#they're queer because it was so obvious! how can you be so dense! or: how can you be IGNORANT of kink matters (that we never told you about

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dear god that would be turbo cringe or whatever, but seeing all those annoying little things in fics over and over again really makes me want to write one in which they're not obligatory funnymoments but rather like, words that have meaning and weight and so on

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I really hope you don't mind OP, but this is such a good topic and you made such a perfect jumping off point. Let me know if I should make my own post and I'll move this there.

I've talked before about how my mom was really involved in same-sex marriage campaigns nationally but in particular on the west coast prior to 2013. Being her kid and evidently somewhat charming to adults, I was a constant shadow at organizing meetings, events, and any protest that was not expected to get violent (my mom had over a decade of training in non-violent protest by the time I was born, so when she had me, she made that her focus as an organizer as opposed to her past....more controversial approaches because she was a single mom with no local family and she needed to be able to bring me along to organize but did not feel she could risk my presence at anything that might get dicey).

So I'm not going to pretend that I have The Answer TM, but suffice to say this issue is NOT new, and we may as well learn from the past!

Some tactics my mom and her fellow organized used over the years to address the priority gap between "people who need things" and "people who can provide things"

An obvious one to start. Political education! The left has historically struggled with political education, often earning a reputation as rigid, dense and overly complicated, and judgy. While to some extent how we are perceived is simply a reflection of the hegemonic dehumanization we experience, we can still make an active effort to learn and use effective political education techniques, including the use of memes, zines, theory/discussion groups, etc. My mom ran a salon once a month for fifteen years in the valley. If you were a parent, a queer, or an ally, you could show up anonymously and talk with the group about life, perspective, prejudice, change, need-meeting, whatever was on your mind. I used to curl up in the corner in my purple riding boots, my pink tutu, and my parent's old baseball cap and just listen in awe to the things people could talk about in that space. Truly life changing and something I hope to host myself someday.

Be willing to meet people where they're at when you talk to them. We learned this in my canvassing work, and I got extra lessons from my actual day job. It's called Unconditional Positive Regard, and it's an important part of being able to have functional conflict resolution in both the interpersonal and political spheres. Per the APA [link below]: "an attitude of caring, acceptance, and prizing that others express toward an individual irrespective of their behavior and without regard to the others’ personal standards. Unconditional positive regard is considered conducive to the individual’s self-awareness, self-worth, and personality growth; it is, according to Carl Rogers, a universal human need essential to healthy development." You may also hear terms like human diginity, which emphasize how fundamental this perspective is for interpersonal connection, especially where that connection may be threatened by conflict, dehumanization/contempt, etc. In plain terms: if you as an organizer want someone to listen to what you have to say, you will need to be able to talk to them like a person even/especially if they do not act in kind. I think this is one of the things that has taken the biggest hit in recent organizing. While mantras like "marginalized people don't owe you a cookie/an education" are true and important, they can sometimes obscure the reality that if we TAKE ON that obligation by becoming an organizer, then yes, in fact. During our organizing efforts, we owe the people we are working with the exact same thing any teacher owes their students: respect, compassion, educational scaffolding paired with responsive mastery exercises and opportunities, and the safety to learn and make mistakes, even really major ones, while still being allowed a path to return to the learning plan. Doing that for people who often take your kindness as an excuse to be cruel and try to incite you is excruciating and exhausting and certainly not for everyone, but when you do it as a group, when you train in communication and teaching styles, when you learn de-escalation techniques and situational safety response, it becomes much more approachable. It's a matter of knowing what tools make the recipe work in a given situation.

