don’t look back

Images from LA's resistance to a Fascist goon squad (aka ICE) yesterday.

"Putting up a fierce fight at the opening of the poem is the way to stop the rest of the poem from coming true.

The fight for migrants and to stop ICE is the same fight as the fight to protect LGBT people (citizens or not), reproductive autonomy, and everyone else the fascists want to fuck with.

Not in some abstracted ‘we're all in this together’ way but directly and literally. When they come for one of us, and realize it won't happen without a fight, they lose their nerve to come for other people.

It is worth standing up for migrants for their own sake, because they are people, but it's more than that too.

Whether you approve of their actions or not, they are earnest activists who are directly and materially opposed to capitalism and have paid a high price for their commitment.

Furthermore, again whether you approve of their actions or not, rowdy protesters are on the same side as peaceful protesters in a way that the police, systemically, will never be. To ally with the police over actual allies is disastrous strategy.

Will the state react strongly to strong resistance? Yes. This doesn't mean that strong resistance isn't warranted.

You have no reason to believe me, and I have my biases, but I have been studying the nature of street rebellion and activism and revolution for decades, as essentially a full time job. I don't have clear answers about what works but I have clear ideas of what doesn't.

Dividing protestors into "good" and "bad" is what the state wants us to do. Rowdy and peaceful protestors learning how to coexist and develop strategies that dovetail with one another is what threatens power.

When granddads deliver sandwiches to kids throwing bricks, the state shakes. When [we’re all out there] together, refusing to let us be divided, the state buckles."