Continued Breakup Files: Illness and Revolution

Here is my dreadful opening.

The ball keeps rolling towards impending doom, and we stand agape. Our minds may roil with things we should or could do, with images of apocalypse or revolution (or the way the two always overlap), with martyrdom and heroism, with shame and violence. The most often refrain is “someone should do something.” In the US, those “someones” who should be doing something often points to those who arm the institutions, at this point mostly the courts trying to stay Trump’s onslaught. Day to day brings endless reversals of they got him, they don’t got him, and regardless of any of this political theater, our people get kidnapped off the streets, Trump and cronies grift every possible aspect of global politics to gild their politics, and genocide becomes further normalized.

Many of my friends and people I admire have taken the opportunity to insist, while acknowledging the terrors of the moment, that we have the power and skills to turn this historical moment towards something more liberatory than fascist. In other words, nothing is inevitable. And I agree, history is contingent. But do we really have it in our hands?

I want to question the common anarchist refrain that we’ve got this: we are already doing this, we have the skills we need. Grow food, stop the bleed, arm up, use underground networks to find safety. Do we just need to scale up and then take the moment to tip the world our way?

What are the things we are most involved in right now?

There are various forms of much needed mutual aid, especially in relation to abortion and trans care. Increasingly, there are networks of getting people vital, basic medicines.

We can sometimes swarm ICE kidnapping attempts, seldom de-arrest. We have inside-outside networks of supporting prisoners (though not necessarily breaking them out).

We hold fundraisers and we send money to Gaza. We do our street medic trainings, queer self-defense. We attend protests, ready for things to pop off, and in those moments, we know how to handle ourselves. And at the very least, we got jail support locked down.

We have community centers and info shops where we host talks and movies and distribute zines and other literature. We have a whole series of podcasts offering analysis and skill-sharing.

We appropriate food and cook for others and ourselves. We have our herbal apothecaries and bodywork practices.

Perhaps in some places, we offer collective childcare (. . . let me know if this happens where you are).

Among disabled and chronically ill people, we try to find ways to make life possible together amidst the utter impossibility of living as a non-worker.

For those of us stuck in violent relationships . . . we still wait for the network that can create safety so that we don’t have the useless pieces of paper the state offers as our only recourse. In the meantime, people trumpet community accountability, and do not much else to mobilize support.