Rev Left Radio - Rebellious Mourning: Grief, Death, and Communal Resistance

Episode Date: March 17, 2019

Cindy Milstein, Jewish anarchist, author, and organizer, joins Breht to discuss the collection of essays she compiled and edited titled "Rebellious Mourning".  Find Cindy's books from PM Press here: http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php/CindyMilstein Find Cindy's books from AK Press here: https://www.akpress.org/rebellious-mourning.html Here is Cindy's interview on Solecast: http://www.soleone.org/solecast/2018/3/23/solecast-w-cindy-milstein-on-rebellious-mourning Here is Cindy's Interview on This is Hell: https://thisishell.com/guests/cindy-milstein Here is Cindy's interview on Final Straw: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/category/cindy-milstein/  Here is the GoFundMe for Comrade Leah who is trying to get help paying her medical bills after being diagnosed with Cancer: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-survive-cancer-and-prevent-homelessness Outro music by: AJJ - Coffin Dance Find and support their music here: https://www.ajjtheband.com/ Get Rev Left Radio Merch (and genuinely support the show by doing so) here: https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio Here is an amazing podcast by two-time guest of the show Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee covering the works Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a Marxist Feminist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation: http://ak47.buzzsprout.com -------------- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante; explaining and analyzing essential works of revolutionary theory and applying their lessons to our current conditions): Twitter: @Red_Menace_Pod Audio: http://redmenace.libsyn.com  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdxX5eqQyk&t=144s Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert):  Twitter: @HammerCamera http://hammercamera.libsyn.com   Other Members of the Rev Left Radio Federation include: Coffee With Comrades: https://www.patreon.com/coffeewithcomrades Left Page: https://www.patreon.com/leftpage ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Brett O'Shea. And today we have on the anarchist author and all-around badass Cindy Milstein to talk about her wonderful work, Rebellious Morning, which is a collection of essays about grief and trauma and death and ways to handle it on the left. Our discussion revolves around that. But she's also had wonderful interviews on a few other podcasts.

So if you like this episode and want to hear more from Cindy Milstein, go check out her interviews on the Soulcast, on This Is Hell, and on Final Straw. All three of those podcasts are awesome. I can personally vouch for them. I listen to them all, and her episodes on all of those podcasts are wonderful. So if you like Cindy, you want to hear more from her, go check out those shows. And before we move on to this episode, I wanted to plug GoFundMe because a comrade of ours that we know from Twitter has cancer and is only 20 years old and has medical debts because of this. In the GoFundMe, she says, hello, my name is Leah.

I'm a 20-year-old disabled trans lesbian. I have cancer and enormous debts incurred for medical treatment. I have no money in savings and I'm not able to find employment so I have no source of income. This means that even if I manage to pay off my medical debt, living expenses are still unmanageable for me and my partner for the foreseeable future. So we wanted to use this platform and get the word out. We will link to that GoFund me in the show notes. And again, this episode is about grief and trauma and about collectivity, and it's very emotional and moving and talks about a lot of these issues.

So I figured this would be the perfect place to talk about this GoFundMe and encourage people to go support our comrade who is suffering from, you know, just unimaginable financial and medical difficulty. So again, that's going to be in the show notes of this episode. Please go and toss a few dollars. It's sad that we have to, you know, fund money for people's health care and housing in this capitalist hellhole we live in. But if we don't do it, nobody else will. So please go and support that if you can. And now with all of that said, let's get to this heartbreaking but important discussion with a comrade and friend of mine, Cindy Milstein.

Hi, I'm Cindy Milstein. I'm a wandering Jewish anarcho feminist, mostly just trying to be a good human being, pitching in with other folks toward making a better world. I've been long involved in organizing, and I think a lot of what connects what I do, is I'm all about creating do-it-ourself spaces where we can experiment in the world that we want to see through our

practices. And that includes popular education spaces. So right now I'm involved in something called the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking, which is in a funky, rural collective household next to a town where we do an anarchist summer school. And I

also do writing and speaking as part of that sort of popular education as form of intervention and inspiration. So including the anthology that led you to talk to me called A Rebellious Morning. And yeah, I'm starting to work on another one right now about actually existing examples of pretty profound self-governance over geographic spaces as opposed to sort of ephemeral projects.

So just to sort of show in the here and now that we're already doing some of what kind of a world we want. Yeah, sure. And, you know, your reputation certainly precedes you, and it's an honor to have you on the show. This book specifically, although, you know, prepping for the show, I sort of dove into a lot of your work, but this one conversation will be focused on the collective work of grief, which you edited, which is a collection of essays.

It's an anthology on grief and trauma on the left and how we deal with it, you know, in collective context, etc. So it's a pleasure to have you on. And first of all, I do want to say that this anthology is truly a profound, rich and honestly like a deeply painful work beyond the content the prose itself often veers into the poetic which adds to its emotive depths it's overall a truly beautiful and really like heartfelt work but what made you want to put together an anthology about grief what were you hoping to accomplish overall with this work i mean when you talk about it being emotive and

painful and i wanted to capture like the fullness of how it feels to have experience on profound forms of loss and to try to figure out ways instead of like hiding it and grieving at our own to do that together with each other which humans have done through most of human history but we seem to have been taught not to do that anymore or it's been taken from us. I mean what led me to do it was just going through a lot of my own losses due to structural forces, both things like eviction to loss of people I love that were dying of illnesses they shouldn't have wouldn't have gotten in a different world like my dad for instance got a bit by mosquito and got on west nile which is from climate change and then had and then was put into a like pretty horrendous medical industrial

complex which i understand is part of capitalism so you know to me it started got me thinking about like how do we relate to to our own forms of grief and at the time i was going through a lot of other losses alongside those and was just needing my own out was so was blogging and posting on Facebook a lot about it, not even kind of just as an exercise in venting because I was really pretty isolated because I went back to Michigan where I grew up to take care of actually my mom and dad who were dying at the same time. And I just kind of needed an outlet because I was really removed from any forms of sort of community to talk to and things like that. And I guess I've never really had so many people respond to that writing and I wasn't sort of writing it.

