C: Collage/Collection

C emerges as a collage, perhaps a collection, of C terms and their provocations. As the mind scrambles through the cacophony, a striving to contribute and continue the experiment.

Curating from the cloud → three voices I’m grounding in relationship to:

• Carne Ross’ recent post of his on LinkedIn about the consequences of truth-telling in the face of WMD lies has stuck with me. I’m eager to follow along with what he continues to share on his new Substack.

• Cailleach by Claire Davey is a newsletter that deepens my connection to Celtic ritual and wise insights, seasonal connection and reflection. 

• Patrisse Cullors lives into her calls for courage and an agility with complexity over, and over again. I witness her most via Instagram. 
  

From me → Ceasefire. It was never enough, but a continuous immediate need (since October). In the face of genocide and murder, heinous destruction, profound dehumanization, mass graves, torture—words toil.

College students, likely, and the forces uniting with them are in part to thank for the US announcing it won’t share weapons for (further) attacks on Rafah. Good. Also, too little too late for the uncountable death toll already, the mass destruction already accomplished with US weaponry.

To those protesting, in encampments, calling for divestment and a stop to the horror show, I am grateful. For your modeling of bringing together disparate voices, dealing with infiltration and the messy disconnects of movement while rooting in mutual aid and better ways, I am grateful. For naming the systems driving this hellscape, that thrive on death, lie at the root of our incapacity for peace and the call to divest from the interwoven fights against the arms trade that is bolstering genocides, war, in Palestine, in Sudan, in Haiti and Puerto Rico, for in the DRC, distinct and connected hellscapes with similar sets of hands dripping in blood behind them, thank you. For facing the violence in your own bodies, for highlighting shared humanity and elevating it to a new level and channel, thank you. For the words that speak better than I could to the content of your calls, I am grateful. (Carne’s SubStack has a helpful piece on this today, as well.)

Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Ohio” rings in my ears, echoing Kent State’s recent 54-year anniversary of the murder of four students protesting the American war in Vietnam. Our local paper runs a piece about how this is similar but different from his experience encamped against apartheid in South Africa. There’s a nostalgia it sparks to the ‘70s, of course, and also personally to my own early 2000s youth. It twangs a thread deep in the fabric of who I am or came to be through my own college years. A reminiscent connection to my own politicization, a set of memories from a march on Washington that haunts me these days. I chose to march in solidarity within the Free Palestine branch of the protest/gathering of tens of thousands in the nation’s capital, that day, as we came together against the looming threat (then) of a war in Iraq. In keffiyehs and symbols of solidarity, we walked alongside men carrying symbolic coffins, haunting us then, haunting me now. Free Palestine. 

Capitol rotunda arrest footage from Palestinian liberation solidarity protests last year revealed college teammates and friends, the people I moved through politicization alongside or following, being bound up in plastic flex cuffs and taken away. They called then, as we call now, for it all to stop. Never again, not for anyone. 

Then as now, calls are against those capitalist colonial systems that make the profit worth the while and the dominion natural order. The same systems dripping in blood across centuries here. Time I recently spent at a Native Americans in Philanthropy conference in Minnesota put the extraction histories and current practices of this system in the spotlight. While there, I received pointed clarity from an entrepreneur vendor who had had enough of nicety. Who named to me, settler offspring, that he and others present are descendants of the 2.9% of indigenous folks who survived settler “contact”=genocide in the USA. Who named the truth of disparate perspectives and the demon of charity engagement where systemic and structural shifts could be chosen instead. Who named silences that stood out, patterns of minimization, frustration of charity. Amidst hopeful and diverse stories of reclamation, rematriation, partnership and indigenized reworking of power, he pushed against flattening the diversity of perspectives present and named the falsehood in any muting of conflict within and across shared spaces. What truth telling do we make space for?

Children are dying and being tortured, and so are adults, and we watch or learn, know or don’t. The same strategy with timely tactics for today in Haiti, Sudan, Palestine, DRC, many places I don’t even know to name. The adults deserve peace, too. Not just peace, but power. Aid held up by States, by protestors. Awareness held up by algorithms, military desire, fear. The United States choosing paths of disastrous destruction. Biden et al lost in it.

