2020-10-27, Y'all've a week

This letter to the Web is for folk who, so far, have experienced most of the year through headline and social media discourse. Things are worse than it’s easy to believe. Unemployment is worse. Death tolls are higher. Anecdotally, there are four new homeless camps within a half mile of me, all bigger than the one that existed before COVID, and more than a dozen people have dying in these camps. (Reminder, I live in a very prosperous liberal university town.) I distribute now a couple hundred pounds of food a day, and it still isn’t enough to make a meaningful dent.

If you don’t feel, acutely, the rapid slide into poverty that has occurred for most of our nation: congratulations, you have more time to prepare. Please, I’m begging you: take advantage of it to by listening to your impoverished neighbors and community, and taking steps to work with them directly. Regardless of who wins the election, there are many million new Americans existing in a state of subjugation. If you aren’t one of them, you’re the subjugator, and I implore you to do everything you can to change that relationship.

You all have a week to figure out how you’re going to react to the various possible outcomes of the U.S. elections. You’re probably waking up to news about a new Supreme Court Justice, and that the Senate went on recess before passing additional relief. Social media discussion about how this threatens reproductive rights, and puts people on the precipice of eviction.

Please try and understand: most of my friends weren’t able to access reproducive healthcare, before COVID. Even before Trump. It’s never been available for them. (I am the healthcare available to many of my peers.) Most of my friends can’t qualify for leases because they’ve been evicted too often. I don’t have healthcare, or the means to qualify for a lease, and haven’t for almost a decade. (It’s only in the past five years that I’ve had any sort of stable housing, and at the moment it isn’t stable at all; my landlord/boss is actively trying to convince the sheriff to ignore the eviction moritorium because they dislike that I distribute free food.)

The things you’re scared of, the risks you’re facing, have been here for years for some of us: and not distant abstract “other Americans,” but like, me and my friends. People you know. People whose efforts you benefit from: we keep providing the services that maintain your society, and we keep providing words like this, that help alleviate the ignorances y’all hold around your privilege.

These consequences you’re waiting on, to motivate you to action, have already come for the majority of your fellow citizens, and it is your continued support of our oppression that inhibits our ability to organize.

I’m not going to spend much time guilting you for relaxing into the stability that Collaboration provided so far. There’s enough of that in my other writings, and from other people. What I’m going to challenge you to do is make clear plans about how you’re going to make this world better, regardless of how the election goes. Come Wednesday morning, are you going to fight your HOA to allow gardens to be set up? Are you going to go talk to a restaurant about donating waste food? Reach out to local mutualists and ask if they need help?

Do real things that directly challenge the many mechanisms of oppression which you’re currently cooperating with. “Releasing an open source blog engine” or “boosting some non-white social media posts” shouldn’t count. This is real shit, and it requires real action.