Must-Reads and Some Thoughts on Being Human in Inhumane Times
"This will be a momentous undertaking, and we can’t do it alone."
Greetings friends,
If you want to read my meandering thoughts about being human—and being together— in inhumane times, scroll down. Otherwise, you can begin at the beginning with my must-read list.
Must-Reads
From bots overwhelming community college classes to the looming fight over the citizenship rights of imprisoned people in the US, here are some of the most important articles I’ve read this week.
- Americans Must Prepare to Fight for the Citizenship Rights of U.S. Prisoners by Sherrilyn Ifill. “Trump’s next move – in fact the primary focus of his thinking – has been how to remove American citizens to foreign prisons. And the group upon which he will workshop the next stage of his plan is another population that most Americans – long before Trump’s rise – have despised and dismissed: incarcerated citizens.”
- Anti-Trans Ruling in UK Strips Protections From Trans Women by Zane McNeill. “This decision could have far-reaching consequences for trans women’s access to gender-specific services and may accelerate broader efforts to roll back protections for trans people across the U.K.”
- As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond by Jakob McWhinney. “The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.”
- The Rise of End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. “To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of ‘ordered love’, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all.”
- A Whistleblower's Disclosure Details How DOGE May Have Taken Sensitive Labor Data by Jenna McLaughlin. “His attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone ‘physically taping a threatening note’ to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.”
- House Passes Bill That Could Make it Harder for Married Women to Vote by Barbara Rodriguez. “Voting rights groups have said the bill will pose a barrier for millions of American women and others who have changed their legal name because of marriage, assimilation or to better align with their gender identity. An estimated 69 million American women and 4 million men do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.”
- ‘If I Die, I Want a Loud Death’: Gaza Photojournalist Killed by Israeli Airstrike by Hannah Ellis-Petersen. “‘If I die, I want a loud death,’ Hassouna wrote on social media. ‘I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.’”
- Growing Old With HIV is Now Possible. Trump’s CDC Cuts Threaten That Progress by Candice Norwood. “‘The infrastructure of care, prevention and research that has developed over the 40-plus years of this epidemic is virtually being eliminated or drastically reduced to the point that the progress that we have made, and the impact of that progress on people’s lives — the saving of lives — is being threatened.’”
- Sudan in ‘World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis’ After Two Years of Civil War by Rachel Savage. “‘Sudan is now worse off than ever before,’ said Elise Nalbandian, Oxfam’s regional advocacy manager. ‘The largest humanitarian crisis, largest displacement crisis, largest hunger crisis … It’s breaking all sorts of wrong records.’”
- Los Angeles Teachers’ Union Defends Students From Trump’s Anti-Migrant Crackdown by Derek Seidman. “Across the U.S., from Chicago to the Twin Cities, teachers and their unions are stepping up to protect and defend immigrant students and their communities. This organizing isn’t new, but urgency is growing with Trump’s extremist policies.”
- DOGE Aims to Embed Agents in All Nonprofits That Receive Federal Funds by Zane McNeill. “‘This action by DOGE sets a dangerous precedent, leaving any recipient of federal funding — nonprofit, for-profit, and individuals alike — vulnerable to the whims of this destructive group.’”
ICYMI
This week on Movement Memos, I talked with author, organizer, and grassroots strategist Ejeris Dixon. Ejeris and I are longtime friends who’ve spent years thinking and learning alongside each other as we’ve grappled with the fascist threats our communities face. In this week’s episode, we tried to reckon with the severity of our situation and discuss what moves and adjustments we need to make in these times. You can listen to Movement Memos wherever you get your podcasts. You can find a transcript, audio, and show notes here.
Organizing Resources
I firmly believe that the ability to organize public assemblies is going to be an important skill during Trump 2.0. For that reason, I am working to organize a workshop on the subject here in Chicago. If you find the prospect of public assemblies intriguing, I highly recommend checking out the People’s Assembly Toolkit, which was created by the leftist library project For The People (FTP). As FTP explains:
In the space created by PAs [People’s Assemblies], everyone’s voice, thinking, experiences, ideas, and visions receive equal hearing and value. The PAs empower every participant to exercise their agency and power. Accordingly, PAs are a form of direct participatory democracy that places unwavering trust in those assembling.
This is a great resource for the current moment and I hope everyone will check it out.
On Being a Person and Being Together Right Now
Are you tired, friends? Me too. I keep thinking about how worn down I feel, as though I am at the end of a long, back-breaking odyssey, when I know, in reality, we are in the early stages of a long and arduous fight. I know things are going to get worse before they get better, and that they will only get better if we fight. So, I am showing up in all the ways I can, with my seizing back and my aching joints, and I am doing my best. I know many of you are doing the same, and I appreciate you.
