Riding the red wave: November 10 update
“The fluidity of our memory, our capacity to forget, is the most haunting trait of our species. It accounts for why we are able to adapt to almost any degree of environmental or moral degradation.” Wade Davis
On election day, I hitched a ride into Clayton, New Mexico. The weather had changed and a blizzard was coming in. I was in a part of western Kansas where there were no trees, buildings or wind breaks and my winter camping gear hadn’t arrived yet. So I stood at an intersection with one road leading to Dalhart, Texas and the other to Clayton. Texting back and forth with my beloved friend, Aurora, one of the people who has deeply accompanied me across the span of this walk, I waited to see what would happen. Seven hours went by with some cars passing but not stopping, including a number of cars with Minnesota and Wisconsin plates, snowbirds leaving the north for their trailers and second homes in the southwest. I was ready to give up and walk four miles back to a town that had a small motel and not much else when a van pulled by. Heading to Clayton, the driver spent the next hour telling me stories of reptile people, aliens and the dangers of Vitamin A.
When I got into town, there were jeeps going up and down Main Street covered in Trump flags and signs. People were cheering and the energy was joyful, like a Pride parade, as opposed to the aggression that I often experience when Trump-draped cars drive by. I’m in Clayton for a few days because we are about to get a blizzard. A few minutes ago I was in a coffee shop in town asking about where I would go to help if heavy snow came and the electricity went down. This led to a conversation about community care and safety and how people show up for each other when times are vulnerable.
I was and am not surprised by the outcome of the election - by the red wave of it. I feel like I have been riding that red wave ever since central and western New York. And I don’t know about you, but every time I write the phrase “red wave” I remember high school when I had forgotten to bring a pad or tampons with me and red blood sheeted down my legs. When I hear the phrase on the news, I wonder if they are giggling inside. I also know that there wasn’t really a red wave, just a much smaller blue wave, but the immersion in a different political truth for the last five months has felt like a red wave to me.
After the results came in, I had three different beloveds reach out and ask me if I needed help getting home to Minnesota or a safe place where there would be others more like myself. I appreciated the question, the love behind it, and I responded that here in Clayton, Trump flags flying, is exactly where I want to be. When here, I shared, the “they” who voted for Trump feel less frightening and like a singular block than they would from my home in Minneapolis.
***
The blizzard came in and there are about 8 inches outside the motel I am staying in. The roads through town are closed and I heard that there are ranches around us that have 12 and 18 inches of snow. This motel is packed and right now there are eight or nine white guys drinking beers in the front where there are couches, laughing and telling stories. Another group of people are playing board games on the little tables. I sat in for a while talking with folks and not a person was talking about the election. That has largely been true on this walk. I have said before and it is still true: more people want to talk with me about God than politics. And not in an “if you accept Jesus you will be saved” way but instead in a way that is about shoring up faith in something bigger than our humble lives.
***
As people who have been reading these blog posts know, I have been wrestling with and listening to the experience of fear - my fear and the fear of those who I encounter - as part of trying to understand what gets in the way of living on this land in a good way together. My own fear has been annoying. It is usually a primal response to being among strangers as opposed to a response to something that is actually happening in front of me. A few weeks ago, as I was walking into western Kansas and the land kept opening up and up, no trees, no towns, no walls or containment, my fear rose hard and hot and made me sit down right there on the edge of the wind. I sat and listened, wondering at this strange spirit, this choke of fear that could so quickly fill my arms and legs and face without any real provocation. I looked around to remind myself that I was not in danger. There were cars and trucks passing on the road, but it was a pretty isolated area and so they didn’t pass by often. I had plenty of food and water with me and if I wanted to stop right now, there was an old farm building just off on the left where I could go and set up my tent and huddle in my sleeping bag, listening to the coyotes. This is what I mean by primal: it’s the shared fear of survivorship that many of us have, a fear that crops up in those of us who have not grown up in relationship to land and life as something that does not need other people or walls. As I sat and listened to this fear, let it fill me and show itself, I started to sense what was just beneath its surface. It was a dropping feeling, you probably have felt it, too, when some habit or pattern suddenly softens enough to open up and let our awareness sink deeper. And for me, what was resting there just below the fear was this feeling of powerlessness.
