People are valuable. Precious, even. Powerful and pertinent and worth patience and heartfelt investment. Not some people. All people.
It goes like this: There are a lot of people I interact with in my daily, weekly life who really seem to be waiting for something. It's awkward. We'll be talking and talking and there's something lurking behind it all. I don't know how to converse about it, but I can tell from their face that an expectation is still pregnant; has yet to fruit. Whether they want something from me or the world, they aren't sure if they've got it yet and they seem to be holding back until the right cue comes their way. This is all of us at some time or another. Certainly me, too.
Maybe we take that cue when we finally see it and maybe we don't, but either way I want to just shake us and tell us we're enough. More than enough: we're ready. We're worth it.
Dramatic words, I know. A lot of times what someone is waiting for is pretty paltry: a social go-ahead to open up or a nod of acceptance from a peer. I think about this on a larger scale, as regards activists looking for larger movement or people who used to do activism waiting until the right thing comes along that might really make a difference. Large or small, I want some way we could just know: There is no cue. The dance floor is open. It's ours to take. This is all there is: the present. The right time is now. And it was ages ago. And it is tomorrow. I think about this especially looking to Egypt and Tunisia, Jordan and Sudan lately.
When I want to shake us--you, me, and the people around us--I want it like a Hollywood buddy cop comedy at the low point in the film. Get yourself together, man! You've got [slap] to get [slap] yourself [slap] together! [slap]. This is to say, I want to slap us out of love.
Which brings me to the first half of the title: love. I remember being particularly inspired by part of bell hooks' All About Love, the part where she discusses love as a revolutionary act. She feels that the core of any revolutionary ethic should reside in love. Love: the will to extend oneself for the growth of another. A tricky amalgam of care, affection, respect, recognition, trust, and open and honest communication. It took a little brain stretch, but to picture this definition of love, a righteous goal for my relationships, as the core of a revolutionary ethic made me hopeful. If you hold all of humanity at the locus of care, affection, respect, recognition, trust, and honest communication, all work for justice becomes so clear, so necessary, so driving, and in a way so easy. Love trumps inertia.
What a powerful lodestone: to love all people and "the people" like you would a true love. If what happens to people the world round every day at the hands of those in power were happening to your lover or your child at the hands of a single person, you might be willing to move mountains to change it. Certainly you would stand up to the offender with all you had and then some. You would extend yourself. With love at the core of a revolutionary ethic, you would do the same for the people.
Loving gives us unnatural-seeming amounts of energy: it releases all the brain's best drugs and provides the lover with uncanny abilities in the realm of how far one can extend oneself. Remember the last time you were all gooey in love? Remember love jail with your new lover? The revolution is some seriously hard, long work, so thank Gosh herself that we have a trick up our sleeve for creating ungodly amounts of energy for a project that at many points will feel unreachable or hopeless!
Take a minute now and picture the strife in this world at the hands of a capitalist system that we in the US are responsible for. Think about what loving truly the people of this world would mean for how you live your daily life. Would some previously too-hokey-to-bother-with things become much easier to do? Possibly useless but wholly easy things like petitions and protests, shopping ethically and speaking out about simple things in daily settings? The drive of loving pushes innovation. What comes after the petitions and the shopping choices?
Let me be clear: I am aware that many people, including many I know, are fighting hard to change this world every day. They are working in brilliant, complex ways to make lives better. As much as anyone, I am writing to myself here. Myself and the many brilliant, sometimes broken, always buoyant, and fairly privileged activists and queers I know here in San Francisco. I am writing to the armchair anarchists and the dwindling anti-war marchers. I am writing to the snarky-but-informed youth of today who know the score but may not really believe they can change it or who only do small things, confusing 'a good place to start' with 'enough'. I am writing to the cynics in the crowd: hokey as it sounds, in the end, love really is the answer.
But the world is So. Fucked. Up. How do you deal with this shit?! Well, we're in the belly of the beast people. If we're waiting for a cue, it was hours ago. The play is droning on and our line is key to the plot's development. The show's getting boring. There is no time like the present to do a thing. Any thing. You have to start somewhere. It's like activism has writer's block. The reality is that the best way to break a writer's block is the scattershot method: write anything for five minutes or twenty or an hour. Know that you're going to burn or delete it at the end--accept that this time it just won't be consequential. Start somewhere that seems like a Good Start and just write for the sake of it, even if it's gibberish. When you're done, you have a starting point and you can begin the real artmaking process: editing. Looking at what worked and what didn't and tweaking it. I think that's what we need to do now. Scattershot activism. Start somewhere easy or wacky or inconsequential but well-intentioned. Work it out from there. Experiment.
What am I saying? I am saying come with me to the lovely state of OHIO. Only Handle It Once. This is a wonderful mnemonic for a profound and basic philosophy for gettin' shit done. It means: don't open the bill and put it in the "to pay" pile and then sort that pile later and then try to get a check mailed next week. If you have the money, walk straight to the checkbook as soon as you open the mail. Keep envelopes next to the checkbook and stamps in the drawer to the right. Do it now. Don't hash and rehash it: only handle it once.That's our job right now. Get to it!
