in the land of milk & honey

                       thank you. thank you all. thank you

These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.

So anyway when are the organizers for the Women’s March on Washington going to give Raquel Willis a formal and EXTENSIVE apology for cutting her mic off during her speech???

…sometimes protests get “out of hand,” which is to say, they actually impact the authorities’ ability to keep the population under control. Then, without fail, police and politicians proceed to the second strategy in their playbook: they declare that they support the protesters and are there to defend their rights, but a few bad apples are spoiling the bunch. In this new narrative, the enemies of the protesters are not the police who are gassing and shooting people, but those who resist the police and their violence. When this strategy works, it enables the police to go back to harassing, beating, arresting, and killing people with impunity—certain people, anyway. Sure enough, a few hours after these articles about “criminals” and “outside agitators” appeared, the St. Louis police killed another man less than three miles from Ferguson. Here we see how defining people as “criminals” and “outsiders” is itself an act of violence, setting the stage for further violence. You can predict police behavior at protests with a fair degree of accuracy based on the rhetoric they deploy in advance to prepare the terrain… Throughout the civil rights struggles of the 20th century, participants who are celebrated as heroes today were tarred as “outside agitators.” The term has a long history on the tongues of racists and reactionaries.

What if all you had was a narrative that intervened? Again and again and again. What would it teach us. How could it liberate us from the narratives that kill, maim and destroy us? Could it? What if I never ask if I am “doing it right” ever again…What if we created forms that prioritized being with each other, being with the work, being with the possibilities, more than they prioritize the gymnastics of trying to get it right in a structure built on our wrongness?