I started to write about this in my last update. I didn’t know at the time that this word, this concept was going to keep working its way through me.
Feeling powerlessness in open land that is not deeply familiar to me, without a clear understanding of where I would sleep that night or of how to read the wind should it shift into something colder, was uncomfortable. Not dangerous. Not overwhelming. But very uncomfortable. And as I sat there, prickles from the plants itching into my butt and legs, something else rose up. One of those teachings that come from someplace other than your brain: there is a difference between powerlessness and collapse. Notice this, the feeling said. This is important.
Collapse is part of our survival responses. It’s the gift of our ancestors, a last try before we meet certain death. Imagine a deer held in the jaws of a wolf. Collapse is when that deer’s body suddenly totally drops down to the ground, releases into gravity. It is a letting go through a total softening of the muscles and this sudden let go is instinctive. When there is a sudden drop in weight and muscle tone like this, the predator, in this case the wolf, might startle, open their mouths and release the deer. If that happens, the flight response kicks in and the deer can run to escape. If you watch wildlife videos, you’ve seen this happen. The prey is in the jaws of death and something distracts the predator like collapse and the prey animal escapes and races off to safety. Usually the narrator’s voice goes up and high, communicating excitement as we all watch the underdog succeed.
Sometimes this first stage of collapse, this releasing into gravity, isn’t enough and then the second part of the collapse pattern comes on line. That is when part of the spirit of the deer leaves their body, contracts away from their senses so that they can no longer feel pain or fear in the face of their own death. This is an incredibly generous gift from our ancestors. I have had friends and family members experience this second state, a sort of calm detached drifting away when their body was experiencing intolerable pain.
For the deer, falling into collapse and then suddenly being able to flee and escape is the culmination of the survival responses. After they are safe again, their bodies go through a series of movements and soundings to release the intense charge of their survival responses. After this, they settle back to regular life. If they are unable to release this charge, they will likely die. You’ve maybe seen this when someone you know captured a squirrel or a mouse, trapped it and then let it go to escape back into the trees but instead, the animal couldn’t move. Over a day or maybe two, it curled into itself and died. This is what happens when collapse doesn’t resolve and for these kin, there are no other ways to come back into life.
Most humans also don’t settle from collapse into regular life so easily, although only sometimes are we like the mouse or the squirrel. We are different because we have this wonderful and annoying frontal cortex. We can hold stories and meaning making in our brains, think through the what ifs and the should haves, running over and over them like a tape. We can look for places to put the blame that is outside of our bodies, that helps us feel powerful even if we were in a dangerous situation. We can do this whether or not the danger is actually over, creating a story that we attach to and repeat again and again when the charge of our survival starts pushing to get out.
It is very rare that most of us have had the opportunity to move that charge through us until it has been integrated and changed. When it isn’t moved through us, it freezes, waiting for a someday release. This does not only happen with the worst case trauma you can think of. This kind of collapse and freeze can happen when the wildness of your childhood meets an authoritarian parent or system and some part of your freedom is contracted into obedience when that obedience is not natural to life. And because we are children and have no power, collapse becomes frozen in the body and prevents the body from moving fully into life. And generations go by and this freeze keeps being handed forward and soon it is described as culture.
And sometimes this collapse occurs because of systemic or structural violence that shows up as both direct acts of harm and an environment of harm in which your people, your way of being, is continually threatened or minimized or attacked and you can’t get away because it is everywhere.
Like all held trauma, this held collapse is constantly looking for a way to complete itself, to be released and end. By now it is fairly common knowledge that this is what happens when you experience a trigger or time travel. Something in the present moment kicks at the post it notes attached to that held collapse (or held fight or held flight or held freeze) and it starts unraveling and filling your body, acting as though the present moment is the same as what happened many years ago, moving your body and mind like a marionette in its desire to finish and release.
