Must-Reads and What D.C. Organizers Need You to Know
"D.C. was able to respond to defend our neighbors quickly," says D.C. organizer Shannon Clark.
Greetings friends,
This week, I’ve got a must-reads list for you, a frontline dispatch from a mutual aid organizer in D.C., and some closing thoughts on how to keep breathing through it all
Must-Reads
- Venezuelan Migrants, a Black Church, and an Experiment in Solidarity by Benji Hart. “What began as a modest effort by a few members of a small congregation to reach out to migrants would evolve into a deep experiment in solidarity — one that would challenge the community to confront its stereotypes of immigrants and change the makeup and the mission of the church for good.”
- Trump is Tightening the Screws on Corporate America — and CEOs are Staying Mum by Maria Aspan. “Corporate America doesn't want to fight with President Trump in public. But as a result, it's ceding him an unprecedented amount of control over the shape — and future — of U.S. business.”
- Teachers Try to Beat the Heat by McKenna Schueler. “All told, Orange County is just one of an estimated 41% of public school districts in the United States that need to update or replace heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in ’at least’ half of their schools, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.”
- Big Tech’s A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone by Ivan Penn and Karen Weise. “The utilities pay for grid projects over decades, typically by raising prices for everyone connected to the grid. But suddenly, technology companies want to build so many data centers that utilities are being asked to spend a lot more money a lot faster.”
- 'Go Home Fascists': Protesters Jeer Federal Agents in Streets of DC by Jake Johnson. “More than 100 protesters gathered late Wednesday at a checkpoint set up by a combination of local and federal officers on a popular street in Washington, D.C., where U.S. President Donald Trump has taken over the police force and deployed around 800 National Guard members as part of what he hopes will be a long-term occupation of the country's capital—and potentially other major cities.”
- Chris Smalls’s Gaza Mission Part of Long History of Black-Palestinian Solidarity by Sonali Kolhatkar. “Israel’s apartheid agenda has been symbolic of Western hegemony for decades. It’s no wonder that links between Black Americans and Palestinians have deep roots.”
- Israel Reportedly Discussing Expelling Palestinians to War-Torn South Sudan by Sharon Zhang. “Expelling Palestinians to South Sudan would mean that Palestinians would go from one humanitarian catastrophe to another.”
- In Kenya, Gen Z Battles Corruption and Police Violence by Nanjala Nyabola. “Every effort at intimidation is met with mockery from a generation from which so much has already been stolen that they have nothing to lose but their chains. The kids are unafraid.”
- I’m a Teenager In Gaza. And I Am Starving by Lujayn. “We have endured unbearable months. Forget what came before; this is the crushing reality of now. Bombing, displacement, and disease gnawing at us with no medicine to fight back. Hunger tearing into every single body.”
- DHS’s Neo-Nazi Memes Show the Agency for What It Is by Melissa Gira Grant. “The message behind this ICE recruitment drive is so casually cruel that it seems like there must be more to it than just some guys got hired at DHS to riff on ideas from white nationalist accounts.”
- 4 out of 5 US Troops Surveyed Understand the Duty to Disobey Illegal Orders by Geraldine Santoso and Charli Carpenter. “When we explicitly reminded troops that shooting civilians was a violation of international law, their willingness to disobey increased 8 percentage points.”
ICYMI
This week, I wrote about Trump’s military occupation of D.C., why clinging to crime statistics is not the best response, and why we must protect anyone chased by the fascists.
D.C. Updates
Many of us are closely watching Trump’s ongoing takeover of the Washington D.C. police department and his deployment of the National Guard in the nation’s capital. On Friday, I was able to connect with Shannon Clark, an organizer with Remora House, which provides material support and advocacy for unhoused and recently housed people in Washington D.C. Shannon offered a frontline view of the violence unfolding—and the solidarity efforts activists are mobilizing in response.
What are you seeing on the ground right now, in terms of policing and how unhoused people are being treated?