I was sort of writing it for myself because I just needed almost to talk to myself aloud or to feel like I was talking to this. And I'd simultaneously at that time really felt pretty profoundly abandoned by the political circles I've been part of, not because people are awful people or intentionally abandoned or weren't able to deal with it, but I just realized very deeply and personally and painfully how we don't cultivate spaces in our own spaces to take care of each other over the long haul of the losses we're going to experience, which aren't just this one moment. They're like pretty much ongoing right now.

So, I mean, that was about five or so years ago. And I was just going to, that was sort of, I wanted to write about it. A lot of people responded to my writing. And what I was really struck by, people kept saying, well, you're talking about, you're writing about your own experience, but I see myself in it. You're writing in a way that's making me see something really deeply human. And so then I really wanted to do a book about that. And I was still too sort of raw from my own grief.

And I ended up, I don't even remember, but ended up turning into this anthology. which I feel like was a deeply collective work of grief in itself, just finding people to write and asking them to write honestly and bittersweetly, not trying to make happy endings or wrap it up, but to just capture the humanness of a quality of feeling. So I really want people to feel when they read it, not intellectualize these things, but really take in that pain and feel it and be with it.

And all the losses in the book turned out, I started thinking, you know, there's so many things we don't even understand is loss, loss of home, loss of ecosystem, losses because of borders, police murders, you know, some of it was physical death, but just so much loss right now is, you know, even the existential loss of humans that we are potentially facing the end of humanity or the end of humans as a species is just intense the amount of structural loss we're facing right now. So I wanted to have people write about different forms of ways they had personally both experienced that,

but also simultaneously grieved and resisted it in ways that blurred those lines. So all to say in hindsight, I sort of did it out of not even quite knowing why I was doing it, but now the book's been out almost a year and a half or two, and I've done maybe 60 or 70 kind of conversations around it, and a lot more people have read it. And I feel in hindsight, things I didn't even understand when I was doing it is, I feel like the impulses to open up space so we can grieve again and mourn are dead and fight better for the living.

And so I feel like the book has really opened up space within radical circles. I mean, when it first came out, almost no, I usually can, it's really easy to book talks at, like, infoshops and radical bookstores. And most of them at first were like, I don't understand what this has to do with radical politics. And so I'm really, I just feel, I don't know if it's just because of this book, but I think it's also because the losses are piling up. I feel like now people are really profoundly more and more getting that we need space to share stories of what happened. And so I think the book now, to me, what I feel like it's accomplishing is helping to open up that space, but also to open up that space for people to share and listen to each other's stories, but to encourage actual collective care, collective grief, collective mourning, collective resistance in ways that, embodies those all at once and increasingly moves toward an infrastructure around there so none of us have to sort of be alone through these moments and i think i mean i think i hope

that it helps rehumanize people and teach us people to be empathetic again i i feel like i really strived hard and spent a huge amount of time working with everybody to make these pieces about something that was deeply human and almost was like you're i wanted each piece to be as the what i understand and empathy to be at forces, one, to be deeply curious about another's experiences and pain and to ask questions and to connect with them on a really human level. And that, to me, is such a beginning of us feeling solidarity enough to want to mourn and struggle together again. Yeah, I mean, exactly.

And I think I always argue that, you know, empathy is a huge part of the left. And certainly for me, it was something that pushed me to the left. And, you know, reading this work, I didn't read every single essay, but every essay in this book that I did read, every single one made me cry. And I sort of realized that I was participating on some level in this, the very collective mourning, right? The very context that you're advocating for, which is for more empathy and collectivity in our trauma. I was engaging in that. So the book is like, is deeper, right? It's like, of course you can read other people's stories of grief and tragedy. But then by reading it, you're actually engaging with their trauma and their grief and

their despair. And so you're actually, you know, kind of having a back and forth with the authors of these various essays. And I think why so many people on the left really love this and why I love this is because, you know, anarchist Marxist, whatever tendency you are, we're all very used to talking about the state or talking about capitalism or how the workers are exploited, you know, and that's all an important part of what we want to build. But, you know, these other issues, which are human issues, the issues of death, of trauma, of grief and despair, these are very human and sometimes in our you know our political spaces as you as you said they get sort of pushed to the side because they're not seen as important or particularly left wing but of course

they are and looking over the history of the left and of liberation movements of all sorts there's so much tragedy and betrayal and hurt in our just our own proletarian histories that i think it's it's very important that we it's on some level wrestle with these ideas and then become willing, as you say, to build that infrastructure of support and care into our organizing efforts, which allows us to be on the lookout for the sort of signs of trauma and despair and to have a community of people come in and help people who are going through that. Yeah. I think that's been, I don't know, I've just here and there, I've been reading some old texts or zines and from different eras, especially anarchist politics, because that's more

what I'm pulled toward. And I just felt, I feel like, you know, part of it, again, it's not that we're all awful human beings were socialized into whatever time period we're in, right? And this we're in a highly individualized society and a lot of the social media is only helping to fragment that and all sorts of other, we can look at

all sorts of structural ways where we've been pushed into our individual little boxes. But I've just been really struck by you in the language and there used to be so much more emotion and intense, you know, in terms of like the way people even wrote radicals used to write and so much more sense.