And so there on the edge of the road, as I was sitting amid the prickles and wind, I heard this: powerlessness is not the same as collapse. And something in me, this space below that fear and wondering, started to clarify. First, powerlessness does not automatically mean that you are in danger. Powerlessness means not having power in a moment, around an issue or an event. It does not mean by definition that you are being disempowered. It does not mean by definition that violence is taking place although all of those things could happen. Powerlessness is something that happens in the present moment. It is what shows up anytime we thought we had the power to do a thing and we were wrong. We were powerless to shift the outcome of this conflict, this election, this cutting down of this forest, this police response, this military funding and intent, this breakup, this cake that wouldn’t set, this garden that needed more rain, this sentence we spoke that was understood differently from how we meant it, this curb that we tripped over, hurting ourselves and spraining our ankle. In these moments, we are powerless and that is just a true thing. We might be powerful at the same time, powerful with the collective mobilization and the frameworks and the brilliance of our policy statements, powerful with our relationship with the cedar we were fighting to protect, powerful with the clarity of our beliefs and our commitments, powerful in knowing how to bake, to garden, to speak and be in relationship, and to heal. Knowing that we are powerless in a moment does not preclude also being powerful. But avoiding the truth that we are powerless and only focusing on how we are powerful, this is where I began to wonder.
Woven through our movement spaces and communities, there is often a confusion about the difference between collapse (giving up, it is done, we are preparing for death) and powerlessness (we thought we knew and understood and were ready but we weren’t or they were stronger). Some of us come from people who have had to build power in the face of generational structural or early childhood powerlessness (or both) and some have not. Positionality is always key to how we experience what I am talking about. Some of us were raised in families that helped us to see this powerlessness and to know it without denying the truth of our power. But most of us were not, or were not all the way or in all contexts. And the more generations your people have been in the United States and similar cultural spaces, the more that you have absorbed the American idea of progress which is all about denying powerlessness no matter what. If we think about it hard enough, pour enough resources into the problem and conveniently forget what is hard and uncomfortable by just holding on to a different story, the more we can avoid the feeling of powerlessness.
Powerlessness is fairly pragmatic. It just is. It happens. It is real. It teaches us that we thought we were ready and understood a situation or context and we did not.
When I first started breathing with this on the walk, it was before the election but in the midst of headlines that pointed to another escalation of despair and violence in Gaza. I had just talked with friends who have been putting almost all of their life towards ending the genocide and they were sharing how hard it was to watch the numbers at protests and gatherings slowly diminish. One woman I spoke with was frantic in trying to think of new ways to mobilize, strategize and act and I asked her, can you pause for a moment and notice that everything you have been part of trying has not ended things? That you have fought with everything you have and so far it has not worked? Just pause and notice it and see what rises. This is not about giving up. It is about deepening. And again, doing this is possible because our bodies in this moment are not in danger, even as our sense is possibility is.
In working with my friend and with my own body, here is what I started to notice. Facing and being with the truth of powerlessness, the actual fact of it, noticing when it twines together with old traumas and collapse and attending to those and then coming back to this physical awareness of powerlessness - we tried, we gave it everything we had and we did not win or it did not turn out as we needed it to - really being with it does not bring us to despair, although that might be a stage that we move through and work with, but in the end, it seems to bring us someplace else. It seems to bring us to humility. A kind of right sizedness, of being one part of a series of relationships and potentials. It seems to bring a kind of rest, deep in the bones rest, that is not often available in the midst of this work. And not rest as stopping but rest as shoring up for the longer term.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t also rage and grief and exhaustion and despair and bitterness and terror and avoidance and so many other things that also rise when trying to feel and orient to the truth of powerlessness, but if we stay with it, really stay with it, something else comes in. It always does. A lot of time in healing work, there can be this feeling of gratitude that rises with the resolution of old pain. With powerlessness, what kept showing up in me and in others I have talked with is humility which is, funnily enough, a cousin feeling to gratitude. It’s a feeling of connection, of being both our specific glorious lives while connected at the same time. Of being a part of something bigger.
I thought about this again as I listened to a range of truly stellar organizing meetings that have been available since the election results came through. They have been glorious, this commitment of groups of people who have been thinking through strategies and scenarios based on the many different outcomes. I have felt moved by the care and attention and smarts in these gatherings and also, while I am marveling and am moved, I hear these words: remember we are not powerless. Feel your feelings, let them move through you, but remember that this is not a time for despair. We have things we can do. This is not the end.
