Hope requires grief
"Hope is not a feeling generated by an individual from within. Hope is a flame that is intentionally co-created in community that then permeates & passes through us all.
Hope, happiness, joy, contentment, safety, meaning, purpose, motivation, creativity, etc are all things an individual cannot independently generate in isolation even if colonial logic convinces you otherwise.
Hope is not a feeling generated by an individual from within. Hope is a flame that is intentionally co-created in community that then permeates & passes through us all.
Hope is a fire that is tended to and kept alive by the collective efforts of many. Just like any life-giving, life-sustaining energy that circulates within an ecosystem, we depend on each other to have hope. Like survival, hope is a collective responsibility, not an individual burden. We have to play our role in seeking out community where such hope can be co-created. The struggle to forge community in itself is a journey with a million hopeful moments that can only exist alongside painful teaching moments. As long as we run from the struggle, hope will remain just as inaccessible.
We don’t fight for us, we fight for those who came before & those who will come after us.
Intergenerational collectivism is intuitive to some but many are not used to thinking deeply beyond the self let alone acting to preserve future generations. Capitalism convinces people to look out for themselves, effectively cutting them off from community not just in present day but communities of the past & the future. Palestinian resistance factions are sacrificing everything including their lives knowing they may not necessarily see a free Palestine within their lifetime but future generations might.
We don’t fight for us, we fight for those who came before & those who will come after us.
We have to fight as though the freedom we envision can be actualized right now but also commit to fighting regardless. This basic logic drives collectivism. Land-based communities don’t just sow seeds to have food next year, we sow seeds for trees that will bear fruit or nuts in the future, sometimes decades or centuries from now. Ultimately, such foresight & care makes our ecosystems resilient, more sustainable & our soil infinitely more fertile even in the present. So it is not a fully selfless act, it is reciprocity. The act of thinking beyond yourself as an individual generates hope. We don’t need the perfect hypothetical utopia of tomorrow to arrive to experience real hope. We need to put in the work to co-create it today & it is all around us if we’re open to it."
How do we keep hope alive in our movements?, Ayesha Khan, Ph.D.
https://wokescientist.substack.com/p/how-do-we-keep-hope-alive-in-our
"We need to grieve.
We have lived in a dire health crisis for far too long. Mourning has become a perfunctory ritual expected to take place in the margins of our days. Genocide reduces lives to statistics for us to inhale without complication; yet, so many of us have seen our communities shrink, grow tired and get sicker. For marginalized people across the world, each day has been doused in distress by the capitalist elites who are waiting for us to eagerly march into our own coffins.
We need to grieve.
Sometimes, there are no words left to say. But, we implore all of us to replace silence with screaming, sobbing, the sounds of grief. We deserve to feel devastated. We deserve to stop pedaling on through labyrinths of productivity and distraction. We deserve time to feel the pain we’ve been conditioned to fear feeling.
Hope requires grief. If we can’t mourn what has been taken from us, how can we begin to imagine what we can give to each other? How can we appreciate mourning when this grief is needless? How do we learn from this mourning when our sorrow is relentless? Mourning in grief requires gentle or sharp release, yet there is no release when our mourning persists.
When we can allow ourselves to embrace slowness and take the time to look at the vast landscape of suffering that has been inflicted upon us, we must also acknowledge that our current lifestyles are antithetical to the future we’re working towards. As Mao Tse-tung wrote in Combat Liberalism, “To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue” is a type of liberalism.
The mass unmasking wave has caused irreparable harm, and we cannot allow that to continue. How can we say we prioritize community care if that care doesn’t include the health and safety of vulnerable communities? How do we intend to wage war on capitalist elites if we all grow weak and fatigued from never-ending re-infections?"
People’s Health Education Program
https://healthselfdefense.substack.com/p/hope-requires-grief
• Remember: covid is not over, 50% of infections are asymptomatic, minimum 10% of infections end up in long COVID, re-infections wreck us, COVID spreads and moves like cigarette smoke, think of the people around you and you as people who are all day smoking, it becomes more visual to understand how COVID moves.
• There is no way to “train” the immune system because it is not a muscle. there is a common misconception that exposure to harmful germs strengthens the immune system. viral diseases like COVID, flu, measles weaken the immune system, leaving the possibility of lasting damage. The reality is that you don't build your immunity with repeated infections, vaccines strengthen the immune system by teaching it to recognize pathogens without all the risks. Focusing on infection prevention is key.
• Rapid antigen tests give many false negatives.
• Solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the capitalist world.
• Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.
“The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. (…) Solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the capitalist world. Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception.” Let Them Eat Plague! http://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/
#MaskUp #WearAMask #CovidRealist #CovidIsAirbone #LongCovid #YallMasking #DisabledLiberation #DisabilityJustice
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