of like collect the words collectivity um i haven't really i've been really struck i've been pretty critical of uh notions of self-care these days of course people need to take care of themselves and survive because this world is killing most too many people but a lot of people end up quoting for instance audrey lord who talked about the need to do care to survive but audrey lord was talking in a deeply collective liberatory sense and that's been stripped away and now self-care is literally sort of an individual act for oneself away from people, including grief. And so, I mean, that was my experience. And I've seen that happen so many times with people I see who've had profound loss. People tell them, oh, go away and take care of yourself. And, you know, one needs

ultimately other humans to be free, to feel free, to feel held, to feel cared for. And so I just think that's been such a loss part of his radicals i think we need to be fighting for is to like fight to reclaim ourselves from how we've been dehumanized by the society we live in so again i think that's why i really wanted these pieces um there was a few pieces i said no to that's that had sort of a me me me quality which didn't mean they were bad pieces again and but i just i really want to pieces that even though it was an individual person that it had a sense of all of us being there together in wanting to see a different world. And I really want to reclaim that. I want to find different language that self-care, the word self means a collective self, not a lonely,

individual, isolated, need to buy commodity self, need to hide away from other people's self. And yeah, so it's just, I feel like that's another loss that we've lost within the radical tradition, that emotions were always seen as a part, you know, a rage, a crying up tears, you know, the great orators standing up on soapboxes and getting highly emotional, as we should, about this world. Right? I've had a few of my people that are close to me who aren't necessarily they're deeply caring people, but they aren't necessarily anarchists or radicals. And they've been said to me to see her, oh, I'm really worried you seem so angry at times. And I'm like I get, like I said, I'm not just irrationally angry. Aren't you angry that, you know, there's fascism, right? You angry

that, you know, police are murdering people, aren't? And they're like, yes. You know, anger to me is part of an emotion of grief. You know, you don't want something to be happening. I don't want the loss of the ecosystem. Of course I'm angry about it. And sometimes I cry when I read about the fact, you know, what's happening or I look at the weather. I start crying. But half the time I'm angry too. And those are impulses. They're not irrational. They're not disconnected from the reality of the losses that I'm warning. And they make me fight harder. I stop feeling. I don't even understand what would motivate me in a certain sense. I mean, ethics. I have a set of ethics that motivate me, but part of those ethics, you know, that feeling

you get of like, I have to do this because it hurts so much to live in a world where so many other people, including myself, get hurt. Oh, absolutely. I literally relate to every single syllable of that. I think a lot of people out there will relate to that as well. Moving on, though, in the book, you assert that, quote, one of the cruelest of fronts is the expectation that pain should be hidden away, buried, privatized. A lie manufactured so as to mask and uphold the social order that produces our many unnecessary losses, unquote. Can you expound on that point and talk about how grief and trauma are generally treated in our society and how that treatment helps uphold the social order? It used to be that people were connected to the whole of the messiness that

happened in life or just the whole spectrum of what happened in life. Most people saw many many times saw people born and die in homes and community spaces. They were around everything that happens that fills out the whole of who we are. And many, many people were embedded in communities where there were all sorts of traditions and rituals and holidays around those moments of joy, moments of loss, moments of, you know. And what you find out if you're around all those things, for instance, is that when you experience a loss, it isn't just 100% bad. There's moments of tenderness and intimacy and love and beauty. There's profound pain. You experience the whole range of everything, right? So in society right now, there's so many ways everything

is removed from us. But one way is just our communities have been so broken down and everything we used to do to care for each other has been commodified. You mentioned before we got on to chatting, you'd mentioned us Sylvia Federici being on your show a couple of years ago when you first started. And I've really appreciated her work talking about the sort of commodification of care and the way care has been taken away from us. And I keep coming back to a phrase I really like is that we really need to come back to sort of a commons of care or caring commons where we're in this together, taking care of each other instead of a world and knowing how to heal each other and knowing how to, you know, that has been systematically stolen from us for hundreds of years

through colonialism, capitalism, including criminalized. So certain practices, such as, for instance, it's pretty possible to do forms of abortion that are pretty low to no cost, that are a lot fewer side effects, that you can learn how to do with groups of other people. But in many places, those are actually criminal,

or criminalized or, you know, not allowed. And instead, you have very expensive procedures, or you don't have access to them at all. But the same is true of all sorts of grief and trauma. It's like we, we've highly removed those things to certain spaces, which often cost a lot of money, which are often about an individualized, depoliticized, medicalized way of dealing with them. And the usual answer is that grief and trauma are something you'll just get over and can be cured, and you don't need to really look at the reasons.

