention to. nathanael points out that trump says he’s not going to roll back marriage equality and yet he’s appointing anti-gay judges. that’s a fight in the making. maggie share’s trump’s bullshit ten-point plan for black america. she and phil both point out its absurdity. anyone (with any sort of racial or oppression analysis) who has experienced or studied cities knows that his language is a smokescreen. “reduce crime” means change laws to put as many people in jail as possible (apparently, this is already happening on the west coast). “school choice” means de-funding public schools. “equal justice and applying the law fairly” means inequity, because we currently aren’t all equal; having marijuana in a packback can put you in prison, but shutting down the economy gets you a bonus.
right now it seems like there’s a lot of energy to keep bannon from getting appointed. it’s unclear to me if that’s a distraction. obviously it will be helpful either way, but are we rallying people’s attention and energy around that while missing other insidious things happening in the background? or things we haven’t actually been presented with yet?
i don’t value reading fiction myself, but i do value it.
i think our lack of collective imagination at the neighborhood, city, and societal scales is part of what’s wrong with our country. some types of fiction, actually support and encourage the stretching of our imaginations. i think that’s the type of fiction he was referring to when he said…
“If a story doesn’t demonstrate how a character evolves through the story in some way, or if doesn’t reflect on society or our own individual hopes, fears and tendencies, then it’s less interesting to me. If the story doesn’t question or explore some aspect of humanity that makes us rethink our own relationships, then I get bored.”
i’ve recently made friends with a city planning student named grant and he’s writing his master’s thesis as a series of fictional rural stories. that sort of work that speaks to real situations people are in or can sympathize with now, but paints a series of pathways forward seems so important.
now, i’m much more interested in, feel passionate about, and feel tooled for creating and building right now, but i do know that it’s super important for us to be able to imagine our way forward.
ps - i have actually started to read a little fiction (the parable books by octavia butler and ecotopia by ernest callenbach). it feels weird, though. =|
