Because what they invariably mean is, “go be anxious/ptsd-having/chronically ill/etc somewhere else, it has nothing to do with ~the movement~ or ~the community~, your problem is not taking care of your SELF”

“Let’s all remember to do self-care” = “let’s all remember to go home and take care of ourselves in private so we can all continue to appear to be/try to be superhuman in public”

Shit that I don’t give a crap about in self-care discourse: any form of self-care that comes down to consumerism/spending time and money that are huge privileges to have, like “oh buy some nice bath bombs and take a bubble bath, you’ll feel so much better [it’ll be like you were never even beaten by cops]!!!”

Shit I am interested in hearing about: how we can create some kind of community/network/whatever where people aren’t so fucking afraid to reach out for help or extend help to others that we couch our disengagement from each other in terms like “self-care”. How activist burnout is inseparable from alienation from activist communities, and what that means. How “self care” is even sometimes used by abusers to protect themselves from accountability processes because those make them feel “unsafe”.

I ended a friendship that meant a lot to me, because the other person has some pretty serious trauma/mental health issues going on.

Without going into, you know, any identifying details: I had stuck by this person though a bunch of shit that was really traumatizing for them, made myself available to them for unconditional support, etc. And we were really close friends and they were there for me too.

But they just… were and continue to be in complete denial about the fact that their trauma affects the way they deal with every. Single. Person. In their life. Anyone who doesn’t agree with them on every single relevant issue is an abuser who can’t be trusted and must be operating on some twisted, malicious agenda. It’s like they’re splitting constantly.

This person is a good person, and I still really care about them. They get a lot of shit for unrelated reasons and they deserve to have people around them who will support them and stick up for them and validate their feelings and experiences.

But when someone is acting out of such a defensive place all the time, it’s hard to separate out “support” from “enabling” - mainly because they won’t allow for support that isn’t enabling. They won’t admit they have a problem, they won’t accept help for said problem, and if anyone doesn’t validate their perceptions of other people as either virtuous and perfect friends or evil, scheming enemies, then they must be the latter.

I stuck by this friend for a long time after I realized what was going on, because I wanted to see them through this and I thought if I could stay on their “good side” then maybe I could support them without enabling their shitty treatment of people who didn’t deserve shitty treatment, could help them get to a safer and more stable place in their life where they wouldn’t have to be so constantly on the defensive (the latter I actually did, but the constant defensiveness remained, because, well, trauma; the former… urgh, I don’t know, I guess).

And then, there came a point where I just couldn’t support them unconditionally anymore.

And as soon as that happened, in their eyes I was evil. I needed to be called out and publicly humiliated at every possible opportunity, to be taught a lesson. Like everyone else who wasn’t “good”.

It was like… they wouldn’t allow for any support that wasn’t enabling. And then, maybe inevitably, that meant enabling their shitty treatment of me.

So I walked away. Somewhat literally, actually - I walked out of a meeting with them and I haven’t spoken to them since.

I’m mad about the way they treated me, but mostly I’m sad, and worried about them, because I know that at this point they’ve systematically alienated every single person who was capable of talking them down even a little bit. But there’s NOTHING I can do without putting myself in the line of fire, so to speak, and even if I was capable of doing that, they probably wouldn’t trust me after my “betrayal”.

I have no idea what to do and it’s sad.

I miss my friend.

***

When I lived in Vancouver, I never thought of the activism I did as activism, really, because activism was something that college students and people with money did. We weren’t those people. Everyone I organized with was poor, young, and dealing with some degree of trauma. We were angry and hungry for change because we’d all been homeless, hungry, beaten, evicted, terrorized, discriminated against in violent ways, targets of racialized, gendered, etc violence.

People come to radicalism often through personal experiences of injustice. Sometimes we don’t think of these experiences as traumatizing, but they are. When you deal with shit like this on a constant basis, you get used to operating on the defensive. Your guard is constantly up, and with good reason. I say this without a hint of judgment, because I know I do it, too. There are things, survival instincts, I can’t forget.

