Let This Radicalize You

The Seattle-area resource Big Door Brigade defines mutual aid as “when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW!”

Mutual aid, of which defense committees are good examples, has the power to change our social relationships, to galvanize us into groups and communities that confront specific crises—and then move on to fight much broader battles. We saw that kind of reconfiguration happen around Marissa’s case, as people moved from concern to collective action, an

“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.”

Shana McDavis-Conway, the codirector of the Center for Story-Based Strategy, about how to build a different kind of political messaging. Story-based strategy, a participatory approach that links movement building with an analysis of narrative power, positions storytelling at the center of social change.

If spitting horrifying facts at people changed minds and built movements, we would have overthrown the capitalist system long ago, because the facts have always been on our side.

not every action, speech, or conversation about climate should be an apocalyptic snapshot, for the same reason that not every protest against police brutality should be a die-in.

In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed1

No matter how we choose to take action, we are usually working toward a future that we will be unlikely to see. It’s a future built on the hopes and the sacrifices of our ancestors upon whose labor and love we stand.

the idea of an important conversation that helped bring me home.