This week, I’ve been thinking about a couple of things I observed at a recent community meeting.
So…the other week I went to a community meeting. I don’t want to say too much about who called it or what it was about or anything like that. I will say it was put together by an organization that I don’t belong to, and I went in the spirit of a piece of advice that I’ve seen US-based abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba share multiple times in the last six months, about how it’s a moment when it’s super important for us to put ourselves into rooms with people who are talking about what we’re all facing right now and just being part of those conversations.
The two observations that I want to share aren’t really about this meeting specifically – I don’t think airing details of community conversations on social media is useful or appropriate. But I think they’re relevant to broader features of our current fraught political moment, and so are worth at least noting.
One is that it was fascinating the extent to which the conversation was all over the place. And, like, of course it was, right? There is so much going on right now. It feels, to nod back to the old quote from Lenin, that we’re in one of those brief stretches of time when decades happen. So much is uncertain, so much is in flux, it’s hard to keep track of it all, let alone take a breath and figure out what it means. And it’s all so emotionally intense and overwhelming, too. So I guess I just found it interesting to see this reflected not just in my own brain or on social media, but among a group of people who pay a lot of attention to the world and many of whom have long track records of active grassroots involvement. I think, honestly, there was something reassuring about seeing it reflected in that context.
And the other observation was about how much of the conversation focused on…I guess you could describe it as issue content rather than action possibilities. So, lots of passionate naming of the problems we face and talking about the big-picture changes we need in the world, but very little focus on, hey, here are the kinds of actions we, here, now could take, here are the kinds of new groups that could really be effective, or anything like that.
And, sure, some of this was a reflection of the specific process at this specific meeting, so I don’t want to make too much of it. But I think that at least in part it also reflects a broader tendency — a tendency that even lots of people who are actively involved in grassroots ways indulge in, where we relate to political life as a sort of spectator sport, and talk about what needs to happen in terms of broad, overarching declarations about the world’s problems, and about what political parties and governments and “people” in the abstract need to be doing, rather than just assuming that the starting point needs to be us, here, in this room, with the resources currently at our disposal. And, you know, you can make a case that it’s important to blow off steam and to process what’s going on by talking about it in those more loosey-goosey, big-picture ways. But I wonder what we might accomplish if we deliberately cultivated practices of talking politics that resisted that temptation and started from who we are, where we are, and what we might do together right now, in very concrete, practical terms. I dunno.