I giddily laughed upon reading Ramona’s retort to her grandma, the caption for the first picture (of you protesting the fact no one was coming to your yard sale), and the caption for the fourth one (Ransom wearing a “Black Lives Matter to God” shirt). I aspire to be as spunky and iconoclastic as you and your children.
I’ve been looking into the literature about moral injury to name and make sense of the shame, guilt, fatigue, and social isolation caused by being a member of an extended family profiting from the military industrial complex. My in-laws bought the house I currently reside in with money from my father-in-law’s last job at Northrop Grumman, working on their B-21 Raider, and my partner, an AV systems integrator, now works for a simulation installation company contracting with companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and directly with the U.S Navy. When my partner and I got together, we were dirt-poor missionaries with YWAM and his dad wasn’t allowed to talk about his job at an experimental airport. But ten years has brought drastic changes, such that I find myself on the other side of deconstruction and a major move across country to an area of Florida economically fueled by the military industrial complex and the space industry. Dreams of divestment and reparation, and anxiety over the fact that I’ve never felt safe or been able to express how my loved ones’ lived values are diametrically opposed to mine keep me up at night. And with every passing day that Israel with the backing of the U.S (and Canada my home country) keeps bombing and starving Palestinian children, I fear I’m one day closer to erupting like a thousand-year dormant volcano and causing some major relational rift.
I would love to make my voice heard, join a local anti-war or pro-Palestine protest, meet and organize with like-minded folks. And there is a muzzling silence around me in Brevard county that is suffocating. Fascism is real; the way it menaces people into not voicing their dissent is something I’m experiencing in real time. And I want to believe I’m not the only one who would like to place their body on the line for communal liberation (and a free Palestine), democracy, and thriving pluralistic world but who feel disqualified and isolated by their association with those benefiting from systems of harm.
I don’t have a clear sense of what it takes to break that silence, but I do know that online spaces like this Substack community nurture hope and courage.
I'm so glad you are here and I hope this essay does not make it seem like everyone must resist or protest in a specific way. You are doing the deep, deep work and I want to validate that! Something I have been thinking about a lot are the hallmarks of CPTSD and how they come into play when it comes to protesting or resisting injustice, especially for autistic folks. It's all a stew, just like human society actually is! You are absolutely breaking the silence by investing into spaces where you can let your hair down / talk about your actual feelings. That is so important, and I am glad you can do it here!
The more I voice what I really think, the more I realize that I’m probably expressing what others are feeling and thinking too but have also been made to feel afraid to say.
It's really trippy for me to read about your progression through deconstruction/deconversion because of how similarly it lines up with my own experience.
I used to put tape over the name brand logos on my clothes in high school and I've been to many protests with bible verse signs.
The last big, march style protest I went to was in the summer of 2020 and I left that summer feeling really disillusioned by I guess protest culture. It seemed to me like protests and marches were great places to let off steam and have big emotional experiences with like minded people but that they weren't good at converting folks into taking more meaningful action afterwards.
These days I'm canvassing for tenants rights and working to unionize an apartment complex down the street from my house. Canvassing strangers isn't as exciting as marching on city hall, but I feel like I'm planting seeds of revolution and that feels more productive. More fruitful.
Yeah we are all figuring out what works for us and what doesn't. Everyone gets autonomy to decide what ways work best for them and what doesn't! I personally am pretty glad to see not a lot of big name leaders rise up out of the protest movements -- mostly I see people who are already deeply involved in some kind of justice work finding strength and solidarity. Protests are just one part of an entire movement :)
This whole post is giving me life. My protest signs that I use are my face (my expressions don't hide my feelings) and my T-shirts. I have two fav shirts that I love wearing around town and at family functions: one is green and has a drawing of Jane Austen wearing big rainbow glasses and it says, "More Pride, Less Prejudice." The other is a hand-tie-dyed pink, blue, and white T-shirt with Precious moments kids holding a heart with the words "Protect Trans Kids." (DL made this shirt and I love it so so much and my nonbinary tween just glows every time I wear it)
2. Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (https://files.libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf) - great little excerpt here on the relationship between protestation and culture within late capitalism: "Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. "
3. Finally, anything on "Color Revolutions", which is a zone that illuminates the elusive relationship intelligence plays in mass movements, often leveraging those movements for the sake of authoritarian control (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1240540.shtml)
I'm sure it's not new content for you, but for some readers might enjoy
Whoa! This essay hit. I was just at a protest last night. Legal observer at the Liberated Zone for a Free Palestine of the local campus encampment, but then I neurodivergently had to sleep it off for the next 12 hours.