But if trauma can tear relationships apart, like it tore apart my relationship with my friend, then it can tear movements apart.

Movements are built on relationships. Obvs.

So what do we do?

***

How do we deal with trauma in our movements?

How does that affect how we do/deal with “call outs” both off-line and on-line?

Why is it that the right can coalition-build like nobody’s business, but you can’t for the life of you even get a Marxist and a Trotskyist in the same room together without shouting?

I don’t know. I don’t have answers to these questions.

I just miss my friend.

I miss the people and places I’ve given up because they weren’t healthy for me to be around/in.

I’m tired of looking over my shoulder instead of looking people in the eyes.

walmas:

Earn College Credits for Occupying

morganna:

trespassnyc:

Are there lessons to be learned from the far-reaching Occupy Wall Street movement? Absolutely.

The folks at Columbia University apparently think so, too. Next semester, the school will offer a new course for upperclassmen and grad students. An Occupy Wall Street class will send students into the field and will be taught by Hannah Appel, a veteran of the Occupy movement, CBS New York reports.

The course begins next semester and will be divided between class work at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork that will require students to become involved with the Occupy movement outside of the classroom.

The course will be called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement” it will be run by the anthropology department.

I WANT IT

UGH.

As someone who’s been in the “business” of community outreach and volunteer coordination for orgs and campaigns, I hate shit like this.

I don’t want people getting involved in orgs, movements, etc that I’m involved in coordinating for class credit. I don’t want people to be motivated by some material personal gain - be it their GPA at their prominent university, or padding their resume for a cush job at some NPO or government administration or charity. 

It’s not because those people can’t and don’t contribute. It’s because they don’t stick around, and they don’t fucking listen to the people most directly and sustainably involved in the issues. They think the reason why they’re there makes them superior to the people they’re trying to “help” - they always say they’re there to “help”, and sometimes to “learn” even though their concept of what they should be learning is fundamentally flawed. They’re upwardly mobile and they know it, and they know that the people who founded whatever movement or org they’re dropping in on aren’t as upwardly mobile as them, and they feel like that makes them smarter than everyone else there, so they don’t feel like they have to respect the knowledge of those people. They publish papers “critiquing” our organizing methods, and then they move on, never minding that their work may damage our credibility with profs and anyone else who reads it - sometimes administrators in charge of funding opportunities - because they don’t understand that in a movement, actions like that have consequences that affect a lot of people. Universities don’t equip them with a real understanding of what it means to be part of a collective; everything about the way universities facilitate learning promotes a kind of individualism that is deeply impractical when it comes to relating to how things work on the ground.

It’s not just annoying for long-term organizers, community members, etc to have to deal with a bunch of college kids who are there to “research” their lives and heart’s work - it’s damaging to movements and communities. It makes groups inherently unstable - because these students will be around, maybe even taking on responsibilities within the movement or org, for a semester or two, and then, let’s be honest, they’re going to move on, and the group will have to adjust, and then another class will come along and the whole process happens all over again. Research reports and papers that are written and published without a real, fundamental, embodied understanding of the movement/organization can damage it’s credibility with outsiders, obscure the realities of various situations, and cause tension and conflict from within. Not to mention it’s just demoralizing to be viewed as nothing more than a subject for someone’s research or class. And it’s a waste of time, energy, and resources for organizers, volunteers, orgs, etc to have to incorporate these green kids into decision making processes and working groups when they may not have any kind of critical understandings of the issues decisions are being made about, and so on.

If you want to learn about movements, don’t go about it this way. Just… don’t. Look first to your own communities, and how the issues you’re interested affect and play out there. Examine your own perspective on the issues and try to deconstruct it and figure out how it was formed. Read up on different kinds of decision-making processes, the histories of various movements. Talk to people one on one about what they’re doing. Go into meetings with an open mind, as a person relating to other people - people who likely understand a lot of things you don’t - rather than as a “student” or a “researcher” dealing with “subjects”.