You are not powerless. We are not powerless.
I want to whisper back, yes yes, thank you, my god thank you for what you are holding and building and for your wisdom and strength. Thank you thank you… and can we pause for just one second and look at each other and say, we know a lot but there was something here we didn’t know. Something we didn’t get right. It isn’t enough to just blame it on white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism, although hello it is about that, too. But there is also something else, something that we did not have the power to understand, act upon or change.
Can we pause for a second there and notice the outcomes we have been powerless to change, notice them, feel them and then see what arises? How would our organizing be affected by a deepened sense of humility and connection? How does this potentially respond to the many organizers who are newer in their practices who turn to those who have been in it for a long time and ask: how do you stay when it is this hard?
I am telling the story of the organizing calls for the purpose of this writing. That confrontation of powerlessness could very well be what is happening between and among the comrades who then prepare their framing and sharing for when they are facing a literal faceless crowd of thousands who are showing up and asking them what they should do. These meetings are about organizing and education, they are not the space for the thousands on the calls to slow down for this kind of self and collective reflection, to move through that powerlessness if it is there and see what comes up.
But we can do this, on our own time and with our own crew, we can.
***
There is another reason why this is important. When we do not face and contend with the truth of our powerlessness, there is a charge. As I shared before, this feeling of powerlessness in the present moment weaves together with the many times we have either felt collapse or a dangerous feeling of powerlessness in our past. That charge has to go somewhere. In the beloved movements that I claim as home, I am watching that charge go sideways. In fighting and picking sides and assigning blame. Ironically, we are contradicting our own values of community and love and respect and dignity and collective care and recognizing the complexity of histories and how they shape the present moment. As often as we are accusing the other side of doing the same thing.
This is also about fighting for our lives.
***
As I shared, I have been in the red wave since western NY with a few brief forays into progressive or radical worlds. I have met a lot of people who have held their noses and circled Trump on their ballot, just as I have met and know of people who have done the same in voting for Harris. I have rarely met people who are rooted in the hatefulness that Trump espouses even as I know they are out there but they are not the ones who are curious about me, the stranger walking through their community. If anything, when I have had the chance to have conversations with people, I have been surprised to notice that we agree with many of the base struggles in this country, but we metabolize those agreements differently. We end up in different places.
It was sometime in 1987 that I was hitchhiking around the United States. I had been living in England for about five years and had come back for a year before returning to England. I was 24 years old. When I reached California, I stopped for a month or so to help put in a garden for this guy who lived in Mendocino County, about an hour from Fort Bragg. I have long forgotten his name but what I remember is this: he was in the process of trying to sell a book that named names, outlining the cohort of white Christian men who had come together right after the Civil Rights Act passed to outline a strategy for “taking America back.” His book was showing how the Reagan Administration was the first deep success of the cultural change needed to roll back the work of racial, gender and economic justice. He knew that he could sell the book to lefty publishers but then it would circle around in its own private space, not reaching those who didn’t already believe. More mainstream publishers wouldn’t take the book because they said it read like conspiracy theory and not journalism.
Now, in 2024, we know that this is not an empty conspiracy, even if we can’t completely track the path. Overlapping circles of newly created organizations and caucuses keep moving forward this ideology of taking America back/Making American Great Again and it’s only been recent years where this ideology could be talked about as directly as it has been. If Reagan was the first success story for moving culture towards the Right, Trump is the second. It is not unimportant that both are and were entertainers.
I keep thinking about the 1990s, when the new coalition between fundamentalist Christians and economically conservative Republicans was building on their success with Reagan. In the 1990s, the primary mobilization techniques and fundraising appeals focused on three things: homosexuality, abortion and the story of the welfare mother. Homosexuality and abortion were the strategies for the fundamentalist Christian side. The “welfare mother” was for the white supremacists and eager capitalists who didn’t want to give any of their wealth to anyone but their banker… and “welfare mom” was code for - Black single mothers in cities. Black single mothers. Black women.