Find a way to make them share your priorities. I'm not actually going to use my mom as an example for this because the best example we've got for effective use case of this strategy is integration. Because integration was made the law of the land, there is a floor level of investment that white society has in maintaining quality resources like groceries, education, quality of life, etc in towns where black people are able to also access them. The floor is by no means GOOD ENOUGH ON ITS OWN but it narrowed the gap for example between the horrific state of education of black children at the time in often-makeshift and self-funded schools vs white children in their much more consistently well resoyrced schools. Now when racists want to cut education access for people of color, they can still manage it, but it is harder to do and must be done abstractly in order to avoid being stricken down in appeal. A current day conversation where we see similar logic is in the talk of establishing pay caps and pay ratios. If a CEO can legally only make 10× what their lowest paid employee does, then I think we would all feel safe betting money that the lowest paid employees' salaries would probably go up at least a little. Tactics like this that tie the empowered's need-meeting systems to the vulnerable's forces both systems to become more similar in quality. This, by the way, is an important time to point out that for MANY vulnerable people, the systems of need-meeting that are most reliably accessible to them are contained in [often criminalized] underclass sub-societies. This is how you get the devoutly Catholic mob running illegal gay bars in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, how undocumented residents become dependent on undocumentable income to survive. This is why so many long term goals of our work include various decrim campaigns. By both decriminalizing the resource/need-meeting systems the vulnerable CAN ALREADY access, and making the publicly funded/respectable systems MORE accessible, we establish quality of life floors that we can than work within specific communities to customize further for their population/residents.

Please for the love of god actually learn what mutual aid is. Money can be involved obvi, but cash/financial resource redistribution is NOT mutual aid. Mutual aid is the cultivation of a system of community-owned and community-maintained cooperatives that provide basic need meeting resources to the whole community including those who would not otherwise be able to afford them, but also including everyone who can. For an example of what mutual aid can look like, I highly recommend checking out Feed Well Fridges in North Carolina [link below]. Another example of mutual aid is the mobile safer sex ed stations my mom and her friends used to run. They'd post up in gay bars, nightclubs, and other places during the HIV/AIDS epidemic with variety packs of condoms, zines on preventing/reducing sti transmission, information on AIDS, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, and other things people might want to seek medical care for or better understand. They would help people set up sti testing at the local clinics that were actually helping, provide rides for sick residents to appointments, etc. More than once someone they knew called them in a panic knowing they could help. In the case of my uncle, he was able to get treated for his HIV much sooner than many men at the time because he knew enough from his work with mom to know what to do when, and he passed away just before I was born after almost a decade HIV+. Mutual aid is only mutual aid if it is non-directional. If aid is always going out from a few places to a bunch of the same "in need" groups, that's charity. If the community themselves has organized to meet their own needs amongst themselves and any one else can have it too since it's available, that's mutual aid. This plea is not directed at anyone in particular, just sort of getting exhausted by how often I see the phrase Mutual Aid applied to things that just aren't that. But importantly, in its actual form, mutual aid is a big part of how you call in community members who would otherwise not be politically aligned with you. It's a type of modeling. You exist as this social alternative for them that and are welcoming and comversational and educational and personalized and little by little people realize that they've been sold a lie that what they have is the best there is, they internalize the humanity of their neighbors more fully, they develop communal care and protectiveness that can be called upon when vulnerable community members are threatened in future. When Bob The Rich Dentist sees Joe The Homeless Landscaper every month at the town cookout, and gets to know Mary The Single Working Mom chatting over squash at the coop market, and Zash The Trans Teenager at the community swimming pool, than when some jackass comes up to him later and tries to get him to shittalk those communities, Bob is going to start thinking twice. We know for a fact that when people can insulate themselves from the realities of another person's oppression, they become less compassionate towards that person, and more likely to be swayed by prejudicial rhetoric. Ever heard the phrase "keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer"? It's not just about spying on them. It's about the chances they stop being your enemy when you are able to get to know each other on common ground. This isn't "coddle bigots" this is "show people that not being bigoted is a loving experience on all sides" because isn't that the point???

So like. I'm not saying do the exact same things that movements before you have done. After all, the world has changed! So should our approaches. But you don't need to reinvent the wheel! There ARE things that have worked before and we can start there and adjust and adapt as needed!

