Cindy Milstein (they)One could read “double trouble” in this enormous example of graffiti, sprayed with bold precision on a walkway wall under an overpass in Vienna: both #FTP (fuck the police) and #ACAB (all cops are bastards/bad)—aka, cops always bring trouble, they don’t protect or defend people from it. And that’s a good and legit read, pointing in two acronyms or seven letters to the countless reasons why police must be abolished. Reform just paints a lighter shade of blue on the inherent brutality of policing.
Yet as a prefigurative-minded anarchist—and thus, it should go without saying, abolitionist—I feel it’s our task to always offer our own, nonhierarchical double trouble—the good kind of trouble aimed at shaking up this death machine of a social order via social critiques and social visions. That is, not merely asserting what we’re against (here, cops) but also, always, concurrently, proclaiming and especially experimenting with what we’re for (in this case, a world without police).
So in this #ArtOfResistance, I see the double trouble of a liberatory counternarrative: #FreeThePeople (FTP) and #AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful (ACAB). I see glimpses across this imperiled planet—of which we humans are only one small (yet too often dangerous) part/guest—of how forms of freedom and self-governance, even in what might seem modest ways, are put into practice every day, including and especially these days, in using solidarity as a weapon (our best one) against the occupying, often militarized police forces trying to control too many cities and lands around the globe.
✨Based Plant🎸
Ika Makimaki
theNameless
Dudula the Dud
Skaka_man / Schorem
YlvieRainmaker
Stuff I found
Della Wren
Jayde Throwing Shade
