Back in February in the first weeks of this admin I got the sense that people were panicking as we should have been. I wrote two posts intended for folks who were not activists, who had no experience... folks who were freaking out and had no clue where or how to get started. 9 months later, we're still doing too little. One protest a month will not cut it. But we're a passive non-activist culture. We look for heros to save us. We have to save us.
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Part 2 link below. I'd intended to write a part 3 about the activist housing co-op I was living in at the time. I neglected to do that but I'm feeling motivated to get that done after sharing a bit this morning on a Signal group. We were doing a lot but none of it was rocket science. It was constant effort, experimentation, failure, some small successes. But at every step it was community and relationship building. Everyday. That's what it's going to take.
Once a month protests are not going to be enough to stop fascism. We are a passive consumer culture buffered for decades by a large enough, comfortable enough middle class that didn't want to be bothered with activism or even basic citizenship. We have decades on non-participation working against us. We shouldn't have "activists" because everyone should be active. All the time.
#Democracy has failed because Americans didn't want to be bothered. Now we have to learn how to #organize.
Part 3 of the above linked series is published today:
Becoming an Activist Part 3: deCleyre Co-op
"We acted as bees in our community, moving between people, homes, projects, businesses and every space between. We pollinated, collected and dispersed. Busy bees...
We ran deCleyre as we ran many of our projects which is to say, as a fully democratic cooperative or collective. We co-owned it and we self managed it as as workers might manage a co-op business... "