I mean, even in the rise of I was thinking about sort of forms of therapy, there's an increasing move. And I'm not criticizing anyone that uses this, which is a really hard world to get first. but increasingly reliance on sort of like getting people to use cognitive methods to get them to just stop doing behaviors without delving into why those behaviors are where they come from right and so your society's systematically telling us it doesn't matter that you know there's a structure called capitalism or patriarchy let's just get to changing your behavior so you don't feel that pain and so even on that level is asking you not to ask questions some authority figure will take care of it, you'll be fine, you'll get over it. I think that's really detrimental. On the flip side of it, the other thing is sort of this idea that, you know, there's a moment when grief is really sad and you'll just grieve it for a few days and then you need to go back to being sort of happy and that they're really distinct things, sort of the emphasis on just kind of a simplistic happiness versus a kind of continual questioning and struggling

together toward a better world. I think is also part of why we have forgotten how to grieve and look at trauma. Instead of seeing it as something, I don't know, that is something together we all need to continue to struggle toward and that we'll find beauty in that. One piece I might want to recommend I just read it the other day and I started crying was this beautiful letter from the Zapatista women. It's literally called a letter from Zapatista women to women who fight all over the world. And the Zapatistas are, after 25 years, are under really serious threat right now, maybe more so than ever, because the other region is suddenly seen as valuable for resource extraction. And it's a beautiful piece written very poetically and very collectively

about how they may, they may not win this time, but they have won because they've created the space. And they know that they're doing this for other people who, even if they don't win, will remember and might win for them other places. And this really beautiful expanse of piece about grief, really, in a way, for them to start anticipating the grief that they might have if they lose and to pass along the sort of legacy and the heart from that to other people. It really is such a completely different way, I think, that piece is a really completely different way. So, yes, the lie that's manufactured is that you as an individual have to go on your own, figure out some really short-term way to fix things and then go back to being normal and fit into

the system and not question it. And this book and hopefully anyone that's doing the collective work of grief with other people in a politicalized context will be like, no, we want to examine why we're having to experience so many losses. We want to examine how the social order produces most of those losses right now. We want to examine how together we can hold each other through that and struggle for a better world together through that. So it's not in the interest of capitalism for us to see that most of the huge percentages of, oh, we could pick any example, huge percentages of medicines that get sold to supposedly cure people are potentially hurting them.

It's not, that's maybe a bad example. I'm trying to think of a good example of all the ways it's not the questioning of the, even the care industry, which is one of the largest growth industries. it's it's not helpful for us to start to capitalism's perspective for people to start questioning hey why why do we have to like actually farm out everything that's most intimate to us to someone else and pay for it when we used to have structures that cared for us right right that questioning i think would begin to unravel and that's what this book looks at it looks at the vast majority of our losses right now are unnecessary and by that i mean you know

people shouldn't have to die by a bullet from a police murdering them people shouldn't have to have profound loss and death from being systematically displaced because of borders or eviction, right? People, those losses, the vast majority of things we're experiencing right now aren't things that we should, we would, in any kind of remotely better society, we should have to be dealing with on the scale we are. And we could get back to holding the fullness of losses that are what we're structured to have as human beings. You know, we will be born and we will die and sometimes birth is both sad and it doesn't work out or sometimes death is you know we could we could make birth and death and all the in between a lot more beautiful we'd

have time to focus on those so yeah yeah i don't know i think that what always gets me about capitalism or the state or patriarchy is you know it's what i like about marx's notion of how capitalism figures out a way to mask the social relationship behind the commodity so we look at something and say it's a thing instead of real it's a collection of social relationships that we could change and that we actually produce. But you could look at the same phenomena within the state or patriarchy. Those aren't things outside us. We end up being part of that same structure.

And so we have to unmask them and figure out the little microways that they get covered up. I mean, one example, very tangible that I use a lot. The DSM, which is a book about who's supposedly mentally ill, says that if you grieve for more than six months. You're sick. You have a pathology. You should need to be hospitalized or medicated. And it's wrong. It's wrong to keep grieving. Meanwhile, the DSM upholds one of the largest, most profitable industries, which is the pharmaceutical industry, which increasingly, you know, we live in a society where many of us are feeling profound despair because the world is falling apart. And then we're supposed we're told, oh, but that's just a mental illness. Don't worry. Just take this pill. Instead of us

saying, wow, maybe we should change the way the world's structure and we wouldn't feel this despair, which is really what we need to get, right? Right. So then to tell us that our very feeling of despair and sadness over all those losses is an illness is just such a profound way to mask the fact that we all shouldn't be grieving what's happening to the planet Earth and to most humans right now, right? That's thoroughly, would seem like a thoroughly reasonable response, not an ill response. right and if you've experienced any kind of loss you know that you don't you don't get over it it changes it transforms you

figure out ways to integrate it it makes you something different in good and bad ways it becomes part of the fullness of who you are and it doesn't go away because and i say this many times and i talk about this book but the one reason i've been really drawn to us thinking about our losses and grief is that we only grieve and mourn things that we love and i want to reclaim love you know we're worried about the the earth's being destroyed not for some random reason it's because we love our place in the ecosystem we love the ecosystem around us we you know we love our homes we don't want to be kicked out of them we you don't want to be cured of love you want to remember that loss of love in different ways in full ways and whole ways and you want that to be an impulse that love again a very collective form of love as an impulse to fight harder to retain the things we love right yeah i mean you know when you're talking about the environment there's so much there that you said that i want to talk about because there's so many great points in there but you know you said towards the end that you know

the environment you know that's our environment and it hurts us to see it destroyed you know i'll take it a step further and i'm sure you'd agree with this that the environment is us right like there is no separation between us as organic beings and the world out of which we we bubbled out of we we are one with the environment and if you can start to really internalize that perspective when you know when the atmosphere is being pumped full of poison or our rivers are poisoned or whatever, you know, Flint, Michigan water crisis, you're hurting human beings and you're hurting the very nest that allows those human beings to exist and to try to prop up an arbitrary division between, well, that's just the natural world, something

