Friday's one thing: Complex + simple
Weekend wish:
Here's a recent pep talk from Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson that I found grounding. I added a little bit of bold emphasis to help folks skim. You can find and share it on Bluesky, on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn. Follow and share Ash-Lee on your platform of choice if you don't already.
Good morning, good people. This is a long one, y’all.
TLDR: What needs to be done in this time requires us to get more comfortable with contradictions and complexity, but doing the right thing, loving your neighbor through your actions, taking collective action to build and sustain our power, and reveal and make evil uncomfortable, is pretty damn simple.
Cue rant: Folks have been asking me a lot lately what I think the universal we should be doing right now. I must say—answering this question for lots and lots of people who live in lots of lots of places requires a superhuman amount of ability to understand the time, place, and conditions that those folks are in—all of which are complex.
It also requires a real understanding of dialectics—that multiple truths can exist at the same time even if they are contradictory to each other, and that, in fact, the struggle/conflict between those contradictions (or opposing forces) might be able to create transformative change.
What is also true—some of the things we should all be doing isn’t that complicated:
1. We need to block the further consolidation of authoritarian and fascistic movements everywhere they’re grabbing for power: whether it’s taking over our governments (local to global) or extracting wealth from our communities at the expense of our people (the corporate billionaires) or both (the broligarchy, corporate dems, etc.).
2. We need to be the weavers of the social, economic, and physical safety net for our people. I don’t mean charity. I mean mutual aid. And let me be clear—mutual aid has to be reciprocal. It’s building community. It’s knowing we all have something to give and gain from being in right relationship. Charity is fine, but mutual aid changes the game, is a political act that breaks the cycle of codependency with systems and people who don’t love the people, but who do think that “helping” them will keep the current social order intact.
3. We have to be noncooperative and noncompliant with evil forces. Not only can we not concede without a fight, we have to give them a fight they can feel. Symbolic interventions are for all of us (including our opposition) to see we’re not alone, find our people, and mobilize them into meaningful actions beyond the symbolic. We also have to get on the offensive and create consequences for the harm they’re responsible for.
A. HOPE-PV has a framework that helps us do this:
a. REVEAL: expose the injustice.
b. REDEEM: validate and re-humanize the people being othered and harmed by the evil.
c. REFRAME: when the evil-doers try to spin the story around their harm, we need to keep naming their actions as wrong and continue to make connections to the bigger picture for our folks.
d. REDIRECT: when the response to the harm gets pushed into slow processes that demobilize our people (courts, commissions, reviews, etc.), we have to channel people’s righteous rage into the meaningful work of direct actions and visible resistance (not just limited to marches and protests but certainly including them).
e. RESIST: we have to build strength and withstand pushback. Protect each other. Expose attacks on our people. Build long-term strength.
4. We have to commit to being the bridges over troubled waters for people who suffer during this time. Not to be saviors of people, but to be good neighbors to people. We don’t deserve a cookie for doing what needs to be done to take care of our folks and keep them safe, especially when we all contributed to the conditions that got us here. We don’t do it for a participation trophy. We can’t be free until everyone is free. We have to build relationships with our neighbors and take collective actions set agendas, to get the change we need, want and deserve, and to sustain that people-powered win. That’s organizing/base-building.
5. Our opposition wants us to be silent and unseen. Our job right now is to be as public in our dissent as possible for as long as possible.
6. Wake up every day and ask yourself, “what can I do today to contribute to the efforts to block this administration from harming people?” and “what can I do today to build the alternatives that meet the needs of our people and keep them safe? How can I love my neighbors through my actions?” and commit to doing, at least, those two things, every single day.
That’s it for now. I’ll be sharing more calls to action soon. Keep blocking and building, being noncooperation and making evil uncomfortable. I love y’all.