I am thinking about what sustainable struggle looks like and what it will mean to organize under shifting conditions and escalating repression. I am also thinking about what nourishes me and what drains me. Today, I took a long walk. I stood under trees and stared upwards at the fresh leaves appearing on their limbs. At one point, a ladybug landed on my shirt, and for the first time this year, I felt that sense of renewal that comes with Spring. Life is happening. My little corner of the world is about to bloom. This nourishes me. Taking long walks without a heavy coat nourishes me. Gazing at the greenness of the season and hearing leaves rustle again—these things nourish me.
Then, I get back to my work.
Can you believe we have to work right now?
I feel like I am on a carousel that’s suddenly spinning at warp speed, and while people are being flung off the apparatus in all directions, I am just sitting on my respective horse, reading and typing and Zooming, because I have to.
As a movement journalist and researcher, I absorb a lot of horrible information. I am constantly learning because I want to make sense of what’s happening in the world in order to help us find a path forward. But amid all of my sense-making efforts, I can sometimes scarcely make sense of my own impulses.
I used to cover my desk with white butcher paper and use markers of various colors to write notes to myself all over it. I would make notes about what I needed to do, when, and what I needed to think about. I would draw circles around my big ideas and mark connections between them.
For months now, I have been avoiding my desk.
I just can’t bring myself to sit there. I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s an aversion to the difficult thoughts I’ve had in that space. Maybe it’s about what I have tried and failed to do while sitting there. Of course, avoiding my designated work area hasn’t helped me avoid my work. Right now, I am sitting in a recliner, where I have done a lot of my typing, reading, and thinking lately. I keep a notebook nearby where I scribble lists, notes, and thought bubbles, in a smaller, less colorful manner than I had on my desk. I haven’t escaped anything my subconscious might be trying to avoid, and yet, the aversion remains.
No matter where I’m sitting, I’m still on that damned, out of control carousel, but is there some part of me that doesn’t know that, or that is simply trying to escape? Is there some fear, sense of failure, or disappointment I haven’t reckoned with that has driven me out of my workspace? Or is it simply not that deep? I honestly don’t know.
So, I just keep doing what I know I have to do, in whatever way I can get myself to do it. Sometimes, I have to listen to my bodymind—my interconnected physical and emotional self, which popular analysis often splits into nonexistent, separate selves—and negotiate with its demands, even if I don’t understand what it’s telling me or why. When we are frightened, grieving, or in survival mode, we can experience impulses, aversions, and desires that may seem inexplicable. I cannot thoughtlessly indulge every impulse, because I may be stuck in a reactive place, psychologically—one that doesn’t allow me to think through long-term consequences, or how my actions may affect others. I also can’t ignore these urges or aversions, because they are communicating something. The message may be muddled and unclear, like a blubbering, tearful child trying to explain their hurt, but it’s real and shouldn’t be ignored.
So, I am doing my work, but not sitting at my desk.
I am also thinking about what it looks like to move sustainably and care for ourselves, not just as individuals, but within our organizations and movements. For many of us, this is go time. But it’s also the beginning of a long-haul fight. How can we make space for our humanity, our grief, our exhaustion, and our basic human and spiritual needs, amid everything that’s happening? How can we give people room to process their frustrations, fears, and disappointments, while also keeping task-focused gatherings on track? Trying to make every gathering a productive, task-based event will end in disaster, because what wells up inside of us will eventually spill out.
We need places to put all of the things that are happening inside of us.
There isn’t enough guidance out there about how to sustainably wage struggle because, traditionally, struggle is not waged sustainably. Some bad patterns need to be broken. As my friend Aaron Goggans once told me:
If we’re honest with ourselves, the model of social movements has been to just throw young people at these crises and not have a plan to take care of them mentally or physically or financially, and to just always assume that there’s another generation of people who are going to spend five years doing it, and as long as there’s enough of us who put in the 20 years to kind of be in leadership positions, we’ll be fine. When that strategy hit a mass disabling event, we realized that there isn’t a bench anymore, and the care network that we all required to reproduce our lives fell apart.
The collapse of care networks Aaron was talking about occurred in the early years of the pandemic, but we are now faced with another era of unraveling. The flawed norms and infrastructure we’ve relied upon are being obliterated. Our future, which was already imperiled by climate chaos, organized abandonment, policing, and militarism, has become even more uncertain, and more immediately so. As universities and research institutions are attacked and defunded, while service agencies are gutted, and the infrastructure of justice work is targeted for destruction, destabilization abounds. These disasters will continue.
To navigate these conditions, we must adapt, experiment, and reconfigure our work as needed. This will be a momentous undertaking, and we can’t do it alone.
Sometimes, when I talk about how to contend with this moment, I am scolded by people who don’t want to hear that they need to connect with others. Some have argued that they are isolated because others have failed them, and that they shouldn’t be expected to place their trust in people. Some simply don’t see the point in gathering or building relationships unless the effort is attached to a blueprint for victory.
The alienation of capitalism has really done a number on us.