out there, and this is me in here. I mean, that leads to a lot of this neuroticism, and of course capitalism undergirds that and perpetuates that at every step. You know, I feel like so deeply us being removed from seeing the cycles of human lives, you know, most people are never are around taking care of people that are being born or dying or being born or you know the actual time being there for the full process before during and after and and when you are one sees more that it's part of a cycle that is part of everything else cycles in the ecosystem right you know and I don't know I think partially we think of like this weird thing because we're so removed from it is like oh birth is this happy beginning and death is this horrible ending and it is a

often the way it happens in this society but but i think more when the more we're around all that we realize while we're part of these cycles too where i don't know i keep thinking about different seasons um you know how do you describe like which one is the beginning and which is the end you need all the seasons to allow for the ecosystem to to happen right so it's deep winter where i am and um you need at this time of deep winter you need the cold so that the sap starts moving around inside the trees so that come warmer weather it's there to produce things everything from you know for those who make maple syrup sap for syrup to um things for other creatures to eat to leaves to you know and so is is winter a time of death or a time of birth right why do we separate those things

and if we so if we kind of started looking at ourselves more as part of this ecosystem i don't know I know it's not up to us. Most of us aren't the ones. It's gigantic structures that are destroying the world. It's hard to even understand how to stop that. But I think if we begin to sort of re-harmonize ourselves inside our ecosystems again, we would feel a different understanding of maybe how, maybe we'd have a better guidepost of how to start caring for us in this world, too.

Absolutely. And not see ourselves so separate from it. Yeah. at the beginning. And the last month in the Jewish calendar was the, in the deepest part of winter is the month of sort of celebrating trees. I'm in a city right now. And someone had mentioned that they said, oh, you know, trees aren't meant. The trees you see in urban spaces aren't meant to be alone.

You know how you see a tree and it's got a little grate around it. And there's another tree. And I've been walking from the city ever since. And feeling really sad for each tree, which seems silly. But I'm just like, and this person was saying, you know, You know, they're meant to be around other trees, to have the roots connect, to have interaction, to have the larger trees, shield the younger trees, to have an ecosystem where things fall and they creates the soil. And you're like, why would they be healthy? And they're not in an ecosystem anymore, right?

And I just keep seeing those trees as metaphors. I think that's why it's making me sad. Yeah. As this metaphor for what's happened to most of us, right? We've been pulled away from each other, from communities, from the cycle of lives. And we've been stuck in a little by ourselves, surrounded by a little metal grate, you know, and told we're supposed to. to be okay and take care of ourselves and we can't and the earth can't and and this is our this is our you're right we're distinct we're not the same as every other creature but we're also in interdependent

relationship with every other creature and every other piece of you know plant and fora and fauna in this world and um that's been profoundly you know stripped away from us too which i really think i really do keep coming back to we've been so removed from just seeing you know if you just get back to most animals have you know a deep relationship to understand their own cycles of life because they see it all the time and they care for each other in different ways, right? Not to romanticize other other creatures, but we think we're so smart and in a way we've been so removed from just kind of the basic common sense of who we are and, you know, yeah, our ecosystem. So a really good friend of mine, part of this anarchist

summer camp, like I said, and a really good friend of mine who does a lot of work with anarchism and ecology. Talked about this term called eco-tone, which I really like. And he's an area where two completely different ecosystems meet, and it creates basically a border between the two, you know, you can imagine like where a desert meets a mountain. Sure. And the border between them is the most differentiated and rich and interdependent and beautiful of spaces. It's where all the differences kind of come together and figure out ways to coexist.

And I love thinking about, like, how would we ever since, and I've been really struck by, like, well, you know, what would it, what would it be like to us to see that, you know, who are radicals are working on the borders of society to create egotones where, you know, people can remember that the more sort of diverse and in harmony, we are at the same time, more reintegrated. You know, we can actually create a much more abundant, beautiful society. And in opposition to the borders of states and capitalism create which are which are spaces of death and homogeneity and cruelty. Yeah. I absolutely, yeah, I absolutely love that idea. You know, one of the things that

I tell my children all the time is I try to break down this, you know, me, like me and here and the world out there dichotomy. And so I'll tell them like, you know, you need the rivers just as much as you need the blood that pumps in your heart, you know, you need the trees just as much as you need the lungs. And I think that's one thing that, you know, if you're a parent or you have nieces or nephews or grandchildren in your life, sort of like, you know, switching the paradigm a little bit, trying to offer this idea to your children is one little thing that you can do to sort of help them at least have a broader vision of the interconnectivity of everything. Before I move on to the question about death, which you've talked about a little bit already in this

conversation, I had this story that I wanted to tell really quickly because we're talking about communal mourning as opposed to, you know, how capitalism atomizes us and turns us into our little individuals separated from the communities, you know, where we're supposed to be the healthiest in. And we had this one year march here in Omaha for a Native American man who was murdered by police. He was mentally ill. He came down from the Rosebud Sioux tribe up north. He was coming through Omaha. His mom had called ahead and told the Omaha Police Department that, you know, my son Zachary is going through a mental health crisis. He really needs, he really needs help. And, you know, the cops found him wandering outside of a gas station. And, you know,

long story short, they murdered him on camera. And the one year march was we marched from a place in downtown Omaha to where her son was killed, you know, with the tribe and then just members of the community that came out to support it. And this was one day before the sentencing or the guilty or innocent thing for the cops who killed them. And sadly, it turns out that the cops were found free of all charges and we're not going to have any punishment whatsoever. But we marched all the way to the place where Zachary died and one of the elders of the tribe took his mother over to the spot where he was actually killed and just having like 50 people very diverse sit there and watch and listen to this mother weep you know when she was brought over to

