I don't be in these streets looking for friends, I'm out here scanning for accomplices. I'm measuring the like-minded and those with adjacent goals for capability and commitment to principles.
I'm out here by moral obligation.
And along the way, we make friends, we share in love, we bond, we fight, we agree, we laugh, we dance, we clique, we compete...
That's all part of the process. But when we talk about centering... What's the big picture?
We don't HAVE to be buddies for Black Lives to Matter.
We definitely don't need to all be friends to defund the police.
We do need to understand each other and have respect and boundaries and a shared sense of community.
No one said "love thy neighbor" was an easy ask. But it's far easier than "like thy neighbor" in my opinion.
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Sitting here hungry, thinking about the first week of the 2020 protests when I tried to catch a gas canister off the first bounce and it ended up being a flashbang.
I ran around deaf and half blind for a while minute. Shout out to the homies.
We were real traumatized out there. Some of us have yet to recover.
It's hard to explain how watching our nightmares unfold from the hands of our city, state and federal government radicalized us and left us distrustful of everyone.
I truly thought I was going to be murdered by a LEO before I turned 40. And I was OK with that.
Betsy Johnson has the support of the cops, big timber, the PDX business community and Nike. And when I say "support", I mean she has around $5M in campaign funds and no one else in the governor's race is anywhere near close.
Where is the resistance?
Betsy is a Joe Manchin style Democrat-turned-Independent.
Low scores on labor, environment, gun control, etc. Not a Republican in name, but for reasons unbeknownst.
Ever heard of People for Portland? The right-wing dark-money group who wants to ban homelessness by herding undesirables into forced shelters?
America: Where everybody is ready to fake fight over things that don't actually matter instead of focusing on making the very obvious changes that are within reach.
America: Where everyone knows the fight is a ruse but we play along anyway because the alternative is actually fighting.
Abolishing police without constructing and using publicly accepted restorative justice practices IN REALITY simply leads to increased public support of policing and vigilantism.
We have to create the alternative we want to see. We have to communicate it. We have to model it.
People keep asking where leftists collectively lost the carrot and its right there.
Why do mostly white anon leftists attack leftists of color? Because leftists of color typically work in actual physical communities where RJ is used in praxis.
So they call us all apologists.
For a lot of the Twitter-left, this is a show. Stirring up mess is the fuel for their ONLINE engagement, so they prioritize gossip as real work. Then they log off.
But if we look at this behavior through an restorative justice lens, what space is created for change? Zero.
Far worse things have happened since, but I hadn't thought about that in a while and it popped out as the moment I stopped fucking with people.
It was also an early example to me that white people def understand restorative justice when it comes to themselves.
The boy who pushed me never faced any consequence. Later that year, I quit school to homeschool. I don't recall how much this had to do with it. Might ask my mom.