05/06/2025
🗣️🗣️Everyday, 47 spouts more nonsense to distract us from the latest sale of our land and Rights. People are anxious, afraid.
So now what?
Now is the time many of us have been preparing for and I don't mean prepping by stockpiling beans🫘and 🧻toilet paper. There are networks around you that are building community coalitions, bridges among neighbors who are clothing👕and🍝feeding people. There are collectives that are learning to be medics⛑️and the old ways of 🌿herbal remedies. We're teaching gardeningand community defense💪🏽. There are groups that are providing free medical⚕️and🦷dental care to the community.
Now is not the time to despair. It's a time to get more involved! Being active in community🐝work helps to ease anxiety and hopelessness🫂. We all have skill sets that can strengthen community resistance efforts.
Almost daily on the socials, I see a meme of the📜 poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, "First They Came For", and I wonder if people realize it was a confessional sermon when it was first released. That changes the interpretation from a warning to an apology. It's not telling us to be brave and stand now; it's more of a "I wish I had been brave enough to stand".
Seeing it go around doesn't give me a sense that folks will be filled with impetus to act, rather the opposite. It tells me that people probably aren't going to be acting this time around either. 💔They'll deal with their mea culpa when it's over, if they survive the storm. It's so much easier to feel guilty when you have the luxury of being alive.
Instead of Pastor Niemöller's words, listen to Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly... Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am able to be what I ought to be."⛓️💥
❓❔What if the poem was "first they came for me"? Then it would be over, right? Historically, those that are willing to fight back are taken first, while the fence sitters watch👀. If they came for the"safest, most secure" first; the rest would stand🧍🏽and👊🏽fight. Pretend they are coming for you🫵🏽 NOW, if that gets you to act.
❤️🔥Assemble your abilities,🌉build bridges, cultivate community👥👥.
Get yourself to a We Outside 607 meeting, a Binghamton Tenants Union Meeting(if you're not a landlord), a B.A.M.(Broome Action Medics) or any other anti-capitalist group, maybe join the 🔫socialist rifle association, whatever, just get up off the couch and get outside! Don't wait any longer.⏳
What now?
RESIST.✊🏽✊🏿✊🏾✊🏼✊✊🏻
And come learn how to keep our community safe this Saturday.
