long overdue, really, but as amerikkka officially joins the ranks of 'failed states', we will *all* be faced w/ the imperative to reevaluate our relationship to organisational aid structures, the npic, career activists, & all the rest of what are essentially civil society groups.

ppl esp. who purport to be uncomfortable w/ 'violence', w/e tf that means to them, will need to get real clear on what civility is, its broader implications, and how 'civil society' (incl. csos / cbo's) are inextricable from many levels of systemic and interpersonal violence.

will not be at all surprised to see today's institutionally based outreach / support coordinators and 'mutual aid' fundraisers go the way of the influencer in a not too distant tomorrow lol. watch

i know i sound caustic + horrible, but my point is not that these structures don't occasionally perform some net good. it is that all structures not emergent from and determined by the communities they serve will eventually fall under the weight of their own willful alienation.

we need to talk about trauma informed care as something one cannot fully understand via training modalities. we need to talk about harm as an intergenerational cycle of behavioral patterns, tendencies, and ingrained understandings, NOT as isolated incidence.

a reality of settler colonialism, contemporary neoliberal democracy, & the global swing towards fascism is that expropriation of wealth, exploitation of labor, constant war, & social death do not end by organising or even the downfall of the systems enacting them. THEY ARE WOUNDS

wounds take time to heal. they get infected. they scar. they inhibit movement, cause many types of disability. we carry our wounds with us, even if only in memory, often for the rest of our lives. every violence is a wound that can be passed on ancestrally. most are unanswerable.

and by 'unanswerable', i don't mean mass discourse, acknowledgement, or even repatriation + reparations. even w/ such necessary measures, there is no cogent response or remedy to things like rape, genocide, disenfranchisement, being excluded from 'human' as exceptional construct.

there is a lot of righteous rage. there will (and in many cases should) be acts of parallel violence. expropriation breeds expropriation. deprivation incubates hunger like wildfire. 'civil unrest' is just boujee shorthand for the awareness that all this theft won't last 4ever.

civil society cannot annex or engage these actual social needs because its existence depends on an order which has always been violent and necropolitical by design. liberation isn't just about comfort or care, it's about setting the terms of one's standard of living.

every death and wound, even of the most despicable or disposed of being, reverberates out into the fabric of our existence. it is, each time, a pebble in a stream whose course is deterministic on an existential level. it speaks to all we are, all we will allow.

praise + worship are similarly constitutive of social & material realities. all we uplift defines us. what is 'love' to you? how do the acts of service you perform for your beloveds create you in turn, shape their life, instruct others around you? what do you worship, and how?

i believe--more than most things--in love, specifically love as revolutionary practice. i believe in spirit, which is less an invocation of magical thinking than a recognition of the metaphysical in everything, the grace in the most mundane and humble of beings and acts.

as a serial vagrant & former ward of the state, i have made worship, found home, inside those i love. love has been the forge of impossible strength, ingenuity, resolve. there's a lot there to be said about codependency and consent as well. it's not always okay, or a way through.

but i bring it up to posit that it is precisely this openness, this consummate embrace, that characterises many of the ways we must hold each other through this bullshit to survive. 'mutual aid' is not enough. 'community support' fails. these are, in essence, transactional forms.

it is not to say we must love each other outside of or without acknowledging the ways we have been wounded by how things are. love is not and will never be some utopian salve. anyone who tries to sell you love as a cure all is dangerous, whether they know it or not.

but love as revolutionary practice aims to refuse this consumer affect. revolutionary love admits wounds, develops capacity to care for them. revolutionary love insists on access intimacy (s/o @miamingus ). it is a means to learn and grow together.

revolutionary love, in fact any love unto itself, isn't enough. but this insistence on loving each other, on genuine interest + care beyond organisational commitment, can serve as a foundation to help carry us through the fight together, to remind us of why we're fighting at all.