Not all acts of resistance are political and overt. Survival is resistance. Loving and supporting those around you is resistance. Finding and sharing even small bits of joy is resistance.
We build the world we want even in the smallest acts we make. Never forget that.
If you’re new to actions with an arrest risk and you don’t have experienced protestors with you, there’s stuff you can find online about having a legal team, writing the name of a lawyer on your body, saying NOTHING to the cops except the name of your lawyer, etc. That’s all good advice.
But let me give you a bit of advice that is just as essential as all that:
If one of your comrades gets arrested, and you know they can be held for 6, 9, 12 hours, depending on where you are, you get a group of people together and you wait outside the police station.
You may be tired, you may be stressed, it may be freezing, you may need to take turns, but you take whoever can still physically and mentally bear it and you go to that police station and you wait for your comrade. You can spend the time taking care of each other, drinking hot drinks, doing whatever gets you through, but you wait.
And when your comrade gets out, you make sure they do not walk home alone in the dark thinking about the fucked up experience they just had, you make sure there’s a big fucking crowd of their comrades there to greet them with hugs and hot drinks and a cigarette if they smoke.
And whether the arrested comrade that just got out is happy or sad or pissed off, you take that for what it is and give that space and you support that. And you get them a hot meal and you hang out with them and you offer to let them stay at your place or you stay with them so they don’t have to spend that night alone with their thoughts.
You do this every damn time, regardless of whether you really like that comrade and regardless of how you feel about the thing your comrade got arrested for, regardless of how often they’ve been arrested. Because you never know how shitty their experience is going to be in there this time.
Trust me. This is absolutely essential. Once you’ve been arrested and have felt the difference between walking home alone or having your friends waiting for you, you’ll understand.
Be good comrades
I can’t stress how important this is. When my father and I were arrested in Seattle some years back for agitating for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, we were greeted outside the jail by the event’s organisers. They cheered us, had cokes and munchies for us. They drove us to our car and, during the drive, asked if we wanted to stay the night in Seattle with one of the organisers, they filled us in on what had happened after our arrests, they asked about and listened intently to what we experienced from arrest to release. They did so much so well that when another call went out for potential arrestees, we were amongst the first to raise our proverbial hands.
Read the post. Re-read the post. Remember it. And, when the chance comes, do it.
When I was arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest a few years ago, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice were doing Jail Support when I was finally let out of One Police Plaza at around 6am.
They had gotten a klezmer band to stand along the hill you have to go up to leave the jail, and as I walked to where the volunteer lawyers were waiting (they were there to make sure all 200+ people who were arrested that night would be represented at their later hearings. They also were surrounded by volunteers who had food, phone chargers, directions to all the nearby subway stops, and one of them let me borrow her phone to call my mom when I got frustrated with how slowly my phone was charging) the band played music, cheered and applauded.
Honestly? That band playing klezmer for me as I left jail, cheering me on and making me laugh… it’s a memory I really treasure.
It’s also one of my mother’s favorite stories. Before I told her about that band, she got so upset and agitated whenever anything reminded her of my arrest. She’d freak out, cry, start fussing over me, and so forth. After I told her about the klezmer band though? It became something she’d tell her friends about, over and over again, laughing each time. She stopped calling me to beg me not to go and protest every time she knew a big one was happening, and instead would call to make a joke about how if I want to listen to klezmer she has some CDs I can borrow.
When I think about that night, rather than any of the many many terrible things that happened from the moment the cops grabbed me onward, the first thing I remember is the klezmer, and how it made me laugh, and the popcorn someone gave me as I gave the lawyers my name and info, and the kindness of strangers.
After the dehumanization of even a few hours in police custody, those volunteers made me smile, and gave the night a new fun and funny angle to be remembered from. I actually laugh when I think about that night, thanks to them.
Jail Support is a beyond vital part of protesting. It really really is.
If you would report an undocumented immigrant to ICE you would have reported me to the Nazis and I don’t fucking trust you
A note:
I live in a state where you “have to” report anyone you suspect of being undocumented (that wonderful hellhole of Arizona). Now in practice this law has fallen far short, thank goodness. But if you live in such a place and they start enforcing it, here is how you get around it:
Assume everyone who doesn’t speak English is visiting.
