Yet, as conditions worsen and urgency increases, as millions are increasingly mired in economic and climate crises while billionaires bank on our suffering, as the Right rises around the globe and comes for our throats with a clear intention to obliterate communities I am a part of and care deeply about, the destruction of so much of the planet we call home looms large, and as police, state, and white-supremacist violence and repression intensify and multiply, it feels harder and harder to try on different strategies to resist and persist. It feels riskier to experiment; to reach for different ways of thinking, being, and relating; to imagine and create conditions for something new to emerge. The more pressure we are under, the more urgency, uncertainty, and fear we face, the stronger our instincts are to cling to the familiar. Under pressure, we are more likely to double down on strategies that have largely failed in the past, and turn to the institutions and structures that manufacture, produce, and sustain the current order in the hopes of changing them—or of at least staving off the worse of what’s to come. We fight harder but continue to fight in the ways we know.
This is precisely the time when we most need to critically examine the ways we are seeking to make change, and to explore where and how we need to shift our approach.
This moment calls on us to practice new ways of relating, new forms of governance, and new modes of being that enable the worlds we want to emerge instead of relying on the top-down law and policy-based strategies that are mired in the illusion that we can change systems and institutions doing exactly what they were created to do: produce and maintain societies that promote extractive accumulation by the few at the expense of the many and of the planet, structured by laws, policies, and institutions that distribute life chances through surveillance, policing, punishment, and exclusion.
Philosopher, organizer, and beloved movement elder Grace Lee Boggs would often begin conversations by asking, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” According to Grace, one answer is that “in the midst of this epochal shift, we all need to practice visionary organizing.” For her, that meant moving beyond protest organizing: “Instead of viewing the US people as masses to be mobilized…we must have the courage to challenge ourselves to engage in activities that build a new and better world by improving the physical, psychological, political, and spiritual health of ourselves, our families, our communities, our cities, our world, and our planet.” In her view, visionary organizing “begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.”
Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds, page 5
I want to posit that the endless crisis scenarios of our present political era—not only the crises themselves but the rapid, bombastic, repetitive, and constantly escalating storytelling around it—are themselves designed to increase that pressure, to trigger the fear and wariness that brings us back to the same old responses, the same dusty stories, the same roads we’ve been down before. There’s familiarity even in trauma, even and especially in fear.
I suspect that kind of storytelling also requires a turning away from the noisy barrage of the daily (hourly, minutely) news cycle, and the many reactions and responses it inspires. You can’t tell your own stories if you’re too busy refuting the terrible stories told by others. You have to give yourself both the space—and the silence—to dream.