Love Letter to the Resistance

Dear Resistance Movement,

I love you. The thought of you sometimes makes me choke up with pride. You are like a big down comforter. Just knowing you're there makes me feel warm. Before I met you, I thought I was alone. I didn't think the word "community" applied to anything in my life. Now, I feel like one small but important node in a vast spiderweb, an invisible force holding the world together, together. Thank you for manifesting yourself. You, the blessed unrest, my tribe, are the silver lining.

All loves also entail friction. I want you to be your best self. And, I can't be with you all the time.

45 isn't the hurricane you think he is; he's just the weathervane.  Melania's jacket is abhorrent, but it's not that she doesn't care. She's mad at him too.  In what universe is that jacket a feminist statement? Try to get your head there. Female anger emerges as a whack-a-mole.

Don't get me wrong. I am not apologizing for that shit. But look at her. She's pissed.

If the evidence results in revealing that the emperor has no clothes, what then? Will we be satisfied? Will our triumphant moment of justice make everything OK?

No. America has been ripped open, and with the pump of each day's news, it bleeds life out. Focusing on those with political power is like wrangling with telltales. Holding the flimsy strands of fabric in the place you want them won't change the direction of the wind.

And we will tire of the battle. Arms aching, teeth gritted, we'll burn a fuse with all that anger directed at flaccid nothingness.

The real work is tending to the culture wars. Tribalism is everywhere, dividing, dividing, dividing. Disguised as solidarity, we build ourselves up by what we're against, leeching our life-force out, day by day.





Before 2016, I thought that having more arguments, evidence, and facts in my back pocket was the way to move the dial of our culture in the directions I wanted. Likewise, as a teacher, I had thought my role was to fill students with knowledge to support positions and claims, arm them with reason and teach them how to win debates.

Has this worked in my most intimate relationships? No. Fifteen years into my marriage, I am finally learning that winning arguments and locating blame may feel temporarily good, but acts like herbicide in a garden. Only one thing can grow under the reign of repeated exposure--resentful victimhood.  Our own relationships reveal this truth to us.

Beware the us-them mindset; the other side entrenches further too. Utopia isn't around the corner of a few changed offices.  Silencing the other side by winning arguments and races can not remain the holy grail of your political energies. When my lover argues me into a speechless corner, my resentment finds other outlets. My heart and mind are not changed. Victimhood becomes fuel for other fights.

I would like the weathervanes and telltales to indicate a different wind, for sure. I love you, tribe, for figuring out multi-issue politics, intersectionality, and strategic coalition-building. I love you for all you do. I worry for your longevity, and I worry about what happens to the country when you win.

If you don't see me at the next march, it's not because I don't love you.  I'm wrestling the wind, not the weathervane.

Love,
Sarah

Resisting Burnout is Revolutionary: Marisol Cortez at ASLE

I just heard the most amazing paper at the ASLE conference ever! Marisol Cortez, of deceleration.news, talked about the importance of slowing down our feverish reactivity to "multiplying crises" of environmental injustices, climate change, the ascendance of white supremacy, etc.  (Update: You can find her paper now published here).

She and her partner, Greg Harman, have experienced debilitating mental health problems, prompting them to leave their secure jobs for the precarious lives of freelance writers and activists.  She talked about the "disabling assumption" that our "bodies can sustain constant conflict, constant crisis."  All action-- chasing fire after fire, working, working, working to resist-- reflects a logic of capitalist extraction, a "production imaginary" undermining capitalist growth ideology, that affects corporate life for sure, but also academia and even grassroots activism, Cortez bemoans.

In contrast, she said, deceleration, degrowth, is a praxis of environmental justice.  The "logic of 'not-enoughness' is disabling to activism."  In other words, the overwhelming feeling we all have to increase the amount of work we do in response to the increased urgency and onslaught of crises is not sustainable to the "marathon" (Bullard's word) of environmental justice.

Thinking of the "pace of life" expectations around productivity--either in the corporate sphere or the grassroots sphere, and deceptively so, perhaps even worse in the latter given our historical moment-- as "disabling" is so brilliant. Cortez just blew my mind.

Finally, Cortez rejects "resistance" because it nurtures conflict-- the very conflict that disables us.  It "internalizes not-enoughness", while "deceleration rejects our exhaustion with resistance," which can be "boring" and "joyless."  Drawing on Gloria Anzaldua, Cortez purposes instead that "inner work, public acts," is a better mantra to live by.   I love that Cortez engages disability studies' critique of productivity in this paper, politicizing self-care and mental health as a praxis of environmental justice.

She cites the new Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era anthology as a key work; in it, an essay on "care" -- especially care of the self-- argues (as I understood Cortez's summary to say), that we should resist the debilitating forces of production, exhaustion, not-enoughness, action, extraction of our labor, acceleration, accumulation, and the emotional and affective results of these values (despair, nihilism, impotence, depression, etc).

Although the feminist in me bristles a bit when somebody tells me that "care" is the antidote to capitalism, but I take her point: I never feel I have the time it takes to do the care of myself, my family, critters, and my friends and loved ones. I resent those humans and non-humans that demand care from me, because I am compelled, torn to do the important work so needed to resist!

But what Cortez is saying, I think, is that I needn't feel so conflicted, and that if I prioritized care, I might care for myself as much as the other critters that need care, instead of cutting self-care in favor of hard work and care of others.  In short, Cortez's paper prompts me to  rethink the complexity of "care", especially as the discourse of "self-care" surfaces in a post-election moment.

I was struck by the arguments about temporality implicit in Cortez's paper.  Cortez talked about the work of environmental justice that is invisible even within the counter-hegemonic work of justice, the slow, daily, monotonous work that is taboo and uncool in the fight to "resist": self-care, writing, thinking, creating, tending to relationships, tending to our joys and loves. She says that our unwillingness to "count" this work as valuable is a reflection not of our selfishness or our inadequate commitment to justice, but rather of the capitalist logic of extraction and productivity.

If Rob Nixon's theory of "slow violence" helps make visible the forms of violence caused by environmental injustices dispersed over time and displaced across time, then perhaps what we might call "slow activism"-- which may not even look like activism-- surely is the response to surviving it.