The Coosa River warns of repeated history, too. In Alabama I listen to a lecture by Dr. Marcus Briggs-Cloud who weaves lessons on Ekvn-Vlakeckat Maskogve EcoVillage south of my house and not so far. He teaches us through frames of language and worldview from his life, his tribe, his community about the effort to resettle, reclaim rebuild in so many ways. One way is the re-population of the sturgeon, a fish who was killed off in the area generations ago. It’s a mighty feat for many reasons, threatened by the looming desire to capitalize the land and water nearby, to mine and profit and pollute water. Folks want to help and be in their space at the ecovillage, join the positive efforts. I aks how we can join the river protection fight? A fresh battle with settler capitalism. 

Profitable control seems like a desperate desire of the moment. Control of the resistance, control of the narrative, control of the movement, control of the people, control of the spaces and places. So much done to cash in. State striving to exert, the schools inviting violence onto campuses across the world. Carnage will tell a very clear tale of what we could imagine, or disappoint.

The shit show that is Congress have a cohort threatening the ICC members and their families, and collectively threw another point on the board for the Christian Zionists recently by redefining antisemitism to include critique of the Israeli state, a boldly antidemocratic play and dangerous distraction from the harm of actual antisemitism. A fasicst play to expand the aperature for State punishment and surveillance, to manipulate antisemitism and boldly invisibilize the threats and rise of Islamaphobia and other forms of hate and violence.

Mussolini himself named the merging of state and corporate power as a critical element of fascism. Oh, you mean Citizens United? They say it themselves in this stark account from retiring Congresspeople.

Across it all I keep coming back to Cría Cuervos, the film I was shown in high school and college Spanish classes to teach me Spanish and perhaps reinforce some history lessons. Its story of three sisters growing up in the midst of authoritarianism and death, set in Franco’s Spain and released in 1976 from within the suffocating hand of fascist power and hasb een on my mind for its offering of what art and life look like and can do even within the confines of authoritarianism, dictatorship. Along with the necessary critique it posits, nostalic pop ups from the song from a quintessential scene getting in my head, bringing up reminiscence of hipster mix tapes passed around in college.

Maybe my brain is there becuase censorship indicators are flying. I mentioned the libraries and book bans in the last edition, and of course the widespread silencing, firing and punishment of artists and intellectuals for standing for Free Palestine or just being Palestinian, or for naming the hypocrisies of this moment. Fascism isn’t a threat looming. It’s here.

We crane to find ways forward that resist this fact. Purity, another deep fascist desire, is a false and dangerous prospect. Complicity is a given. If we can hold that, perhaps a different cooperative effort can bear fresh fruit. 

There is both deep personal clarity that we protect each other. I am grateful for the frame of care, what it offers when used as the basis of relation and community. Folks are coming in from different lenses; it creates a confusion fog around it all. What does the world look like when we care about each other? What does it look like in the places where care is structured? Can we fully witness the truth of where care is absent in our structure/s? What does it feel like when we are cared for? How will we know we are caring? How can we care and keep space for truths that don’t immediately align? We protect each other.

Calls for imagination and building the world we want, together, now, outside the institutions that are failing us in their false promises of protection while we pave the way. Carving out the new instead of contorting within these places, relationships, ways of lying and hiding that are being laid bare in their weakness. Will we care enough to take that data and build forward, release, or must we hide away?

On the plane from the conference in Minnesota I watched decorated chef Massimo Bottura’s Masterclass. His “best in the world” multiple Michelin-star Osteria Francescana, he shares repeatedly, is rooted in a commitment to be “critical rather than nostalgic” while crafting recipes and dishes to evolve Italian food forward.  

When we design critically instead of rooting in nostalgia - disconnect from the comfort of what we have known, hold the essence of its tradition and intention, hold the inquiry of what is possible anew, and braid it together with the crisp highest quality ingredients, what can we create? It’s what I hear in Cullors, in the college kids, in so many of these moments and deep pockets I’ve touched on above. I draft myself into this calling forward, as well. 

Moving past the nostalgia, we apply a critical lens and clarity. A new world is possible. As we contribute, it takes shape.