Some projects I'm working on in meatspace:

Riparian barrier restoration, especially the valley's creek's and streams as there are a number of rare and threatened species that make their home in our fascinating little valley's freshwater biome

The city is building an overpass by our house, and no one is happy about it, but work is already underway and was before we moved in unfortunately. The neighborhood, largely black, is being increasingly sectioned off from the rest of the city (also largely black, but become increasingly gentrified and stratified as the city council pursues tourism and business classes) including the nearest grocery stores, worsening food insecurity in the area. The food fridges in the area don't quite reach us, so I'm getting into the local conversarion about whether we should work with them to extend theirs or build our own. Currently the conversation leans making our own, as then we could pair on the initiative with our sister towns, as is often done to maximize reach and minimize costs.

I'm looking to pair our home with a local shelter/fostering program for animals, focusing on those with trauma, reactivity, and behavioral issues so they can be rehomed rather than put down. Amara's settling in beautifully, so once she's been here a full year, we may start hosting our guests. Programs like this are great for animal welfare, and can help increase spay/neuter rates in a community, reduce animal abuse and neglect by offering affordable veterinary care, etc. The shelter we worked with in the past had a once per week free vaccination clinic and a once per month $50 spay/neuter (free with scholarship) alongside their regular clinic (which offered sliding fee scales), and placed fosters all throughout the community. They never had fewer than 100 animals in care per shelter location, and yet they only had to keep about 20 animals on site per location. They did great work and I really came to appreciate the value and quality of life they brought to our neighborhood

Fundamentally, if the people currently empowered to take action don't care to, we have two versions of option. 1) make them motivated to take action. 2) do it ourselves.

There are a lot of different ways to do either of those things! But there really isn't a third option. You can't force someone to do something and get a sustainable outcome. Often you can't even do it without fucking yourself harder. So try and get buy in, but always have a plan b in the back of your mind that doesn't depend on needing any more people and resources than what you have.

During meetings, my mom and aunties used to make 3 plans. One was bare bones. Nothing but the cash and bodies on hand. One was utopia. Every resource and volunteer they could possibly want. And the third was Goal. Realistically, how many people do we think we can get to do what, and how can we make the most of that. Mom always said that even when all 3 versions of the plan went to shit, having taken the time think about those different perspectives and ideas was really helpful to reacting well and pivoting in the moment as needed.

This last part is a bit personal, right, but it's mattered to me, so I'll share it regardless in case I'm not the only one it's useful for.

The youth resistance group I worked with was overseen by a pair of UUA ministers, one of whom, Doug, was part of a delegation to Tibet at one point during a lifetime of seeking out learning around international approaches to resistance. What he brought back in this case was something he described learning from the Buddhist monks he trained under in Tibet and Dharamshala. I am 100% NOT going to try to present this as a buddhist thing because I don't know enough about buddhism to speak to that, but I am aware that it's tied to the monk's buddhist ideological origins. Essentially, the idea is similar to Radical Acceptance in DBT, accept that multiple, mutually exclusive truths can all coexist in the same place and time [your brain]. Allow for many versions of Truth to be real at once, and possibility/choice/empowerment within those truths becomes exponentially more attainable. Allow for many versions of outcome to be real all at once, and the load-bearing aspects of your needs across iterations of possible future will be easier to identify and work with. Accept that you have control of nothing but yourself and your actions and use the knowledge that others can only do the same responsibly.

The last thing I learned. When everything feels heavy, set down your obligations, breathe deep, and have a good cry. And if you start to feel helpless or hopeless, remember that nothing exists alone, including you <3

there's a degree sometimes to which i look at some criticisms of political organizing efforts' language and goals (particularly when it focuses on, like, financial priorities and gaining/losing constituents) and feel like... the focus on morality is losing the plot a bit.

like, on the one hand, there's a lot of interpersonal value to criticisms like "you should be calling for public health and safety reform because disabled people's lives matter and it's the morally right thing to do." but on the other hand, the individuals who hold power in society are not moved by moral arguments and are fantastically callous--yes, even democratic politicians. the things they care about are the things that are likely to get them to change their platforms materially, which means "losing constituents who have fears about rising unemployment and a crashing work economy" is one of the relevant concerns to them regarding public health, and any organized movement worth its salt will at some point direct public action and discussion into that realm.

i'm not sure what to do with these thoughts, but i've been thinking about the general concept a lot lately.