Since the 1990s, September 11th and the response to it, the global reorienting into neoliberalism led by both Republicans and Democrats, along with some parts of white supremacy inflamed by Obama’s presidency, shaped the first decade of the 21st century. Those working to elect Trump during his first presidency dusted off the old strategies to mobilize Christian evangelical and economically afraid folks again. Now instead of homosexuality, it’s transgender lives. Abortion is still the same and that many-years strategy successfully defeated Roe v Wade. And then the language about freeloaders and those who are not entitled to help because they are lazy and manipulative transferred from “welfare moms” to “illegals.” It’s the same strategy with a slight shift in the personalities attached.
I write this to remind myself and you that this is not new and it is even older than the Civil Rights Act. The same strategies and languages have been used since first wave colonization and in our timeline of the Healing Histories Project, we show some of how these things emerged and shapeshifted over time. I am sharing it here to underline how layered and long practiced the context is that surrounds those who have no real access to information other than the stories that keep repeating these false threats. Sadly, it works and our side, however you would describe it, can’t fight fear with fear. We don’t have big enough weapons or use the same kind of social power.
***
It matters that most of the people I have met who are voting for Trump are not people who hate. They are not repeating or aligning with his hate speech and his commitment to Project 2025. That doesn’t mean their vote is separate from that or they are not accountable for whatever might happen as a result of his victory nor does it dismiss the very real planning to push forward a heavily authoritarian agenda and our need to prepare and counter it, but their lived experience of WHY those I have met are voting this way doesn’t include the narrative that we on the Left often put on top of their bodies.
If anything, what I heard repeated most often from those I have talked with on this walk is the resentment towards wealthy liberally educated folks in Cities/Washington DC who keep making decisions that don’t take into account the truth of their lives. I am walking through rural counties that are either majority white or a mix of white and Latine or majority Latine and where the poverty rates are between 15 and 40%. I am walking through small towns filled with storefronts that are empty and boarded up, in the same way that businesses have been boarded up in north Minneapolis and other mostly urban Black and poor/working communities. I keep thinking that, while we on the Left are good at talking about extraction when talking about colonization and appropriation, we aren’t as clear on it when talking about how dependent our urban centers are on the rural communities around them. And how little payback regular folks in rural communities see from their labor which is then turned into the goods and energy that keeps the cities moving.
What I keep encountering, sometimes covered in bluster and sometimes a shoulder shrug, is powerlessness; a form of it that doesn’t make it into the manifestos of the organizations I love. Or at least, not most of them.
Scot Nakagawa wrote this in a letter he sent out on the day the returns came in:
“Imagine this for a moment: You’re a rural voter in a county where you and your neighbors all lean a certain way politically, but time and time again, your vote gets overshadowed by dense urban centers full of people who are in no position to acknowledge and support you but who get to decide the state’s outcomes. When that is a pattern that recurs year after year, the words “the election was stolen,” gain a special resonance.
You may not even believe the election was stolen, but you may decide to spread this idea and support actions to overturn election outcomes as a means of being heard, of having your sense of being cheated by the way the votes are counted and distributed gain you an audience, even if only among others who feel like you do. And once you are among people who feel as you do, then, the lie becomes a means of building community in circumstances in which you may be feeling powerless and isolated, and a vehicle outrage over the way rural voices seem not to count in a system supposedly built on fair representation.”
As I walk, I notice again and again: we do not live in the same United States. I am constantly in conversation with people whose news stories and experiences and series of facts are completely different from the ones surrounding me. It isn’t even apples and oranges; it’s apples and granite rocks. Or apples and car manifolds. There is no place to have a conversation about “facts” because there is no shared ground to speak from. And the cultural languages we use to make sense of the world are not the same. A friend of mine, Beth Zemsky, helped me understand what I was experiencing when she told me that my people and those I share movement with interpret the world through a political lens that looks at power and oppression and history. The communities I am moving through interpret the world more often through a religious values lens and the two sets of stories and interpretations are the apples and granite rocks that keep bruising each other.
