After ten years of organizing I have to say that the most difficult thing about organizing isn’t the work itself. Instead, it’s other people’s apathy. This can be really blatant, in terms of people’s eyes glazing over when you talk about your campaign, or friends demanding that you skip a meeting to go out with them. Yet it also exhibits itself in other subtle ways. There are the loved ones who say “I could NEVER do that, but I love that you do.” There are the people who understand organizing to be your hobby, something that you do for fun. There are also others who are well-meaning, who love you deeply, but who don’t understand that after breathing, eating, and drinking water, organizing is the life force that sustains you.
(a picture of trees that K took on one of their walks)
Organizing is why you get out of bed in the morning, it’s why you live certain places, it’s why you have certain friends. You frequently understand regular interactions in terms of organizing strategy, analyzing who has power in certain social situations, and what you have to do to make that power shift. It’s not uncommon for your partner to find you hunched over your laptop late at night, filling out a google form. It’s why you have your Signal notifications always on, as though you’re an on-call doctor.
I know these experiences aren’t true for every organizer, but they are for me. Organizing is the only thing that makes sense to me in terms of implementing the large-scale changes that we need to see in the world. Organizing is how I grew up, and even now that I understand the issues with the nonprofit industrial complex, organizing is the longest paid job that I’ve ever had. I’ve always organized outside of my job, having to switch roles as soon as I clock out.
Throughout this time I’ve had comrades come and go. Some only organized while in college, often out of a sense of rebellion. Others couldn’t deal with the conflict, or had other life issues pop up, and they couldn’t really justify having meetings 3 times a week in the evening. Some people moved or got married, and others went to school. Many people decided that reading about politics was the same as *doing* politics. All of these changes sometimes feel like little heartbreaks. They feel like you’re walking to the edge of a cliff and holding hands with a group of people, ready to jump off into a glistening lake, only to turn around and realize this whole time you’ve been standing alone.
I understand why people quit. I’ve quit several groups, I’ve witnessed groups blow up, and I’ve also had to find a way to organize through several cross-country moves, two autoimmune illnesses, and of course COVID. People have limited capacity. I still believe if you watch multiple episodes of TV a week, you have enough time to give up 1 hour a week for an organization. You could even join the organization and say you’re at low capacity, and only sign up for smaller tasks!
I also know people fear that they don’t have the skills to be a good organizer. Yet hopefully you’re in an organization where people will train you up. If an organization exists, they’re probably going to want to include new members. You also likely have skills to contribute, yet you don’t know how they relate to organizing. Are you good at graphic design? Great, make the fliers. Do you know how to read a room? Okay, run security. Maybe you’re great at cooking. Organizers need food. Are you a partier? Okay, make your next party a fundraiser and halfway through get someone on the mic talking about local actions people can plug into. Do you watch films? Work to host a film screening and have different organizations “sponsor,” a film. One of the best parts about the Stop Cop City movement is everyone contributed what skills they had, even if they felt random. My organization wrote a report about private equity’s connections to the project. I know another person who works with the city on construction, and told City Council about the project’s impact on soil and runoff water (I am probably summarizing this completely wrong).
I know people don’t always have groups in their area which can feel isolating and alone. Yet as someone who has started 3 groups, including two groups that ended once they achieved their goals (this is very rare in organizing), as long as you have two other people who agree with you, you have enough people to create an organization. You come up with a meeting schedule and commit to reading 1-5 different texts. You analyze the conditions in your area and brainstorm ways to base-build (add more people to your organization). You create the structures to handle conflict and increase commitment. You gain comfort in talking to strangers and eventually you have enough right there to begin a campaign. It’s awkward and sad, and sometimes it takes over a year to get going. But there isn’t going to be a magical group of unactivated people waiting for you to run into them. YOU have to be the person to activate them.
I also know movement conflict is hard. Nothing hurts more to me than when a group breaks up, or when a comrade you thought was also just a friend ends up being neither. There are also groups that have issues with abuse, misogyny, and other forms of domination. These groups can make it feel scary to leave, or as though everyone is against you. I’ve definitely felt that way before, and it’s something that I have healed from over time through journaling, therapy, and also the understanding that these things will happen when people interact. Capitalism changes every form of human interaction, leaving no one untouched. We lack the skills to handle conflict because we have lacked the space to practice with each other. Organizing provides that space, showing us that imperfect people can, and do, find pathways to work together in ways that emphasize integrity, trust, and respect.
At the end of the day, no one is going to drop down from the sky with the solutions for imperialism, capitalism, ableism, the list goes on and on. No one is going to randomly stop the genocides, feed the children, or lower the rising sea levels. No one is going to magically create a world where we are not alienated from each other, where we are not living paycheck to paycheck, or dealing with precarious housing situations. Even on a smaller scale, no one is going to weed the community gardens for us. No one is going to re-stock the mutual aid fridge for us, and no one is going to set up the zoom meeting for us. We are quite literally the ones we have been waiting for.
I was reading an internet friend’s blog and one of their followers asked for advice on joining an organization because they were afraid that it would be awkward. I really had to grapple with the fact that this is a barrier to entry for a large amount of people. They won’t share a flier online, they won’t come to the meeting in the community group, they won’t go to the teach-in alone because they’re afraid of being “awkward.” They’re convinced that someone else will pick up the slack, and they can keep raising “awareness,” only when they feel like it, and that’s their only duty in this life.
If only life were that simple, if only we could just look away. If only we could all continue to pretend that we are unchanged by Palestine, that we find it difficult to close our eyes at night because of all that we’ve seen and heard just by opening our phones. How much easier life would be.
As the police repression escalates, as private equity buys up all our homes, as the government pretends COVID never happened, as our kids learn how to protect themselves from bullets, and as our elders no longer have any form of social support, I wish that I could walk block by block and knock on people’s doors. I wish they would open their door to me so that I could look them in the eye and remind them of the one single fact that rings through my mind again, and again, and again, on loop, so loud sometimes that it feels like the only thing that I’ve ever known for certain. I would tell them that no one is coming to save us.
Beautifully written 👏🏾 as a fellow organizer this definitely resonates but also re-energizes and reground. Thank you for sharing!