What I hope you will have noticed is a feeling like the one those who participated in Common Ground, Occupy Sandy, COVID- and Metro Surge-era mutual aid efforts all experienced: *direct action to support communities in crisis restores precisely the sense of purpose, power and possibility everyday late capitalist life leaches away from us*.
When we organize ourselves to take care of one another, especially, the powerlessness and anxiety and sense of helplessness we’re so used to drop away, and are replaced with a feeling of our own rising capacity. We don’t have to sit there, suffused in numbness and gnawing dread, as people suffer. We can intervene – directly, materially, with the whole of what scott crow calls our “emergency hearts” – and the life changed most by that intervention may very well be our own.
What we know now, consistently and empirically, is that self-organized, autonomous mutual aid is the remedy for everything that’s been done to us. Let’s keep doing it.
And the next time you see someone – anyone, but *especially* “influencers,” prominent people in your life or your field of awareness, people with big follower numbers – posting about some new crisis, whether “natural” or purely and malevolently anthropogenic, ask these two questions:
What are you doing about it?
What can *I* do about it?