***
I am currently walking through Apache land. It was colonized by Spain first and was part of Spain and then Mexico for far longer than it has been part of the United States. When becoming a territory and then a state, there were fights over whether or not New Mexico would legalize enslavement, meaning the enslavement of Black people. The Civil War was right around the corner so New Mexico never really had this kind of enslavement although it was not completely absent. But the enslavement of indigenous people was common from before The Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, when the US officially “took over” this land. The last formally recognized Apache raids meaning resistance to occupation happened in the late 1880s, a few years before my great grandmother was born. This was all yesterday and this always shapes anything we talk about today. Including the strategies we build to meet the present moment.
I have had a surprising number of conversations with farmers and ranchers on the southern Plains, all Trump supporters, who have told me the importance of learning land management from indigenous people, and that the American land practices which led to both the Dust Bowl and a rapidly drying up water table are a point of shame.
These are not the stories we think about when we talk about the people who are voting for Trump.
*******
I know there are people reading this who I have met on the walk and who have made different political choices than I have. I want to say that cruelty is rising, that it has been emboldened by Trump winning. There were enough people who asked me as I was walking for some kind of proof of the fear that so many of us were holding. This is part of it. He has not even been sworn in yet and still, the cruelty is heartbreaking
Stories flow through my feed and my personal texts of anonymous messages sent to Black adults and children about enslavement, high school boys singing out some version of “your body, our choice” to women students, and then so many other stories of individual white men targeting Black women, white women, and queer people in hateful ways. I had to pause for a moment and think, is what is written here really what I want to say? My own anger rose up and I wondered if the people I met on this walk, you might be reading this, as well as the people back home, if you saw this happening in front of you, would you stop it?
One of the things I know is that there is too often a difference between how we show up as white people with other white people versus how we show up with Black people and other people of color. I know this. I spent some time with this, remembering it. Feeling some amount of powerlessness about it. And feeling humbled by it.
And then committing again.
***
There are going to be many strategies that start to rise as we think about what our next steps are. Some of them will be new and many will not. Some of them will focus on working to keep our people safe because we will need to do that. We need to do that now. Some of them will look to build shared commitments and goals as part of multi-organizational movements for both electoral change and broader long term change. Some will focus on healing and care and the support needed to stay in this for the long term. Every single one of these fronts is deeply important and works best when the various strategies stay talking with each other, stay in communication.
But the strategy we don’t talk as often about, not outside of canvassing and campaigning for a specific issue, is the long term relationship work that wants to bring softness into places where the lines are really hard.
I met a man a week or so ago. A ranch manager whose people lived in the area for about three generations. We talked for a few hours about all kinds of things, God and the world and how we best help our children and grandchildren to feel a sense of possibility. At the end of our conversation, he said to me: I have always wondered if I would recognize an angel if they showed up on earth and sitting here today, I am happy to say that yes, I recognized her.
Now I am not telling you this to lift myself at this moment. After months of talking with folks whose worldview is very Christian, I could hear this as something about him and his experience and not specifically about me. So I asked him what about this conversation made him feel that way. He said, this is the first time that I have ever talked with someone whose beliefs about the world are so completely different from mine who did not once shame me, try to teach me, or argue with me but who only listened in a way where I felt respected and heard. I stopped and told him that I was glad he had experienced that and what did he think was possible because of it.
I can’t remember the words he shared specifically because my feelings were starting to rise and to cloud my hearing, it was a very emotional moment, but he said something like: well it softens me. Now when I hear about or from people who think about the world like you do, I will probably not dismiss them right away as crazies and people who are mentally ill or just the victims of propaganda.
And we hugged and then he drove away. And I kept walking, moved by our time together and therefore changed.
On its own, this is not enough. And it matters. It matters because anything that supports real connection with kin - whether people or trees or birds or the soil - is what life hungers for. It’s what our ancestors designed us to be able to do. But it is strongest as part of the many strategies outlined above, as maybe a kind of spiritual or cultural relationship work that goes alongside our work to name stories and dangers in ways that help make visible the layers of threat that impacts so many of us, this softening is part of our work.