Shannon Clark: What’s happening in D.C. is an explicit racist attack on a majority Black city, with majority Black leadership, that is also a Sanctuary city providing defense and support for our migrant neighbors. His goal is to terrorize the city’s residents, and with the help of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the absurd amount of bored federal agents wandering the streets have increasingly targeted predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods over the past week. They are stopping anyone who isn’t white to ask for ID and proof of residency. They are setting up ID checkpoints. They are harassing people sitting on their front porches. They are targeting and kidnapping migrant neighbors doing food deliveries. The National Guard, which has no authority to make arrests, is dramatically staged around the city to remind us as we move about our day that we are under a violent occupation.
The attack on our unhoused neighbors is an escalation in an already escalating attack on the city’s residents. The fact that MPD and federal agencies have been able to speed up the rate of camp evictions is astonishing, given how frequent and expansive camp evictions on both federal and city property have been over the past several years. There is now no notice. Evictions that would have taken hours, so that people could plan, pack, and move, are finished in 30 minutes, with people packing as fast as they can while MPD drags their tents to dump trucks.
Camp evictions are violent, traumatizing, and cruel. People lose their belongings, medical documents, medications, IDs, and birth certificates. Family photos, clothes, and favorite books. Privacy, safety, and protection from the elements. They claim they’re connecting people to services. Not only is that clearly not the goal—how would 850 federal agents from outside of D.C. even know where to begin? Even if that were the plan, there are no shelter beds. People are outside because there is nowhere for them to go, or the options for shelter would force them to separate from their partners, pets, and belongings.
How are you and other community members responding?
While people are exhausted and scared, D.C. residents have shown up in force to defend each other. Evictions were stopped by local advocates, buying people another night of rest and safety. Organizations are getting people into hotels, making sure they are fed, getting them tents and camping supplies, helping them pack and move, and finding safe places to hunker down during the federal takeover. People all over the city are sharing photos and warnings about federal agents patrolling the streets, setting up vehicle checkpoints, and calling into ICE watch hotlines to keep each other safe.
What do you want people to understand about the severity of this moment, and what do you hope they'll do?
The biggest thing people outside of D.C. can do is continue to support these groups. The government is doing nothing to protect us or is actively complicit in this violence. The second thing people should do is connect with mutual aid organizations and networks in their communities. D.C. was able to respond to defend our neighbors quickly because we had so many great networks already in place, ready to respond.
Organizations to support in D.C. right now:
Feed the People (FTP) Mutual Aid
Final Thoughts
Take a deep breath. That’s usually a good idea.
A physical therapist recently told me that in my default mode, I am not breathing deeply enough. A number of things can cause this, including chronic muscle tension, but one explanation got my attention immediately: chronic stress and trauma. Yep, that’s me—Kelly Hayes, also known as a fleshy ball of chronic stress and trauma. It turns out, not breathing deeply enough can lead to heightened stress reactivity (what a vicious fucking circle), low grade fatigue, and other issues that sound exactly like me. I’m not convinced that mindful breathing will fix all my problems, but I’m definitely paying closer attention to what my diaphragm’s doing when I’m supposedly “at rest.”
I already knew a bit about breathing and how it can affect mood, stress levels and reasoning. I learned these things as a street medic and as someone who has frequently engaged in direct action. I used to be adamantly opposed to anything that struck me as even slightly woo, which included deep breathing exercises, until someone taught me that the pace and depth of our breath in high stress situations can impact cognition and emotional stability. That’s not woo, it’s science. Deep breaths stimulate the vagus nerve, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system. This can help buffer the effects of surging stress hormones, and help slow our racing hearts and rising blood pressure. You know that feeling, when you can feel panic pulsing in your chest, and you can barely link one thought to the next? That sense of overwhelm that shrinks the world down to a single, seemingly impossible scenario, and leaves you feeling utterly alone and inept? Deep breaths can help with that. Sometimes. To some extent. The trick is conditioning yourself to do helpful things, like take deep breaths, when your body goes into fight or flight mode.
I’m good at that. I’m one of those people who’s good under pressure. What they don’t tell you about being good under pressure is that it often means you’re bad at the everyday business of life. On an ordinary day, I’m hypervigilant—always, and I mean always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Apparently, my body doesn’t even know how to inhale and exhale correctly unless I am breathing strategically because something has gone sideways.
