Who Are You?

Just got here? Start from the Beginning, below.

Who is this being written for? Realistically, an essay, and article, or a book is written for anyone who reads it, and what they glean from it depends on who they are.

Are you worried about the immediate future relationship between the current government of the states and Canada? Are you worried about the relationship between that government and the people it governs? Are you scared? Do you feel like no one in power seems to be taking this seriously?

Then I am writing this for you. If it makes you feel better, you can think of this as catastrophizing - We are, in time, going to look at bad but still likely scenarios, and see what we can do if they come to pass.

This series of essays, or whatever "this" is, is specifically being written for queer people, because those are my people. And I want to caution queer people to remember that, just as Black Americans have the phrase "Not all skin-folk and kin-folk", not all LGBTQ people are "queer".

Queerness, to quote bell hooks, is "about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live." Queerness is the act of, once you question one part about yourself (your sexuality, your heteronormativity, your relationship to your gender) and find it wanting, questioning more things about yourself, about the world around you, and asking "Why is it this way? Does it have to be? Is there a better way?" Queerness is definitionally radical in its politics, its method of thought, and its way of being.

I believe that that “questioning queerness” is a tool that allows us to see the writing on the wall that a lot of people are working harder and harder to deny - that things are really bad right now, and they are not likely to get better unless we push.

I also believe that queerness is inherently community-driven, and that that community-driven nature puts us in a good place to do that work of pushing and resisting. I have often repeated in my life the phrase, "we find each other", because over and over again whenever I enter a new space, I find the queer people, or they find me - sometimes before they (or I) even acknowledge our shared queerness. It should not be a surprise when a queer person looks back on their old school friend group and finds out that even many of the people they didn't realize were queer at the time have grown into some level of queerness.

We find each other in the dark, and you are not alone in this moment.

This (again, whatever this is) is being written from a perspective that is specifically based in socialism, anarchism, and collectivism. We cannot survive alone, and we must find allies we can break bread with where we can. Much of the work that I think is critical to resistance and collective action is deeply based in community. It is much harder for someone to stomach watching you be dragged away if they know your name, have spoken to you in the street, have been served lunch by you, have rung up your groceries. Fascists purposefully alienate their out-group and attempt to remove them from community specifically because it makes it easier to villainize that out-group.

I again, must repeat my refrain, I feel insane talking like this (talking? writing? I think in such first-person writing, this is a distinction that makes little difference). I do not want to "play revolutionary", I do not want to struggle in a resistance. Mostly I want to lie in bed and shrink into myself until I am unrecognizable. Unfortunately, I also have some Oppositional Defiance Disorder percolating in with whatever other neurodivergencies I have, and they want me to take it lying down.

As the joke goes, "all out of spoons, but plenty of knives."

If you had told me even ten years ago that we would be fighting fascists and preparing to take our cues from places like occupied France, I certainly would have questioned your sanity, too. The signs were there, certainly - the entire conservative sphere's reaction to a Black President of the US (and not even a particularly liberal one, a plain old average war criminal one!) - but I also had my own naïveté about the ten years preceding that, where the rise in right-wing fervor had grown in response to 9/11. You can trace it back further and further, as well - through Reaganomics, through the American Civil Rights Movement, through American post-Revolution Reconstruction, even back to the building of America as a country built on Classical (Greek and Roman) values.

The reality is that this pimple has been coming to a head for a long, long time, and there have been literal generational efforts to guide the good ship Earth to this point. Depending on how dogged you are, you could trace where we are right now back through Capitalism as a concept, back into Merchant Capitalism.

But then, at this point, where it came from feels less critical as "what do we do about it?" You can follow the beating of butterfly wings back to the beginning of time, but past a certain point it becomes an exercise in navel-gazing.

Right now, we have an American President trying to put us into an economic choke-hold so that we will agree to be owned by them. Right now, we have a Conservative party that is waiting with bated breath for that to happen, and a Liberal party that is frankly sprinting rightwards to try to catch up. It is impossible to resist this attack on sovereignty while also playing to business interests, because business interests will unerringly align with fascism against the interests of the people. They will vote for slavers until they themselves are enslaved, because damn if slavery isn't profitable.

So. What do we do about it? I believe we must harness community and everyday resistance to frustrate any and all efforts to align our country with fascism, whether that be through invasion, through attempts to placate other countries, or appealing to a business class that is in bed with those same fascists.

the next installment will be about how we are our own best chance at survival. The entirety of this thesis can be summarized to two statements.

You are not alone.

We must help save each other.

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