this place where her son died and then like looking around and seeing everybody around me crying I felt for a moment you know even in the midst of all this tragedy is like there's something strong here because there there is it's a small community but we're all witnessing her very real grief and we're in a communal sense sort of feeling that grief and we're not turning away from it we're not going to our own little cars and driving to our own little homes and looking away from it but we're looking it in the eyes and you know it's it's not ideal of course but i felt like your work is getting at this idea of this communal grieving process and witnessing the trauma and grief of another community but just to see it up close i mean it you will you will walk away

forever changed, you know, after having those experiences. No, you will. And as part of the, I feel like it creates these, I mean, it's, that shouldn't have happened. I mean, that's like, you know, and yet it did. So if it did, how, I guess that's why I keep saying unnecessary a lot, you know, it's like those things shouldn't happen. And, but when they do, that's such a much better way for all of us to be able to, you know, feel together, including, I mean,

I've been around a lot of times also pretty either during or right after when families have had someone murdered by a cop and you know you just watch the intensity of how much they shouldn't have had to join that club and then and then you just watch them turn to other families that have experienced the same thing and they're like we're going to be here with you and you watch a community be around and have those the ceremonies and the rituals and um You know, I think it's been no accident, for instance, that as YouTube has made it so remarkably accessible to watch people be murdered by police, which is both, you know, cop watch, you know, it used to be a small group of people having to run around neighborhoods trying to capture on film something that happened, and now these things happen. And, like, millions of people watch someone's loved one be murdered, including them. And it isn't something you should have to watch, but it's also created this visibility where then people, the response has been an outpouring of people creating, you know, DIY outdoor shrines and spaces of mourning and collecting and having that be part of, you know, you don't even know if it's a demonstration or a morning or a celebration of that person's life.

It's all of them, a support system, a care structure, you know, and when you're with people and you see them, you know, experience. in the whole range of emotions around loss, it's far more easier to understand as another person what you might do to support your community, right? If you don't see that, you kind of like the thing people say, I think part of it is we've been so individualized to how to respond. We're so not around. Let's just take death for instance.

Most of us never, ever are around it or see it. So people say things very unthinkingly because they don't know what to say, and they'll say, oh, you know, if you need anything, let me know. well how does one know what one needs at those moments you know but when you're watching someone experience sometimes it's just so self-evident what they need right so i was i was having a really hard time a couple days ago and walked into a gigantic event and i was thinking i was standing outside my god i shouldn't walk into this i'm not in a good space and i just as i did that someone's yelled my name and came running up to me and looked at me and said how are you great to say or something

you know and i go i'm fine and you know which i i i i don't usually do because I don't like to just say that when I go I'm really bad in hiding my emotion the person said you're not fine and I go no I'm not and they go why don't you just tell me about it for a few minutes and I did for like one minute I just ranted almost crying and then they said you know what if you don't mind I would like to really hug you a lot right now and I go yeah that would be great and and it was like they could see what I needed because they could see me right yeah right and so I think what you're talking about is that same thing on the level of community, the more we see each other, we don't have to say, well, if you need anything,

let me know, because it's so clear when we're watching that, that we start to respond in ways that are, we re-remember how to care again, in ways that are deeply, again, empathetic and about what we might need is each other in community, you know, as opposed to some random, just like sending someone a card that has no relationship or posting something on Facebook. So I'm just really struck by that. I think we've been, you know, the social media, for instance, where most people are having to find out that a friend has killed themselves or someone's died on social media these days and then there's an outpouring of grief on post which is somewhat beautiful but it's it's so hard when you're you know the physicality of being around each other it's completely different

experience that we've forgotten right and the longer term caring and empathy that requires and I think I'd forgotten that myself I started out saying you know the impulse behind this was me having to go back to a place where I didn't have a community and to try to deal with a lot of simultaneous loss and I started posting on social media and but yet I have so never you know and again it's not because people are bad just no one thought to say you know I'm gonna hop on a plane and come do with you you know I'm gonna text you every day you know I'm gonna call like and maybe I would have said no because I'm kind of a person that takes care of myself too much which isn't good but but but it's I think we we think that social media is society right as opposed to like the face-to-face

there is something really different you know yeah even in a way like the thing where you said the essays made you cry like I really wanted I wanted people there's a couple in there that I cry every time when I still read them and um I wanted people to feel that emotion to remember this isn't something removed right so that's not abstract yeah so your story is so beautiful but I feel like there's so much more of that and maybe because people feel the loss of those spaces I've just been really struck by the outpouring of you know increasingly people are thinking to do things in public together there's an anarchist book fair

that's coming up that I've been pitching in a little bit with and folks are talking about which I'm really excited about doing a room I don't know what it'd be called like you know mourning our losses room or something but having a little room set aside where in the space of joy and fun

and book fair which are lovely spaces there's spaces where we get to be who we want and share what we write and produce and they're like family reunions for radicals but there's going to be a room where people can, you know, build altars or put photos or sit there and talk about losses. And I think, like, those have to be in our spaces. And so maybe to come back to that question you asked about, like, what I was hoping would come out of this book or one impulse was, like, I feel like the reason a lot of people go to hierarchical religious structures, churches, or other things, synagogues or, you know, people that are, is they offer people. a deep sense of community