I even hesitate to name it as part of a strategy because it is not a plan, but a reweaving. It is not filled with goals but filled with the space to let something connect that was separate before. It’s about where the places of relationship and intimacy might be possible so that there are other options beyond this profoundly polarized reality.
And within that, maybe it is also about helping real people, people who do not want to be a part of collective systems of hate and violence, helping them, and helping us to be braver than we have been before. The work of stepping out from the collective that has always kept us safe, stepping out so that we can follow what might feel like a contradiction in our gut, that is spiritual work and it is relationship work. Political education is only useful when the other parts have already been supported in some way.
And I’m going to say again: for it to be real change that means that you are going to be changed as well. It doesn’t just go in one direction. But I know you already know that.
As I have shared in this writing and in At the Fork in the Road, there are a number of teachings or directives that I carry on this walk. One is the Prophecy of the Seventh Fire and the other is the directive I have heard from many a Black and Brown beloved: white folks go and get your people. While I don’t think that walks - whether for a day or a year - are only available to white folks nor is it only white folks that I am talking with, I do know that it is white folks, especially white men, who are voting for things that cause harm, whether they can see it or not, to many who are beloved to me and to our descendants. Far too many of us have used this directive to try and convince white people how to be better white people, to educate and push and demand. And while that has worked with those who were ready for it to work, it has largely fallen flat.
The reason I am saying, leave and go be a stranger among strangers, need them and be open hearted to them and love them, literally physically love them, is because love is really the best weapon we have. Love and care and respecting the dignity and agency of the person we meet, and believing what they tell us, and not trying to change them as part of a ten point plant but instead trusting something else. I have worked with many people who have tried to do this within their families and have struggled with how tight everyone’s walls were. I think that doing this within our families is the hardest. It is easier to walk among strangers but in doing this work first among those who meet us as new people, we tend to soften and change in ways that might make it easier to do it with those who already know us.
When I was pregnant, I had a conversation with Ricardo Levins Morales. I knew that Ricardo was a parent from a multigenerational family of artists and activists and I knew that his children had grown up to care about the world and to shape themselves in a continuation of that artistic and organizing commitment. I asked him how he taught his children, what he did. He said to me: we always told our kids the unembellished truth about the world around them and then let them decide how they felt about it. We didn’t tell them how to think, how to feel or how to be. We gave them information and love and the experience of community and connection and then trusted that forces much older than our will would shape them into being people who cared from a place of connection. And it did.
About ten years before my walk began, I had a dream of hundreds of people stepping out of their homes and just beginning to move. To walk up to a stranger and greet them. Ask how they could help and what they could do. To listen and wait, truly wait, and trust something other than the limited capacity of our minds to envision change.
When a person or a people have been hurt time and time again, it can be very difficult to trust. This is the spiritual part of life, the place where faith and connection to something other than human will and strategy live. This dream is not a directive. But it is a wish. After all, relationships need us to stretch outside of where we are comfortable, otherwise we will just keep circling ourselves in reframe after reframe without any change at all.
On the second week of this walk, I called my friend Marie and cried and said to her, my god, Marie, I like people again. I lost this feeling over these last years but it’s back and I like, I love people again, with all of our foibles and dramas and self centered actions and forgetting and protecting and defending and denying. With our glories and complexities and the comet’s tail of histories that have made us who we are. I like people again.
I like people again. Our awkward, foolish and very young species of mammalian urges and hungry minds. Our capacity for violence and our capacity for love. I like people again.
I don’t think revolution is possible without it. Or, at the very least, I am not sure we can prevent war without it.
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And my Patreon site for those wanting to support this walk. Thank you again to those helping to make this possible.
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Oh, and about that quote at the top of this piece. I love it, truly love it. I also know that when Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist with good relationships with many people from Native nations, shared this quote with Native friends and colleagues, they said but no, this is not a species thing. This is your people’s thing. We have ways of remembering, of staying connected so that our forgetting doesn’t turn into a weapon. We haven’t needed to forget to survive. And Wade acknowledged this and forever after, when he spoke about forgetting, he talked about this as something not shared by all but, unsurprisingly, found in those cultures and communities who have normalized violence as justification for how they exist.