Forget about your grades. Forget about publishing a paper. Make friends. Actually invest your time and energy. Stop thinking about how cool and progressive all of this will make you look and actually commit to giving a shit even when it might mean taking risks and bruising your ego and dealing with people who aren’t fucking impressed by you.

Don’t bring your class down to a protest. I can’t speak for OWS organizers, but I can speak for myself as an organizer - I don’t want your fucking class there, I will not do an interview for your research paper and I won’t hook you up with research “subjects” for you to exploit.

But I WILL welcome volunteers, I will invite you over for dinner if you agree to leave your recorder and textbooks at home, I will ask you for help making signs and booking venues and doing all the thankless grunt work you never thought about.

If you’re not interested in doing any of that, don’t fucking waste my time. And consider not wasting other organizers’ time. Because I promise you, we don’t have a lot of time, and we have even less patience for privileged college-kid poverty-tourism bullshit.

quixotess asked you:

This is a bit of a strange question, but I’m thinking of joining my “cultural council” at work which is like…talk about problems and stuff and try to work out solutions and then maybe present them to corporate. It’s a good time to join because there’s a new lead who I respect. It’s not exactly like a co-op or organizing for justice, but I thought there might be some similar dynamics/behaviors. Can you maybe give me a basic rundown on how not to be a jerk, what to expect and other various tips?

So this was a really neat/interesting ask to get.

I have some personal ground rules for any kind of collective organizing and/or decision making process. I’ve developed these through years of slogging through these processes and seeing just about every way they can go wrong, as well as a lot of ways that they can work, and I find that it’s pretty easy for me now to tell in a group when my ground rules aren’t being respected and aren’t going to be respected. There are red flags to watch out for with each one, and if I reach a certain limit of red flags, I tend to bail.

So uh I guess I will just list my rules? Yeah.

Read More

i just ended a two year relationship… with a non-profit organization

i seriously feel like i just got out of a really toxic, bad relationship with a terrible human being

you know what this means

TIME FOR UNIBREW, BAD TV OF RICH OVERSEXED PEOPLE (MAYBE GOSSIP GIRL?????) AND DRUNK BLOGGING

AW YISSSS

(maybe not the drunk blogging)

(because you know, i am an adult in a relationship, so i can also just go have sex)

(fuck i’m awesome)

1. Bring up a concern. It could be valid, or not, it doesn’t really matter. The point isn’t the concern itself so much, for reasons which will become apparent.

2. Frame the concern in purely emotional terms. If you can say that you’re “afraid”, that’s good. Repeat that as necessary. Say that you feel “silenced”. If the concern is concrete and valid, conflate it with your emotional reaction; that will serve to obfuscate the actual nature/details of the concern, and make it harder for people to adequately address.

3. When people try to address your concern directly, say that they are being “defensive”. Remember, trying to divorce an issue of decision-making or policy from the emotional reaction you have to it in order to move forward in a decision-making or policy process is an attack. (Possible bonus round: act offended at the very idea that someone would try to address the concern and your emotional reaction as separate issues. “Anti-feminist” is a good phrase to throw in there while you’re doing this.)

4. When someone else has an emotional reaction to your manipulation - and if you’ve done the first three steps right, they will - publicly accuse them of creating an “emotionally charged atmosphere” and say that this is why you’re “afraid to ask questions”; that it’s now impossible to ask questions without people getting emotional about it. Act like this is the fault of the other person, and intimate that they’re being disingenuous about their emotional reaction, and/or creating such an atmosphere on purpose, to “silence dissent”.

5. Remember to use sj buzzwords all throughout this process. When referring to people who are trying to move forward despite your efforts: call them hierarchical, anti-democratic, possibly anti-feminist, and accuse them of trying to make decisions unilaterally. (If you can do this while also calling for them to “unpack” the language they use to address your points, you’re a pro at this already.)

Congratulations! You’ve created a dynamic in which it is impossible to get anything done. Collect a 30,000 salary, wonder why your organization has such a hard time getting and keeping volunteers, and then go home for a well-earned rest.