for the whole of everything that happens in their life. You know, when you become of, when you transition to certain ages, when you have births and deaths and, you know, marriages or anything that happens, you know,

and there's community spaces. And there's an acknowledgement continually of loss. You can light a candle and a space, you know, you can go into a space. I was recently in a church with some folks. And I was just reminded, you know, they did a little thing at the beginning. They say,

we just want to remember people that died this week. And they say their names. And you can go light a, handle and then there's a afterward you can hang around and eat food for two hours of people and chit chat and get come you know and i'm like you know we as radicals i think we're like oh we don't want those hierarchical structures we throw them out of our lives which is a good to me a good impulse yeah um we don't want you know we don't want um to me any forms of hierarchy and domination we want to create our own spaces but we failed to create those kind of spaces where we have a space

we could just walk in and see the whole of what happens to us in life you know where we can feel like, you know, oh, I can see evidence of multi-generational things that people go through, having kids, you know, coupling and uncoupling, blah, blah, blah, all the things. Sure. So, yeah, to go back to that, I'm just really happy to see more and more spaces and more, not just radicals, but more and more people feeling this impulse. But I think that's also just because it's getting unbearable how much loss humanity's having to take, right?

Most of us feel like we're in a future where literally there will be no future. Like that's a profound form of life. So I think the grieving is almost having to come out more and more in public spaces because the enormity of it is so huge. Yeah. It's almost like it's spilling over a little bit. So moving on and, you know, in the background of all of this world's suffering and grief is, as we've mentioned a little bit before, the looming reality of death. And I often find that people's stated phobias and fears are often really just varied manifestations of their more fundamental underlying fear of death, not only of oneself, but also of the deaths of everyone we love and care about. So I guess my question is, have you struggled with fears of death or existential crises in your life?

And how can our ability to grapple with death become healthier in the sort of society that we want to create? I would imagine there is no one, I shouldn't say no one, but I would say the vast majority of people have probably struggled to. with fears of death. I mean, that's a really, you know, you know, I mean, I totally distinctly remember how old. I was like four years old. Having some neighbor kids tell me, your mom and dad are going to die. And I didn't even know what it was, but I started crying and ran home and go, are you going to die. My parents always answered my questions directly. So they were like, yeah, no, we are. It's okay. We're not done yet. And, you know, any questions I had about it, they answered. But, and I remember going, oh, okay. And then going back and playing with my

and so I guess naturalizing it to me is I feel like we're so scared of it because again we live in a culture that is like highly like it romanticizes being young and beautiful and alive forever and if you never ever see death you know someone your your grandmother gets sick and is whisked away to a hospital and probably you're not there when they die and then you don't see the body and you don't maybe for a second there's an open coffin or something but you know I think it's very human to have that existential fear of who wants to leave things they love and people they love ourselves who we love, right? But the more I've been, like I have, I ended up having two biological parents and a chosen parent die over the past four or five years and was fortunately able to help switch them from having horrible deaths to having really beautiful deaths of their own self-determination surrounded by a community of care that basically helped create an anarchistia community care around them to let them die how they wanted to die and was with the bodies as they died as they were moving toward dying as they died and afterward and each time especially the third one i i personally

was realizing that more and more i could do more and more and the more i participated in it the less i felt i felt i was able to grieve in this much more profoundly beautiful way which didn't make it easier. I don't know. That's hard to, I mean, these are so hard to explain. You know, there's ways, I think there's ways to grieve well, right, where you're able to integrate the wholeness of your sorrow and not forget, you know, that you know you did the right thing for the person and yourself and you know you're still sad, but it feels integrated, right, as opposed to someone having someone they love murdered by a cop. I don't know how you ever integrate that or make sense of it. like it feels like it probably always feel sort of unresolved and torn from you.

So I think we will struggle with less with fears if in our communities of death that we actually had for me, to me, what I understand politics to be about is an anarchism politics is how do we create a world in which we are trying to look around everything in our lives and figure out how we can self-determine it, self-organize it, self-govern it together. and I wouldn't exclude moments like of death from that. So to participate more and more and take care of someone and, you know, figure out what they're going to wear when they're dying after they're dying or dress, you know, wrapping their body or all the ways you participate actually think lessens the fear

because again, like we were talking about earlier, you understand it more is somehow a part of life. So I don't know what that would look like again in our like in our more radical communities. But I feel like, you know, us creating more spaces to have conversations about loss and death and dying more. There's a person I know who's an anarchist death dula, which I'm happy to be a death dula too and feel like I've done. But this person has done a lot. And they had their whole community of people. They said they did this exercise where a lot of them have lived there. It's very multi-generational place in the South.

And most of them have lived there most of their lives and are planning to. and they're all really incredibly good organizers and anarchists. And they said they did this exercise together where they all sort of wrote up what they would want to happen through them dying and what they would want to happen afterward. And they said it just made them think through so much about like, how do they want to care for their friends and their family after they die? You know, thinking about ways to make people feel tender about them to make it easier.

