Dear T—
I feel the country unraveling. Do you feel the country unraveling? I totally feel the country unraveling. Or maybe it’s just my mind unraveling, as it has for years, like a tattered flag atop the domed capitol of a dying republic. Yeah, the country is unraveling.
Notice I say the country and not our country. I was born in Flatbush, yet brown skin makes me an immigrant with unearned birthrights and a Brooklyn accent. I vote every year, yet womanhood makes me an underpaid womb with an irrelevant view. I pay taxes and follow the law, yet citizenship earns me no favors from the government. It can never be my country.
That’s because it’s their country: the rich white men bankrolling this vulgar parody of democracy. I only rent a low rung on their greased ladder: for the price of my dignity, I get the illusion of security. It’s what Americans do, we employees of the month. We aspire to the comfort and influence they hoard, so we assimilate. We ingratiate. We supplicate.
We suck as a country, and we are in for a reckoning. I don’t know when it will happen, but soon. Maybe it will be a civil war of litigation to preserve our existing system of injustice. Maybe it will take guerrilla action—a riot or a revolution—to redirect our collective course. In either case, people will die—a few, hundreds, thousands—though one death will already be too many. Institutions will fall. Infrastructure will fail. No political solution will avert this.
Still, I’m optimistic that my community will persevere—it always has despite obstacles. When fathers were deported, mothers held the family together. When breadwinners succumbed to COVID, neighbors held the household together. When the government withheld life-sustaining resources, people petitioned, protested and went on hunger strike until they received what their taxes paid for. This community lives in spite of the government, regardless of who is in charge. As my neighbors say, “Mi existencia es resistencia.”
My only wish is for the community to create an accurate first draft of history before it is erased like Reconstruction, or else sanitized like Martin Luther King. The current fourth estate is too busy defending its privilege; it cannot be trusted to portray my community as anything but victims to be saved or culprits to be blamed. Our progeny deserves unadulterated accounts of our successes and failures, lest they be damned to repeat the same mistakes we and our forebears committed over the last two and a half centuries. Fact and truth must prevail this time.
My role in all of this is to help the community understand the importance of documenting their lives themselves, even under dire conditions. Call it media literacy or political education, citizen journalism or mutual aid: my job is to organize and mobilize the community into recording its present and contributing to its future history. I can serve as a reporter if my neighbors choose, but it is their choice. Everyone is an editor in this leaderful newsroom.
If I achieve my goal, then these editors will organize and mobilize others to do the same, so that every neglected community is represented. If I fail, then perhaps I was the wrong organizer, but mobilizing these communities to survive the gradual death of this nation and to thrive in whatever follows is still the correct course. May the right organizer see it through.
So that’s where I am, anarchist at large. I spend my days writing these letters, forging my philosophy on the internet, as well as reporting on a trial basis for The Community Hub. I’ll be participating in political education there too later this month, examining science, medicine and colonialism. The Free Store offers me fresh bread weekly after the comrades and I pack the bulk for distribution to community fridges; and for my help in last month’s hot-meal distribution, I brought home enough leftover saag, dum aloo and basmati rice to last a few days. Family time, exercise and psychotherapy keep the rest of my life on a healthy track.
Any idea how I might make a modest living organizing the community to claim their stories and declare their place in human history? I may be done with capitalism, but it ain’t done with me—and the rent is due.
As always, I welcome your thoughts. Be well and stay safe.
Jennifer