I went to a noise demo on this #NotMyNewYear, #NotOurWorld evening, and felt profound love for how anarchists make time and space, day in and day out, for solidarity, deep and reciprocal.

I went to a noise demo that took pauses in the cacophony of @brassyourheart marching band, amplified music by the @pansy.collective, and the banging of pots and pans to give voice to how our solidarity sees intimate kinship between struggles—naming political prisoners and those politically imprisoned because of things like racism and classism; naming criminalization against anarchistic movements both local like @parksareforeveryone and further afield such as @stopcopcity; naming the open-air prison and now genocide in Gaza; naming the injustice system’s logic and our abolitionist ways of troubling it.

I went to a noise demo where DIY solidarity looked like warm pizza and fresh flowers and zines and handcrafted stickers, freely gifted, and the @certaindayscalendar offered as a fundraiser for @avlbail.

I went to a noise demo on stolen Cherokee lands, walking to and from it past capitalist excess drunk on its own delusions and power, and I cried both ways. I wiped tears away during the demo. My body was there, seeing those in the jail flash lights back at us, wanting them to all be free, and prisons and police to be abolished, and a wholly new world take their place. But my heart was far, far away, with the dead. The dead who should still be here were it not for thefts of lands and all that’s sacred, including life.

I went to a noise demo, yet this #NotMyNewYear, #FuckThisWorld, I heard and felt the quiet of absences: three months of tens of thousands of Palestinians murdered or still “missing” under the rubble, and today, one sudden and still incomprehensible death that’s hitting hard for me and many others, @kleebenally. May their blessed memories—each and every of our dead—topple walls and empires, colonialism and fascism, and all that keeps us from being free, from living lives worth living and dying in our own good time, not killed off early by this sick, sick social order.

#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#UntilAllAreFree

Not my New Years.

Not this date established by a dictator, Julius Caesar, and his empire, then reaffirmed by the Papal State, and now upheld by capital and its food+alcohol industry.

Not this date that tries to hide, erase, and obliterate the new years that move in relation to the moon and sun—the lunar and solar calendars that offer life rhythms and meaning-filled rituals for most cultures, save for the death cult in power.

On January 1, 1916, Antonio Gramsci wrote about why he hated New Years, which “fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit.”

This past year, we’ve lost profound amounts of life and spirit, not to mention lives. “Fuck [12] 2022,” as tagged on a wall I saw this summer, is an understatement, and wishing for a better 2023 feels false. That’s another reason to hate New Years: it suggests that some force outside us—like turning a calendar page—can right this wrong world.

Ahead of the “highest” of the four Jewish lunisolar new years annually, Rosh Hashanah, many days are spent, individually and communally, in reflecting on how well we did in terms of mending this world. When on Rosh Hashanah the world is symbolically created anew, all we have moving forward is ourselves and each other, messy and beautiful, in terms of doing better at it.

This 2022 may not be the worst of human history, but it feels that way, when mass death, fascism, and ecocide are some of its highlights. They and other social ills have not only stolen our moon and sun but also nearly everything else, leaving most of us stripped to the bone, having lost everything from trust and faith to friends and community to health and more.

I recently saw this print on a friend’s wall, created by Levi Coven, reading: “Nothing left but each other.” When we’re all so depleted, so traumatized, it’s hard to act—and with kindness and collective care—on that abundance: us, ourselves, each other, our life force. Yet if we don’t try harder, daily, in the days of 2023 ahead, we’ll have nothing at all.

#NotMyNewYear
#RitualsAsResistance
#LoveAndSolidarity

For Gramsci’s full “I Hate New Year’s Day” essay (with thanks to Zoé Samudzi for sharing it earlier today on social media):

https://viewpointmag.com/2015/01/01/i-hate-new-years-day/