We’ve Always Resisted State Violence

For the Helpers, 1.6

Dear KTC,

It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote because I’ve been thinking.

As you all know, I’m quite interested in seeking MAGA defectors. Recently I began attending a support group for people who have lost relatives to the cult of MAGA. Imagine a co-dependency twelve-step group where the higher power is nonviolent action.

At the start of each meeting, we’re asked to accept that we’re powerless against our loved ones’ MAGA affiliations. Logic won’t work, facts won’t work, appeals to kindness won’t work. We know this because if these things worked, we would have already had success.

I realized this was true, and it left me gutted. It’s hard to accept that you are no longer within someone’s circle of moral concern.

I’ve also felt confused. How am I supposed to seek defectors other than with logic, facts, and appeals to kindness?

Here in St. Paul, things feel calmer, but there are still more DHS agents in town than before Operation Metro Surge began. Frightening things continue to occur, like violent incidents with men who claim to be bounty hunters.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is buying warehouses across the nation, including in Social Circle, Georgia, a little town in Walton County, the place where my mother’s people lived for a few hundred years. DHS says these warehouses are to be used as detention centers. This is happening while our president announces that he won’t sign anymore bills until the SAVE act is passed by Congress. The SAVE act could keep large numbers of people, especially married women, from voting. Nationwide detention centers and calculated voting upsets are not the stuff of a healthy democracy.

The billionaires benefit when the people are divided. By keeping the populace in fear and turmoil we lose the emotional capacity to remain in relationship with one another across political divides. Rather than working together to fight the elites, we fight one another. While we’re in turmoil, the billionaires line their pockets and consolidate control. By one estimate, Trump made four billion dollars as president in the first year of the current term.

Contrast his earnings with my ask: if you’re able, please donate to this neighborhood fund that is helping families in hiding pay their rent and cover their legal fees. Many of you have already done so. Thank you so much. Your contribution made a huge difference. March rent and utilites were covered for about fifty-five families. This fund was begun by my neighbor who is a public school teacher. The fund directly assists the families of her students.

I’ve found comfort lately by meditating on all of the humans who have lived and are living through state violence. When I really sit with this idea, I understand that state violence is more the norm for more people throughout human history than sparkling lifetimes of peace and plenty. This means, as a human, I’m wired to resist, to survive, to help others, and to continue to grow my good heart. I’ve evolved to love and be loved despite and within oppressive systems. This is how we’ve continued to survive as a species. It’s not hatred and tribalism that has kept us going, but love and generosity. So we can know and feel and share love even if things get worse instead of better.

One Immediate Action (Okay, Two)

As I wrote above, if you can make a donation to this neighborhood gofundme, please do. Any amount helps. While people are returning to work, there has been a lot of damage done. Businesses closed, jobs were lost, and savings were depleted. Families are rebuilding.

My husband’s cousin introduced me to Resist and Unsubscribe. I often feel powerless at the hands of big business, especially Meta, Apple, Amazon. Mostly I’ve addressed my sense of powerlessness by doing things like shopping local, going to thrift stores first, and supporting a CSA. I’ve not done mass unsubscribes. It just hasn’t felt as if my single act of resistance would be worth the inconvenience. (A tacky sentiment but an honest one.) Resist and Unsubscribe is tracking the financial impact suffered by these companies as folks like us stop supporting them. (The people versus the billionaires!) Seeing the impact we’re having heartens me, and with this uptick in hopefulness I’m able to make logical decisions around where I can unsubscribe. For instance, I can’t imagine my work life without Word for Mac and my Mac laptop, but I do think I could drop Facebook. Right now, I’m playing with the Resist and Unsubscribe Impact Calculator as I consider the changes I will make.

Seeking Defectors

I owe you the final entry in my four part discussion of propaganda, but I have to decide how to present it now that I’m questioning the impact of logic, reason, and appeals to kindness.

History proves that defection happens. There’s no reason to lose faith in defection. I’ve been participating in Singing Resistance, a movement that began in Minneapolis and has spread nationwide. It’s exactly what you’d imagine, group of folks from a few to a lot gathering to sing songs of resistance.

Singing Resistance is inspired by Otpor!, a nonviolent Serbian student movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor!’s actions was to show up and sing even, and especially, after violent crackdowns and arrests.

I’m old enough to remember The Baltic Way—in 1989, about two million people held hands and formed a human chain across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to oppose Soviet occupation. People built up to this moment, in part, by gathering and singing resistance songs together in public.

Nonviolent resistance works. I’m exploring how others have connected the dinner table to the streets. This letter, while public, has such a small audience that it feels private. So I’m considering new ways to discuss this image of some members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America on strike at the Curlee Clothing Company in 1925.

I lifted this image from an online exhibit on Immigrants’ Rights from the main library at the University of Maryland. Original caption: “Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America members, representing a wide range of national and ethnic backgrounds, on strike at Curlee Clothing Company, St. Louis, 1925. AFL-CIO Still Images, Morris B. Schnapper Collection.”

We’ll get there. I’m a finisher of things, albeit slowly. I’ll write again when I’ve coalesced a few ideas in a meaningful way.

ginger

I know the algorithms love a face, but this is the best recent picture in my camera roll. No filter! And I always forget to use my selfie as my image for my post anyways.