What to do

Quarantine Journal

Day 55, Monday, May 4, 2020

     When Trump won in 2016, a group of former Congressional staffers wrote a 23-page handbook and put it up online. It was called "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda." In it they suggest ways people can peacefully but effectively resist the move toward authoritarianism that Trump's election signified. They suggest citizen activism like showing up at town halls, calling Congressmen, visiting their offices, and writing letters/sending emails. The essence was push-back; in the same way the Tea Party had acted as a culture jam to Obama's agenda, this road map by Indivisible gave a way forward for people like me who were in despair and needed something to do so I wasn't grinding my teeth all night. When my friend Ethan approached me to start an Indivisible group I said yes.

     Ethan's brainchild was to marry the ideas of Indivisible with the quiet activism of writing letters and postcards. He and I are both artists and have been active in artist driven movements coming from the '60's - among them, Mail Art. That was a movement that resisted the commercialization of the art market by creating global open calls for art to be sent through the mail and shown in easily accessible places. Ethan, my husband J and I started a chapter of Indivisible but we quickly morphed into "Pen Connection." We are guided by the Indivisible agenda but don't want  endless meetings. We keep it simple: every Sunday we write letters to politicians, voters, and media people - thanking them or nudging them. We helped Katy Porter and Harley Rouda win close elections, and, most recently, the challenger for the Supreme Court in Wisconsin, Jill Karofsky. (Next project: get voters to sign up for mail-in ballots AND save the post office.)  

     After the wins of the 2018 election, when such an exciting and diverse group was elected to the House of Representatives, Indivisible said, "Ok, you were telling people in government what you didn't want. Now it is time to tell them what you do want."

     It was a great question. Turns out it is much harder. You can kill a child in a second, but to nurture and grow one takes an infinite number of small decisions, made over decades. It is the aggregate of the decisions - plus serendipity - that makes a human out of a tiny baby.  Which is the same thing you can say about politics: it is always slow and meandering, messy and imperfect,made of a million million parts. Show me a system that isn't. Medicine? Teaching? Manufacturing? Science? Art? Business?

     My point here is that messy involvement is better than perfect detachment. Politics is messy, yes. Humans are messy, yes. Get on with it. This is our moment to try things. Coronavirus will continue to upend systems that looked impenetrable, like McConnell's Congress or oil based economies as our future. The virus is an accelerator of cracks in the foundation of globalism. 

     What can we create that is useful for everyone? What happened after the Great Depression? FDR developed a robust safety net: Social Security, minimum wage, non-discrimination in employment, and banking regulation among them. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promotes the Green New Deal she is referencing the New Deal Roosevelt used to create jobs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired young people for conservation work, or the Public Works Administration that created 70% of the nation's new educational institutions. Artists, too, were given work that is unparalleled in our history.  I'm cherry picking from the projects, but we can do that with the gift of hindsight. What do we need now? Internet across the country, robust libraries, places for walking - streets, hiking trails, rails-to trails. We could have students work in America as they have in the Peace Corps. We can hire millions of workers to update infrastructure. We need public art and performances, restorative justice programs, gardens instead of lawns and community supported agriculture. How about public banks, urban gleaning, bikes routes that aren't in competition with cars, the de-fencing of cities so people gather together, older kids teaching younger ones, libraries of tools and supplies - I don't know, what do we need? 

     One vision that has sustained me is Richard Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest." He gives talks all over the world, and stays to schmooze with people who come up to him and press their business cards in his hand. After years of this he realized he had thousands of cards. They were for tiny groups and non-profits everywhere - people who wanted to save a language or a species or a kind of music/dance/craft. Folks who were organizing, connecting, speaking out. When he started to look more closely he realized there weren't thousands of these little groups, there were hundreds of thousands. He calls this unrecognized and unruly vanguard the immune system of the planet coming to save it.  

     For instance: City Repair in Portland, OR. They have been working for 30+ years to create spaces in cities where people can gather and talk, organize and speak out, come together for protest and celebration and creation. They recognize that gathering in small groups to converse and play is the bedrock of democracy. It breaks urban cycles of loneliness and despair, bringing people out of their houses/apartments to create community - with a garden, an intersection painting, a free library, a tea stand. They've gotten thousands of homeless people a place indoors to live and heal. They work on the meta - city planning - and the minute: tiny stands (like realtor's boxes) that have poetry you can take with you on your walk.  

     The weird thing is we need places to come together more than ever and this virus has jinxed that. Our new main streets are online. But maybe, like boredom is good for creativity, this time away from each other and our incessant busyness is actually a good time to see the whole. To do a life in review or a culture-in-review or both; to do a what-do-I-want-to-do/see/make. When, in moments of crisis, kids ask me what to do I say, "Pick something you love and do one small thing for it every day for fifty years." They hate that - it's so unsexy. But it works. My most radical friends from 60's social movements crashed and burned and died young. I'm still alive, still working. I do small things some days and more when I get fired up. It's so much easier to keep a drip going than let the pipes freeze and have to unearth them. I'm not the volcano, I'm the coral reef, built one tiny effort at a time. It adds up.