Never ask about their job, because if they tell you they work here then you know they’re not visiting. You see them a lot for several weeks or months? Hm. Someone in the family must be ill. That’s terribly tough. They always dress in old, ratty laborers’ clothes? I feel you, my dude, I can’t afford new clothes either, and my dad has the fashion sense of an aardvark, so sometimes it’s not even about “affording” them. They say they’ve been here for years? You must have misunderstood. Spanish isn’t your first language, after all. First and last name? It never came up, or you don’t recall–you meet a lot of people.
And then, if you’re asked: no, you haven’t seen anyone residing illegally in the United States. Just people visiting.
i feel kinda fucked up that im living in a country with a nazi regime and not being able to do anything about it and nothing is working. we need to take to the streets in droves and riot. gather thousands of people. throw rocks at the white house. sprinkle sugar on the campgrounds where the tents are gonna be built (2 lbs of sugar can ruin up to one ton of unset concrete). or throw hydrogen peroxide filled water balloons at the exposed steel to corrode it faster because theyre literally building concentration camps in 106°F texas heat for children who cannot regulate their body temperature like adults
nobody in power is listening so we have to do it ourselves
If you’re an adult, do the stuff you couldn’t as a kid.
Like, me and my sister went to a museum, and they had an extra exhibit of butterflies. But it cost £3. So we sighed, walked past, then stopped. We each had £3. We could see the butterflies. And we did it was great. We followed it up with an ice-cream as well because Mum and Dad weren’t there to say no.
I was driving back from a work trip with 2 other people in their early 20s, and we drove past a MacDonalds. One of the others went “Aww man, I’d love a McFlurry.” And the guy driving pulled in to the drive through. It was wild. But it was great.
I went to a park over the weekend and I was thinking “Man, I’d love to hire one of those bikes and cycle round the park.” It took me a few minutes to go “Wait, I can hire one of those bikes!”
I guess what I’m saying is, those impulsive things you wanted to do as a kid – see the dinosaur exhibit, play in the fountains with the other kids, lie in the shade for 2 hours – you can do when you’re an adult. You have to deal with a whole lot of other bull, but at least you can indulge your inner 8 year-old.
When people suffer, it often makes them into worse people.
It sucks. I know it sucks. It is quite possibly the single most unjust thing about this universe of ours, which is filled from top to bottom with soul-breaking injustices. If you yourself are suffering, it’s pretty much the most insulting thing you can hear, a cosmic insult-added-to-injury where the authors of your pain are sneering at you for retroactively having deserved it.
And yet it’s true, for basically any sane definition of “worse” than can be applied to human beings.
…I was going to have a very long essay here about all the different ways in which this phenomenon can manifest. I don’t think I need it, and I don’t think you need to see it. You can generate any number of examples perfectly well on your own, even if they’re not things that you’d ever want to say or even think.
The point is that, as with any Big Truth of the Human Condition, you’re not going to be able to engage with the world in an enlightened and principled way until you own up to it and face it down.
Don’t worry about fault or responsibility or moral dessert. Don’t worry about how much you’re supposed to blame the poor suffering soul for the poison fruits of his pain. Blame is a stupid sideline, more useful for crafting rhetorical barbs than for actually figuring out what to do.
But make yourself remember –
* Alleviating the suffering of bad people is a useful tool for making them into better people, or at least for preventing them from becoming even-worse people. This is true even if they don’t deserve it, which as postulated they presumably don’t.
* The fact that people are suffering…or the fact that their suffering is unjust…is not a contradiction or counter to the claim that they are bad, or that the things they are doing is bad. It is supporting evidence for such a claim.
* If you decide that you are going to dedicate yourself wholly to fighting on behalf of those who are suffering – or, especially, to fighting on behalf of some specific subset of those who are suffering – you are constantly going to have to deal with the fact that your clients are doing terrible things, and that by reasonable standards they’re often much worse people than the people who are making them suffer.
* Redemptive stories about the morally-purifying nature of harsh ordeals aren’t always false, but they’re usually false.
you can still radiate light if you’re sad. you can still be kind and soft-hearted if you’re a bit cynical. you don’t need to be the happiest person to make someone else’s day better.
Consulting Witch 