The intergenerational aspect of protest has been in my mind too, also as the child of left-over hippies/jesus people. I have super cute photos of my kids with signs that say "jesus was a refugee" and "my friends wear hijab", but I there are also photos of me in existence as a kid with protest signs that say "all children have a right to life" and news articles where I'm photographed as a child at anti-choice rallies.
I have no doubt children can see injustice and feel it strongly. I know I did. There are studies that is it one of the first complex things children will react to in a lab setting. I definitely have doubt as to whether they can discern the nuance of who is being harmed where and the long-term impacts of public positional stance. I know I didn't. I've had some discomfort and grief around how much choice, present and future, is taken from children when they are part of political displays.
This part of an essay I've been reading on Zapatista liberation and their writings on digniity and autonomy got me, "So we fight so that the girl, who is going to be born in 120 years is free and is whatever she wants to be. So we are not fighting for that girl to be a Zapatista or a partidista or whatever, but rather for her to be able to choose, when she has judgment, what her path is."
Anyway thanks for triggering some thoughts and maybe some healing around all this, and (one day) may all kids, trans kids, Black kids and kids in fundamentalist families, just get to be kids.
great essay. thank you... i laughed out loud and also felt the massive accumulated stress of living in this world. I loved your jesusy protest signs back in the day. Still love them . Your point about protest being a somatic experience !
I giddily laughed upon reading Ramona’s retort to her grandma, the caption for the first picture (of you protesting the fact no one was coming to your yard sale), and the caption for the fourth one (Ransom wearing a “Black Lives Matter to God” shirt). I aspire to be as spunky and iconoclastic as you and your children.
I’ve been looking into the literature about moral injury to name and make sense of the shame, guilt, fatigue, and social isolation caused by being a member of an extended family profiting from the military industrial complex. My in-laws bought the house I currently reside in with money from my father-in-law’s last job at Northrop Grumman, working on their B-21 Raider, and my partner, an AV systems integrator, now works for a simulation installation company contracting with companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and directly with the U.S Navy. When my partner and I got together, we were dirt-poor missionaries with YWAM and his dad wasn’t allowed to talk about his job at an experimental airport. But ten years has brought drastic changes, such that I find myself on the other side of deconstruction and a major move across country to an area of Florida economically fueled by the military industrial complex and the space industry. Dreams of divestment and reparation, and anxiety over the fact that I’ve never felt safe or been able to express how my loved ones’ lived values are diametrically opposed to mine keep me up at night. And with every passing day that Israel with the backing of the U.S (and Canada my home country) keeps bombing and starving Palestinian children, I fear I’m one day closer to erupting like a thousand-year dormant volcano and causing some major relational rift.
I would love to make my voice heard, join a local anti-war or pro-Palestine protest, meet and organize with like-minded folks. And there is a muzzling silence around me in Brevard county that is suffocating. Fascism is real; the way it menaces people into not voicing their dissent is something I’m experiencing in real time. And I want to believe I’m not the only one who would like to place their body on the line for communal liberation (and a free Palestine), democracy, and thriving pluralistic world but who feel disqualified and isolated by their association with those benefiting from systems of harm.
I don’t have a clear sense of what it takes to break that silence, but I do know that online spaces like this Substack community nurture hope and courage.
I'm so glad you are here and I hope this essay does not make it seem like everyone must resist or protest in a specific way. You are doing the deep, deep work and I want to validate that! Something I have been thinking about a lot are the hallmarks of CPTSD and how they come into play when it comes to protesting or resisting injustice, especially for autistic folks. It's all a stew, just like human society actually is! You are absolutely breaking the silence by investing into spaces where you can let your hair down / talk about your actual feelings. That is so important, and I am glad you can do it here!
