Yesterday, many of you helped fund the purchase of a solar generator for a #mutualaid hub in Gary, Indiana, a postindustrial city in the American midwest now in its thirteenth day without electricity. It’s already en route to them.
I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass, and suggest that one tiny generator is in any way sufficient to the scale of the crisis – or even to the needs of a single relief hub. But importantly, it’s not nothing, either. It will be used, it will make a difference and it will be appreciated.
So today, especially if you contributed, I’d like you to ask yourself two questions:
- How hard did it turn out to be to take (small but) meaningful action to intervene in a distressing situation you might otherwise only have read about passively?
and
- How did it feel to participate, and have those feelings changed since you first became aware of the crisis?
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.
