You Are Also Just A Person
Liberation begins at the root.
“After all, radical simply means, “grasping things at the root.” — Dr. Angela Y Davis. From her book Women, Culture, & Politics, excerpted from her speech, "Let Us All Rise Together: Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This post originally appeared on my personal Facebook profile, so I addressed it to a domestic audience and folks generally in the sphere of ‘comrade.’ Thus the framing and assumption of who my audience is.
The last 12 months have not only made my political commitment more ruthless and methodical, it has also fully cemented my commitment to anarchistic matriarchal values, and made me a lot more wary of who I listen to and whose opinions I take seriously.
I have talked about how much of a well-meaning but traumatized keyboard thug I was when I was younger, and how much work it took to help me more deeply align my embodied experience with my intellectual and political values. Compassion is a constant discipline. Constant. And it begins at home, in your personal beingness.
The more I listen to my ancestors and my elders, the more I turn to organizers who live and breathe the hard work, the more I am sure that most of y'all have no fucking idea what you're talking about, don't want to know what you're talking about, or have a foggy bleating fuck of a clue about how to embody the values you claim to rep with any sort of consistent baseline of integrity in the world if you tried.
Primarily because 'goodness' and 'enoughness' and 'rightness' - which are the ultimate individualist values - still have most of your asses in a chokehold of dysregulated terrorism and, for lack of a better way to put this, patsy ignorance.
I realized this about myself about 7-8 years ago, when Layla Saad decided it would be cute to treat me like dirt (baruch hashem, thank you my sister for the opportunity to learn about myself and grow as a being.) That prompted a LOT of deep soul-searching and self-reflection about the critiques I had about the whole situation, our respective roles, and what that whole experience did for myself. It also led me to reflect on how I handled several other scenarios, including and most notably my address of Kelly Diels.
You can say a lot of things about me, but lacking for a desire to create tangible impact ain't one. And. I realized this is *not* true of a...lot of people. The folks who are busy doing the thing and getting the work done always have a much more wide-lensed, complicated-and-non-sound-byteable, grounded, meditative, and careful analysis of being with the world, even when spitting fire and doing the bold and scary shit. I have always wanted to be that type of person in the world: genuinely powerful, principled, and effective.
But that requires coming to grips with the existential question of who we are as beings, what we owe and are to one another, questions of free will and agency...the works. And our society is very explicitly designed to encourage you to forsake that conversation and to disempower yourself by default, including by pretending "the others" are the problem, and you are the "good"/"right"/"enough" person, always, no matter the situation or the day.
You are not. You are a person. We're all people.
That's what makes violent bigots, power-hungry shitbags, and Elon Musk so despicable and terrifying: we share the same base element. We are all the prima materia of Saturn. Under the right combination of alchemical circumstances, with a slight tilt to the left or right in the fate patterns, arriving to one place or another even 30 seconds early or late, and with the same misapplication of will, you, too, could find yourself being an unrepentant monstrous villain and enacting depravity, violence, pain, and destruction in the world, all while being utterly positive of the intentions of your mind and heart.
So the question of justice and righteousness is more about putting yourself in the shoes of people you revile, and then honestly and sincerely asking yourself how they got there, and then coming to terms with having to be responsible and agency-filled around doing the work to fix that path to depravity. Including being responsible for your own contributing to the violence, even if you were sat on the sidelines and had your back turned while it happened, or, you know, you were an infant.
And most of y'all can't even do that with your own trauma, on a personal level, in your own home, community, neighborhood, let alone apply this praxis to the ills of the world which encompasses millennia of histories known and unknown, spoken and unspoken, buried and burning in wildfires and the existential collapse of climate crisis.
So it goes. Forever and forever.
Because Gd is eternally change and so is liberation.
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