#tryanarchismforlove — Public Fediverse posts

How do we make better mistakes each time?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot the past three weeks, having thrown myself, side by side with so many hundreds of others, into solidarity efforts for the now-codefendants in Atlanta—people caught up in the fascistic state repression against @defendATLforest and #StopCopCity.

For many who have dropped everything to voluntarily, tirelessly, and exhaustedly throw themselves in various jail, court, legal, logistical, and other support roles to #FreeThemAll, this isn’t their first time at doing antirepression work. They’ve gone through the hell—as defendants and/or supporters, inside and outside courtrooms, jails, and prisons—in other brutal crackdowns on our beautiful resistance, from the Green scare and RNC Welcoming Committee, to J20 and Standing Rock, to more recently, the George Floyd uprising and Line 3.

There’s so much collective wisdom, collective strength, and collective defense in our toolbox to fight the charges, with the aim, always, of #DropTheCharges while sustaining our movements. Yet the dynamics that can tear us apart inside our circles—whipped up, manipulated, and cruelly exacerbated by the state—are sometimes the hardest, and way too predictable or familiar; here, often our tools are rusty or underutilized, or get lost in the mess of all else we have to do.

This time, maybe due to the wealth of solidarity experience and multigenerational co-learning, or usually invisible longtime work of feministic+queer care-focused anarchists, or many big hearts converging, the mistakes are better. Or rather, we are doing better at “early intervention” and “harm reduction” to grapple with past mistakes in order to lessen them.

For example, having volunteer “on call” therapists to hold space for processing trauma and grief, rather than letting it build up, boil over, and burn us. Setting up care clinics, supporters for support crews, weeks of resilience, and umpteenth other acts of compassion that try harder to leave no one behind, and stave off the ways that stress and fear can divide us.

There’s a long road ahead, but we’re starting on better footing, better mistakes and all.

#CareNotCops
#SolidarityNotStates
#TryAnarchismForLove

(photo: anarchism is love, as noted in black-and-purple-painted “circle A” = “heart” symbols by some anonymous tagger on a brick wall on the stolen, colonized, unanarchistic lands of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal in March 2023)

That weird and wonderful moment when your “baby” is born—nestled in a cardboard box that reached your doorstep today—and you can finally hold it in your hands. And the friends who saw it before you were right: it looks much more gorgeous in person than in this photo. But don’t all proud parents say that? (Pick up a copy and see for yourself!)

In celebration, I’ll likely be sharing a series of “baby photos” over the coming week or so, with bonus pictures of circle A photos taken in the wild that have been filling up my phone-camera.

For now, I’ll probably stare at my newborn way too much this evening, trying to get used to it now truly being in my life.

Available from its publisher/coparent, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, at www.tangledwilderness.org, or its chosen kin, AK Press at www.akpress.org, and/or awesome anarchistic bookstores.

(photo: #TryAnarchismForLife, showing the book’s pretty green-and-pink face designed by @eff_charm, smiling up at me with its circle A by @landonsheely)

#TheBeautyOfOurCircle
#AlwaysCarryABook
#TryAnarchismForLove