Aaron is flying up to Wellington tomorrow for the day, then right back. Prior to 2020, this would be an absolute non-issue.
But now, even armed with a pack of KN95s, Flo Travel spray and probiotic lozenges, the odds of him travelling 305km and back through a gauntlet of unmasked coughs and sneezes without bringing the goddamned rona back to our home, our child...
It sucks, fam. It didn't have to be this way.
#CovidIsNotOver #COVIDIsAirborne #CleanTheAir #WeTakeCareOfUs #WeAreAllWeHave
In other news, the #NZ govt still plans to phase out free RATs by end of June.
This is a spectacularly bad idea, so please write to your MP and/or the MoH to ask they continue. Aotearoa #Covid Action has an open letter here: https://covidaction.nz/en/keepratsfree
Also, find your nearest location that dispenses free RATs and stock up over the next few weeks according to the size of your household.
It’s a bittersweet challenge these days to figure out, much less practice, what it means to “live like the world is dying.” After nearly three pandemic years, given how much has died, “living life” can feel more elusive than ever.
I’ve been thinking a lot—on obsessive #FuckCOVID19 walks again—about an observation that @mbsycamore made in a tweet-story recently: we squandered the “we take care of each other” opening at the pandemic’s start and now the widespread loss of “communal care” feels “all the more brutal.” Especially when the abandonment of collective care for all (emphasis on “all”) occurs too often now in our own circles, as if the pandemic were over. That “squandering” has been cutting me to the core.
So it was not merely an honor to be asked to join @margaret and @house.of.hands for an episode of Live Like the World Is Dying; it felt reinvigorating to hear their words on the joy of living anarchism for life.
https://www.liveliketheworldisdying.com/s1e55-cindy-barukh-milstein-on-trying-anarchism-for-life/
Since we recorded that podcast, many days haven’t feel reinvigorating. And even when recording it over a month ago, I was speaking/dreaming of the world I yearn for and wish I lived in, not the one I inhabit, as if voicing my aspirations can conjure them into existence.
I’ve been reflecting on that a lot ever since, but keenly once the podcast came out. I was struck by the unusual number of folks who messaged me to say that listening to this episode gave them “care,” “kindness,” and “love”—and reasons to go on with “living life” for themselves and others.
Around that same time, some friends who I hadn’t heard from in a while randomly reached out to me for a catch-up phone call, text exchange, or walk—just when I desperately needed extra support. Their words gave me “care,” “kindness,” and “love”—and reasons to go on with “living life” for myself and others.
I write. And talk. So even if I’ve forgotten of late, I know that words count—as political practice, as lifeline and love letter, and as the stories that we swap to tangibly reshape this miserable world for the better.
Let’s reinvigorate #CommunalCare with words that remind us to engage in life-giving deeds.
#WeAreAllWeHave
#NoOneLeftBehind
#PathsTowardUtopia
#TryAnarchismForLife
(photos: Live Like the World Is Dying logo, which is a drawing of a camo-green gas mask with yellow and white flowers growing out of it, promoting the episode I did on “Trying Anarchism for Life”; “you are loved” street heart, black words written on a pink heart, attached to a tree, as seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, summer 2022)
Care packages aren’t just beautiful on the inside—for what they contain as gifts, as sustenance, as rebel “love letters” to each other. (Though getting a no. 10 envelope filled with stickers from @municipaladhesives last week was lovely indeed, as the shimmery-metallic circle A that found a good home outdoors today attests to.)
It’s what overflows outward into the “worlds in which many worlds fit”—to borrow Zapatista words—that we are already, always, crafting in the here and now that’s especially beautiful, messiness and all.
That includes the “little touches” like the black and red rubber-stamped logos that Municipal Adhesives put on the envelope’s outside, meaning that various postal workers maybe couldn’t help but notice—perhaps speaking to their antifascist and/or anarchic hearts during yet another deadening day of capitalism.
Or the bigger, prefigurative ones, in which Municipal Adhesives thinks to make and distro stickers with circle A slogans that hold out a hand—on public walls and lamp posts—to the anarcho-curious or world-weary who long for something besides the daily disasters of the current social order—but need glimpses of what that could be and is when one embraces anarchistic forms of social relations and social organization.
Or the bigger-still ways that anarchists create do-it-ourselves spaces in which we remember that “we are the ones we waited for”—spaces open and welcoming to whoever is on a journey, their journey, to liberation and freedom. For as Municipal Adhesives reminded me when they PM’d me about sending a care package my way, we’d met years ago at the annual National Conference on Organized Resistance, in which a tiny anarchistic collective brought some 2,500 young folks together for a weekend that was a smorgasbord of hundreds of workshops and tables (by young-at-heart folks) spanning the whole range of radical politics. In this outwardly solidaristic, generative, open-door space, thousands found their political passion and calling—and each other.
Care packages are a joy—a life line—on a personal level in these dispiriting times, warming our insides. Yet anarchistic care shines when we common it, outward and upward.
#CollectiveCare
#WeAreAllWeHave
#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife
“In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.”
Carl Sagan #CarlSagan #vastness #humankind #SaveOurselves #WeAreAllWeHave #ItIsUpToUs
