“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
—Ruha Benjamin
Eerily, the same date, one year later. Extreme rain. Flooding again.
After seeing a notice on social media, I joined a small and determined stream of volunteers who spent the morning emergency-harvesting at a local community farm collective. With the rising river expected to flood the fields, there were just hours left before the crops would likely be lost. Just like last year.
With wellies and heavy-duty hiking boots and galoshes (and at least one set of fluorescent crocs), this ragtag group did the needful: Pull the beets. Twist off the greens. Pile gently in a milk crate. Laugh. Leave the tiniest in the ground. Move to the next row. Offer a steadying hand. Hydrate. Stop when the body says enough.
Eerily, here we are four years later. Or eight, depending on which election disaster is the point of reference.
I care about the outcome of the presidential election. Though I must admit, I am put off by small data points sensationally enlarged by pundits and memes, abandoned just as quickly as the next gaff or horror emerges. I’d rather follow the wisdom from adrienne maree brown’s Group Agreements for Emergent Spaces: engage the tension; don’t indulge the drama.
I care that fascism is not just approaching, but is already here, rising, like this cresting river. Flooding all I care about with an oversaturated authoritarianism, thick with the muck of it, deepening the damage of it.
I give thanks for teachers and companions who remind me that democracy is a practice (thank you again, adrienne maree brown) and that citizen is a verb (thank you, Baratunde Thurston). Sooner or later (though not soon enough for those who have already paid too high a price), I believe that our “big D” Democracy will be saved. However, though such efforts have their time and place, writing postcards or from GOTV campaigns is not enough.
It is by acts of “small d” democracy. Ones that look like getting to know neighbors, when we might otherwise scroll endlessly. When we not only offer help, but accept it as well. It looks like creating systems of support and strategy with people who share vision and values: people whom we discern as worthy of risking trust.
And on some mornings, it looks like a socially-awkward band of strangers wearing rubber boots who heed an emergency call and harvest a field of beets.
Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love and Resistance: may we find within us and around us, the resources, inspiration, and insistent invitations to be the ones we have been waiting for. May there be joy. May there be justice. May there be amiable companionship. May there be more joy. So be it. See to it. Amen.