Btw it's not enough to say that you are not shaming people who are being prevented from registering or voting bc it's not that clean. The system of voter suppression does not just directly suppress participation. It also grinds the will to vote out of ppl. Shaming compounds that.
I realize people are scared, but that's no excuse for making the situation worse for literally everyone. Let your fear motivate *constructive* action.
Part of the problem is that ppl don't fully understand how voter suppression has *always* worked. Making the process unbearable, unnavigable & potentially legally risky was never just about directly blocking ppl. This system was designed to beat ppl into feeling it's not worth it
People who do not understand those things prop up contemporary modes of voter suppression by shaming people who have become disillusioned, and further polarizing participants and non-participants, instead of blaming the system or working the problem.
Ppl who vote shame often defend their actions by emphasizing how valid their feelings are. But the thing is, it's not about your feelings. It's about what generates the outcome we both agree is essential. Vote shaming actively harms those efforts. It is a gift to the other side.
Trust me, Republicans love it when y'all talk shit about people who don't vote and get all superior about it. They LOVE IT. Bc they know you are alienating those people and making them less likely to team up w you on anything, including the election. Seriously, they adore this.
I know folks who used to vote shame before they got real with themselves about how destructive it is. They are better organizers for this, bc they figured out how to extend asks and ideas about elections in ways that were not harmful or alienating. They challenged themselves.
It's also worth remembering that some of our very valid feelings and complaints in this life are more suited to group chats than twitter.
Folks who are traveling to Chicago for the DNC, please be careful about who you connect with. If you meet strangers who are talking big game about doing "epic" shit, ask yourselves why they're saying these things to someone they don't even know.
They might be cops who want you to get hyped and drunk and run your mouth. We have seen this before. In 2012, a couple of undercovers latched onto three out-of-towners who showed up to protest the NATO summit. They hung out with those guys, got high with them, and talked big.
The two undercovers recorded the activists they targeted in moments of bravado and the state ultimately hit them with terrorism charges. Those young men were not a threat to anyone. They were singled out bc they had previously recorded police in a manner that embarrassed CPD.
When he was still doing climate journalism before retiring young (and not bc that work pays big), Dahr Jamail wrote: "I am learning how to bridge gaps between myself and the people I love who are navigating in a different reality." And fuck if that doesn't resonate.
This is all my therapist heard about recently: what it is to hold so much painful knowledge that you can't just casually dump on other people bc that info has to be parceled carefully alongside ideas about what the fuck to do, or it just demobilizes people or shuts them down.
So you don't want to throw around bad news like Oprah giving away cars. "You get an apocalyptic scenario! And you get an apocalyptic scenario! And you get some bad news about sea mammals!" It doesn't end well.
"What does peace mean in the heart of empire amid the realities of racial capitalism? What does it mean to politicians whose primary concern is the maintenance of an economic system that is driving most life on earth toward extinction? It means order." organizingmythoughts.org/what-does-peac…
Noticing some folks reasoning that particular students don't deserve a militant police response bc they are "peaceful." I don't care if students break windows, shove back, or throw things; none of them deserve a militarized police response. They're protesting a genocide.
Folks should be careful about conjuring standards that determine whether someone is deserving of police violence. It's enough to say that the people protesting a genocide should not be harmed.
I'm not even sure whose values are being appealed to half the time. If people were really worried about "violence," they'd be objecting to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Many people in colonial societies believe (or simply accept as a norm, without argument) that any amount of suffering and death is acceptable within out-groups to sustain their in-group's way of life. This is especially true in the imperial core, where I live.
The idea of a "whatever it takes" stance being adopted by those out-groups, as they pursue a freer existence, or simply demand to survive, inspires genocidal zeal among many people in colonial societies. Standards of decency are about how their in-groups are treated, not others.
When such people are harmed, they say, "Nothing could justify this." When their governments harm others, they point to the injuries they have experienced as justification.
.@BostonReview published an excerpt from Let This Radicalize You. It's from a chapter called Organizing Isn't Matchmaking. "It is no exaggeration to say that the whole world is at stake, and we cannot afford to minimize what that demands of us." bostonreview.net/articles/how-m…
"Put simply, we need more people. What do we mean by this? We are not talking about launching search parties to find an undiscovered army of people with already-perfected politics with whom we will easily and naturally align." bostonreview.net/articles/how-m…
"Instead, organizing on the scale that our struggles demand means finding common ground with a broad spectrum of people, many of whom we would never otherwise interact with, and building a shared practice of politics in the pursuit of more just outcomes." bostonreview.net/articles/how-m…