It’s October 30th, 2024 at the time of this writing and by the time most of you read this, the election should be over. The thing is, I am still going to be here with the rest of you and I have to live with that. So do you…

…and that’s the issue.

That and the fact that I’m going to ramble.

Revolution

The system in which we live is poisonous to the world. Nothing new there. We know the whole thing – that being imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, etc – needs to jump straight into the deepest pits of hell and rot there and there’s no argument to that point. However, I’ve spent a lot of time having to talk to people in the process of doing the day to day things that get us there.

I’m gonna hold your hand when I say this: if revolution arrived today, we wouldn’t make it.

Community, Reality, and Terror

I’ve spent a couple of years working at trying to make friends, build connections, and such locally. That is work. Effort. Most of the time, that’s not a thing we want to do. Skills for navigating conflict are lacking. When someone tells us that we need to be mindful of the way we speak to them, we call it tone policing – even when it is a friend – because we’ve co-opted terms without understanding them or their impact.

We don’t think about where our disabled neighbors are going to be when the violence that revolution often carries shows up. Hell, we outright discard them for the most minor of conveniences. We don’t remember what history has already shown us about the lengths this system will go to turn us against ourselves and each other to keep us inching toward greater forms of oppression all the time.

Friends and enemies look and sound similar when they don’t seem to view you as human rather than something to weapon, aim, fire at the opposition, or speak to as if my lived experience doesn’t factor into my decision-making.

These, by the way, are the people who would otherwise agree that we are walking a similar path and share similar values.

Some of the people I rock with are mighty warriors, but have no idea what we are going to do or be when the war ends or what we should be so the war doesn’t end us. I don’t know if any of them particularly care, either.

I don’t know who I can or should talk to about the psychological impact of what I know in my bones will come when revolution shows up and the current response being “Sucks, but we gotta do it…” doesn’t help when what I imagine is the crushing weight of what resistance will eventually ask of me.

Let me be specific: who is going to help me navigate the trauma of having to choose between my life and the life of someone who is bent on destroying it if it comes to that? What happens when I have to wield a blade or fire a bullet?

I’ve been told this is just what revolution is. What it requires. At the end, there was a shrug as garnish at the end. I don’t have an answer to this and no one seems to be interested in giving me one.

I don’t know who would take care of my cat if something happens to me. I don’t know who would call my mom to tell her the news before she finds out on social media or who, other than my sisters and brothers, would hold her when she cries. 

I have had more people talk at me or yell at me about navigating this system than have asked me to go to lunch, dinner, or even to get coffee.

They do want me to pick a side, though. That has been made very clear.

Binary Thinking

The unwillingness to see how multiple things can be true is fucking up every conversation I have. 

For example: you can critique your representatives without wanting a fascist in the highest office in the country.

Or: it is understandable that someone living in this country would not want to vote for someone who is bombing their homeland until even the memory of it vanishes from sight.

Or: minority groups have members that vote against their own interests, but that shouldn’t mean that we want people to be unfairly punished.

Or: it is possible to be conflicted about participating in a voting process or government process in general even if you ultimately decide to do so because this whole setup is ass.

Or: direct action is the one way to move forward in this revolution and all other methods are also valid as long as we are working with each other and toward a common goal of freedom for everyone because infighting helps no one except our enemies.

When I eventually have the conversation of “here’s what we have going on and I just think that…”, I get a lot of surprised faces and people who think that there is only one correct answer or path to everything and that every other thought/method/etc is invalid for whatever reason.

The idea of revolution rises and falls on our ability to imagine and what I see is a dearth of exactly that. Do things need to be revised? Sure. But let’s be clear about one thing: acting like only one path to the things we desire for this world is just as much a facet of supremacy culture as anything else.

We can’t afford that.

Also? I’m tired of that conversation. The wearing exchange of who is more correct and why. The need to make “doing the work” a personality trait and something to be weaponized rather than a life that you are welcoming others to join in cultivating for themselves and others.

More Thoughts, I Guess

No one – or very few – are listening and when they listen, they listen to pick things apart or debate or argue.

I’m not interested in that. My every day on socials at this point is just people yelling about any and everything.

And yet, people are also asking me to answer questions about what I’m doing and why. People who, if something happens to me, do not know the name of my cat to care for her.

The people who do live hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

Like… leave me alone.

If you’ve seen me online, on stream, in these twitter streets or mastodon streets, or seen me on panels, or seen me at charity events, you should know enough about what I’m about that I can let that speak for itself.

So any additional dialog should be from people who want to be in community with me.

And that is what is so scary about this community and care thing, I want to say that the future looks like me finding an expanding amount of people that I want to share the future with; in theory, it does.

In practice? It feels like the closing circle of your favorite battle royale and that’s just… lonely. Sad. I don’t know what to do with that, either.

And in all of this, the one thing I can think to do – to talk it through – seems to be the one thing it seems useless to do. Quite frankly, I’ve been having more discussions than not about how I’m withdrawing from conversation and sharing my opinions on things and this is at the root of all of that. I’m just… tired.

Idk man. Idk.