The more I voice what I really think, the more I realize that I’m probably expressing what others are feeling and thinking too but have also been made to feel afraid to say.
It's really trippy for me to read about your progression through deconstruction/deconversion because of how similarly it lines up with my own experience.
I used to put tape over the name brand logos on my clothes in high school and I've been to many protests with bible verse signs.
The last big, march style protest I went to was in the summer of 2020 and I left that summer feeling really disillusioned by I guess protest culture. It seemed to me like protests and marches were great places to let off steam and have big emotional experiences with like minded people but that they weren't good at converting folks into taking more meaningful action afterwards.
These days I'm canvassing for tenants rights and working to unionize an apartment complex down the street from my house. Canvassing strangers isn't as exciting as marching on city hall, but I feel like I'm planting seeds of revolution and that feels more productive. More fruitful.
Yeah we are all figuring out what works for us and what doesn't. Everyone gets autonomy to decide what ways work best for them and what doesn't! I personally am pretty glad to see not a lot of big name leaders rise up out of the protest movements -- mostly I see people who are already deeply involved in some kind of justice work finding strength and solidarity. Protests are just one part of an entire movement :)
This whole post is giving me life. My protest signs that I use are my face (my expressions don't hide my feelings) and my T-shirts. I have two fav shirts that I love wearing around town and at family functions: one is green and has a drawing of Jane Austen wearing big rainbow glasses and it says, "More Pride, Less Prejudice." The other is a hand-tie-dyed pink, blue, and white T-shirt with Precious moments kids holding a heart with the words "Protect Trans Kids." (DL made this shirt and I love it so so much and my nonbinary tween just glows every time I wear it)
Three recommendations that feel essential to protests in our current moment:
1. If We Burn by Vincent Bevins (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/10/vincent-bevins-if-we-burn-interview-mass-protest-decade-2010s-change-how-you-view-protest-forever/) an account from a journalist exploring a global pattern where mass protests seemingly lead to results contrary to the protesters' demands. The book discusses the inherent challenges of leaderless, digitally-coordinated protests that, while initially successful in mobilizing people, often lack the organization necessary to sustain their original goals, leading to unintended outcomes.
2. Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (https://files.libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf) - great little excerpt here on the relationship between protestation and culture within late capitalism: "Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. "
3. Finally, anything on "Color Revolutions", which is a zone that illuminates the elusive relationship intelligence plays in mass movements, often leveraging those movements for the sake of authoritarian control (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1240540.shtml)
I'm sure it's not new content for you, but for some readers might enjoy
I have never heard of any of these articles and thanks to my ethical OCD I'm probably not going to be able to. But thank you for sharing!
For sure. I respect that. grateful to join the convo.
Whoa! This essay hit. I was just at a protest last night. Legal observer at the Liberated Zone for a Free Palestine of the local campus encampment, but then I neurodivergently had to sleep it off for the next 12 hours.
The intergenerational aspect of protest has been in my mind too, also as the child of left-over hippies/jesus people. I have super cute photos of my kids with signs that say "jesus was a refugee" and "my friends wear hijab", but I there are also photos of me in existence as a kid with protest signs that say "all children have a right to life" and news articles where I'm photographed as a child at anti-choice rallies.
I have no doubt children can see injustice and feel it strongly. I know I did. There are studies that is it one of the first complex things children will react to in a lab setting. I definitely have doubt as to whether they can discern the nuance of who is being harmed where and the long-term impacts of public positional stance. I know I didn't. I've had some discomfort and grief around how much choice, present and future, is taken from children when they are part of political displays.
This part of an essay I've been reading on Zapatista liberation and their writings on digniity and autonomy got me, "So we fight so that the girl, who is going to be born in 120 years is free and is whatever she wants to be. So we are not fighting for that girl to be a Zapatista or a partidista or whatever, but rather for her to be able to choose, when she has judgment, what her path is."
Anyway thanks for triggering some thoughts and maybe some healing around all this, and (one day) may all kids, trans kids, Black kids and kids in fundamentalist families, just get to be kids.
great essay. thank you... i laughed out loud and also felt the massive accumulated stress of living in this world. I loved your jesusy protest signs back in the day. Still love them . Your point about protest being a somatic experience !