To address the first concern, I want to begin by saying: I understand. I have been in that headspace. I have been marginalized, stigmatized, isolated, and betrayed, and left feeling like I could not trust anyone. I remember telling a therapist—who I also did not trust, and was only seeing because I had to, in order to access other services–that I didn’t trust anyone anymore, and that I had more or less given up on other people. This was many years ago. I was wounded in ways I won’t describe here, but I will say that it’s a miracle I survived that period. My therapist urged me to think about trust in practical terms. She said that when I crossed the street, I was putting my trust in drivers who had paused for a red light. I was trusting them not to hit the gas and run me over. I told her, somewhat bitterly, that while I was relying on these people not to kill me, if someone did blast through a red light and plow into me, tossing my body through the air, my last words would be, “That figures.”
I sometimes had to rely on people, but I didn’t trust them. While this exchange might sound fruitless, it was actually constructive. What my therapist got me to acknowledge was that while part of me always expected the worst from people, I still took small risks each day, and in doing so, relied on other people. What she had identified as trust was actually dependence. I was depending on people to abide by certain norms and practices, even if I didn’t necessarily believe in people. I wouldn’t have been surprised if anyone had let me down, but I was willing to take some risks in order to get somewhere.
I started thinking of each mundane risk I took as an experiment. If, under certain conditions, I was willing to rely on people not to kill me with their cars, when else could I potentially rely on people? Eventually, I began to think of social risk-taking, like engaging with someone new or sharing something personal, as an experimental process. I could assess people’s apparent values and motivations, but the only way to find out if we could rely on each other was to try.
I didn’t start with trust. I didn’t have faith. I took small steps, the way I would years later, in physical therapy, when I was recovering from a spinal injury. Each step was its own little risk.
Eventually, I learned to count on people more often—and to extend myself to others cautiously, with firm boundaries. Over time, I made some new friends, repaired some old relationships, and came to rely on people I didn’t necessarily like or want to be close to, but who I knew would show up when it mattered. I knew that, in turn, I would show up for them, too. Because we all have to rely on other people sometimes. Whether we notice or think about our interdependence or not, it’s always there.
For those who see no point in building relationships or gathering with other people when there’s no grand plan, I have a couple of responses. The first is that there are many plans being made and put into motion. I am regularly on organizing calls where people are strategizing about how to meet the moment. Those conversations and the conclusions reached therein may not be blasted across social media—for reasons we should all be able to understand—but it’s folly to assume that plans do not exist because they haven’t been delivered to our doors, without us having to interact with anyone directly. (And can we also acknowledge that the conditions that allow us to expect everything in life to be delivered to us, without us having to interact with other human beings, are unnatural and layered with exploitation? Perhaps this is a clue.) There are many plans being created. Some will work. Some will fail. If you are not engaged in the work of organizing, you probably won’t know what organizers are planning. If you are hoping to find people who are generating strategies and solutions, you probably won’t discover them by posting through it.
But what about situations where there really isn’t a plan? For example, I don’t know anyone with a singular grand design that’s going to get us out of this mess. I believe it’s going to take a lot of us, pushing and pulling on many fronts, from all angles, and that we have to figure out where we fit in. The uncertainty of that arrangement may be unsettling for some people. Hell, it’s unsettling for me. But here’s what I do know: You will be better positioned to survive this mess if you’re not alone.
All of our connections can become lifelines in moments of crisis. I’ve watched this happen with my own eyes and experienced it myself. My collective, Lifted Voices, which was grounded in movement education work, pivoted to mutual aid at the start of the pandemic. We put a lot of food on people’s tables and a lot of masks in people’s hands, at a time when the government was failing them miserably. Organized people can pivot and make things happen much more effectively than individuals.
When we are anchored to each other in fellowship and shared purpose, we are better positioned to do the work of collective survival—and there is no collective liberation without collective survival.
Whether it’s a mutual aid group, a book club, a care web, an affinity group, a union, or a chapter of a membership organization, having people is crucial in these times. Whether you are bound together by policy objectives, shared interests, or a mutual practice of care, organized people have the potential to pool their capacities and accomplish what none of us could achieve on our own. The more organized and accustomed to solidarity work a group becomes, the better positioned they will be to adapt and respond as crises emerge.
To transform our conditions, we must solve problems cooperatively with other people. We are social creatures. We were not built to survive alone. To contribute to or benefit from our collective potential, you must find your people. There is no other way out and no other path forward.
We gather, not because we have a blueprint to share, but because here, on the edge of everything, we are still each other’s best hope.
I am expecting some rough moments in the next week. The Insurrection Act may be invoked soon, and the administration seems ready to wage war on the nonprofit sector, which would undermine crucial service organizations and the pursuit of justice, and imperil a lot of people’s jobs. There will be a lot of scrambling in the days ahead. My advice is to listen to your bodymind, negotiate with your needs and capacity, and remember that we were never meant to face adversity alone. We need to be in this together.
Much love,
Kelly
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