Let This Radicalize You

that our hopes to the contrary are the utopian dreams of childish idealists. These fears create a psychic fortress around the death-making forces that are killing us in real time.

The state sees communal care as an ideological threat. This is why mutual aid movements are routinely targeted and undermined by the US government. Mutual aid projects are a manifestation of power that contradicts the state’s primary narrative about what it is, who we are, and whose purpose it ultimately serves.

The idea that disasters autogenerate panicked, aimlessly violent hordes of people who must be controlled with an iron fist is an authoritarian fever dream. While the powerful would have us believe that frightened people are always selfish and hypervigilant, cooperation and collaborative care are common human responses to disaster.

Obviously, other people can and do harm us, regardless of how much we share. But the conditions that alienate us and enable harm are wholly alterable.

many of us accept the violence, limitations, and boundaries imposed by the system as though they are natural laws—inalterable, inevitable, and final—and view everyday people as an existential threat to control, contain, and manage.

Powerful actors must keep us convinced that it’s the people around us—everyday folks whose struggles overlap with our own—who pose the greatest threat to our safety, well-being, and happiness. It is the grandest illusion ever created: in a world where corporations and governments worldwide are poised to annihilate most life on Earth, we are made to

What we offer as organizers is not simply alarming information, nor is it the guarantee of success in a particular campaign. We must offer people a vision of how things could be and the opportunity to connect with the people, projects, and movements that can bring this vision to fruition. That is the organizer’s unique gift: an invitation to partic

when we tap into the diverse spectrum of human emotion, we have an opportunity to inspire people to view themselves as part of a larger story—and to make moral decisions about who they are in relation to other human beings.

“We do need to tell stories that evoke emotion,” she says, “and fear is an emotion, but it is not the only emotion available to us. There are many other emotions we can tap into.”