Why am I oversharing about breathing? Because I suspect that, in addition to some of you being likewise traumatized and fundamentally nervous, others may be experiencing something similar for the first time. Maybe you feel more tired lately. Maybe you’re taking short, shallow breaths all the time because you’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe you’re a mess. Maybe that’s new.
Welcome.
This is a hard time to be a person who gives a fuck. Every day, some fresh horror drops. This week, for example, in addition to the military and police shit show in the nation’s capital, I learned that a start-up called Foundation is pitching the sale of armed humanoid robots to the Trump administration. The assholes behind this company have suggested that one possible use for their robots (which are currently used for menial industrial work) could be patrolling the border. If that weren’t ugly enough (and it is), this week also brought news that Meta’s chatbots had been authorized to engage in “romantic” and “sensual” conversations with children. (After being confronted by the Wall Street Journal, Meta made changes to its bots and its policies regarding underage users and explicit content.) To make matters worse, Meta’s “Big sis Billie” chatbot invited a man with a cognitive disability to come meet her at her nonexistent address in New York City. He was killed in an accident trying to get there.
People are starving in Gaza and the Trump administration is plotting a military strike in Mexico. Yes, I said Mexico.
This is no country for shallow breaths.
Being human in inhuman times is exhausting, and it’s not going to get easier anytime soon. I wish I could tell you that it would. I want to be able to name the tactic we can all embrace, or the attitude we can all adopt, or the language we can all use that will change the shape of everything. Believe me, I wish I could gift-wrap the answer for you. But there’s no one answer. The other day I attended a training where the facilitator noted that everyone probably wanted to hear about one thing that they could do, and to hear that they would only have to do it once, in order to get us out of this mess. I chuckled at the truth of that. But of course, that’s not how a devastating mess works. We’re in deep. It’s going to take a lot of time, work, sacrifice, and creativity for us to wind up someplace else.
So, we have to inch along. Make decisions. Do what we think is right. Experiment. Fuck up. Help people. Take care of each other. Fuck up. Try again. Build things. Watch them get knocked down. Hold each other. Build again. Sob. Hold each other. Take deep breaths. Always, deep breaths. Not just when we’re walking into obvious disaster, and our hearts are sprinting away from us, but right now, while we’re sitting and thinking about being a living, breathing human in a world where armed robots might patrol the border, and a chatbot might say god knows what to a child, and the US might bomb something in Mexico, and police in the nation’s capital answer to a Nazi game show host, because no matter how bleak things may seem, people are worth fighting for.
People are worth fighting for.
People are worth fighting for.
So, breathe.
Deeply.
Slowly.
Now, keep doing that.
I’m talking to myself as much as you.
Breathe.
Hate being told to do that? Me, too.
I know a lot of you also hate the word “resilient,” because resilience is an expectation that often gets lobbed at people in lieu of justice. It’s a valid complaint, and yet, we’re all going to figure out how to fortify ourselves, because our resilience will be tested again and again.
In order to make a difference, you have to care about what’s happening. When harm is perpetual, caring is exhausting. That fatigue isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the pain. So, do what you can, where you can. Take deep breaths. Hydrate. And make time for what heals you. This weekend, I am getting together with some dear friends to watch Star Trek. We’re going to binge some of my favorite episodes and eat good chocolate. That sounds like a small thing, but I have been looking forward to it all week. I am going to laugh, get emotional and nerd out with people I love. I will be more able to face the day on Monday because I made that time.
I will be more able to face whatever comes next.
That’s the rhythm we need now: care, connection, and action—each making the others possible. So, if you can, do some good today. Consider donating to one of the mutual aid organizations linked above. Think about how you are connecting with others and advancing your skills to address the threats we face. Then, take a deep breath and take care of yourself.
Much love,
Kelly
Organizing My Thoughts is a reader-supported newsletter. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today. There are no paywalls for the essays, reports, interviews, and excerpts published here. However, I could not do this work without the support of readers like you, so if you are able to contribute financially, I would greatly appreciate your help.