But how do they want to be celebrated or remembered? How do they want to face their own death? And like most don't think about that, right? And if we do, there's forms you can fill out, but they're also written by like funeral homes or state institutions or so what would it look like for radicals to craft different versions of us facing up to those moments and then also create different structures. So for me, for instance, I'm really interested in having anarchists become more anarchists, become death doulas, able to do. There's a bunch of anarchists I met this year traveling around that are learning how to do cremations. and be funeral directors, you know, or do, and there's, I think we think a lot as radicals released in those circles I'm in about like, oh, you know, we need food not bombs so we can

feed people collectively and share food in different ways, or we need a really, really free market so we can figure out ways to have people have the things they need and want in different ways or, you know, bookstores that are radical and collectively run, or all these other things that are sort of the staples of radical circles or medics, the demonstrations that come and take care of you if you get hurt when the police shoot or bullets at you. But I think we've, again, I think the more we think about, wow, we need like, you know, from my mind, we need anti-authoritarian death duels and people that are willing to help people figure out what, you know, I know I've run to a few people to see her, for instance, we need more anarchist cemeteries or more radical

cemeteries. And at first I kind of laughed and then I thought, wait a minute, most of us have gone, A lot of us have gone to Chicago, for instance, to the cemetery there. And you can see the Haymarket Martyrs buried there. And Emma Goldman and Bolterin Declare, and there's a whole bunch of other radicals all buried together. And it's kind of a place that a lot of radicals go and they put black and red roses or they do take pictures of themselves. And they think about like their ancestors and they both mourn and they feel more resilient to organize. And so it isn't strange to have radicals buried together, right? And it makes us less scared of death.

I think it makes us be like, wow, we're in a line of people that have struggled together and fought together. And, you know, which is, again, why I think the more we integrate into our spaces, you know, if we have an anarchist bookstore, an anarchist social center, instead of just having, like, the typical posters of, you know, fuck the police or on the wall, you know, blah, blah, all the posters you see that are kind of typical in books, which are great. I love radical social centers and infot shops. But, again, you rarely see us a corner, which you should, or a section on a wall where there's, like, and here's where we're mourning and honoring those who come before us, you know, and that we realize we're in a line of people.

And I think the other thing that would really help to be stabilized our fear of death is to have a much greater commitment to multigenerational spaces. Because then whether you want to or not, you're going to be around people that have kids or around people who are sick or around people that aren't as mobile or around, right? Because you'll see people at different points in lives. And unfortunately, so much of radical circles is a lot of young folks and they don't have, it's increasingly like a cycle where there's a lot of young folks

get really enthused, but they're increasingly less and less infrastructure and a lot less kind of spectrum of ages together and the younger folks cycle out. And there's a new batch of younger folks. And then maybe, you know, I don't know, I just, I find we, you know, that's, again, I feel like another huge loss that there used to be people of all ages in radical spaces and they understood themselves as mentoring and being in community with each other. and then you would whether you wanted to or not you would have to grapple more with things like

you know death and birth and other types of losses and other types of monumental moments in people's lives and we'd probably then have a lot more infrastructure for it and then we'd also have help want to change the conditions right you know and kind of also that would help us destabilize the ageism that happens within our circles where you know there's a real romanticization of you know the young, you know, radical jumping on top of the barricade and blah, blah,

which is fine, that needs to happen. But not everyone's able to do everything. And if we see that we're in an ecosystem where every single role is necessary to transform the world, you could do militant care, you could do militant front line, you know, battling the police. You could do militant being back at a house staffing the hotline when people call in because they need an anarchist lawyer. we would see this as an ecosystem. And so again, so look into the

ageism within our own circles and the lack of multigeneration, I think, would help us get us feeling scared of death too. But yeah, it's also, and the last thing I just would end with, it's scary. And so I think that's to me why I long for more collective spaces to be able

to say this world is scary together. There's nothing wrong with saying it's scary to, you know, like as humans, we're going to be scared of losses. And yet, if we are doing it together, we'll know that there's people to hold us and care for us and be there through losses and make those losses as bearable as possible. Unlike now, I think one reason we're scared is because we're like, oh, my God, if I get sick and I start dying, everyone's going to disappear on me. I'll be alone. Or if I have a terrible loss or a terrible death, I watch how everybody disappears on me.

So, you know, that makes it so much scarier than when you're around examples like you gave of, a moment where someone's experienced profound loss and they look around them and they see a whole bunch of other eyes looking at them, feeling their pain. That's a totally different experience that makes the fear bearable and the sadness bearable and the anger bearable in a way that doesn't when you're just looking at your computer screen or by yourself. Yeah, exactly. And I really love that idea of taking all this stuff very seriously and organizing around it.

I mean, we talk about dual power, we talk about autonomy. This is one crucial aspect. of all of our lives and to have, you know, ways that we can mourn together and and celebrate like births and deaths together is an essential component of that and will actually build solidarity and bring us closer together. I do notice how comrades in Rojava, for example, handled death when one of theirs is killed, like with the Turkish invasion recently in Afrin, they're still fighting. You know, what do they do? They put up pictures of them, and I've seen videos of their burial ceremonies where all down the blocks, you know, all the folks come out in the street, they carry the

casket, they chant, and they take their martyrs to their resting place, and they really honor in a communal context, the sacrifice of their martyrs. And there's even that picture of Rojavan militants standing atop a building in the Middle East with the spray painted across the building, you know, our flag is red with the blood of our martyrs. And that sort of infusion of taking this stuff seriously and weaving it into how we organize and think about our own lives, and our activism, whatever, that's essential. And we see people that have done that in both Marxist and anarchist context. And I think we really have a duty to sort of revitalize that here in our circles and see how far we can take it.

Yeah. No, I met someone who went and fought in Rihaba last summer. And they'd just come back and they'd been there six months. And they were so upbeat. And I was like, wow, you were just there for six months. You know, they went and fought in one of the militias. And they were like, they were. And I said, but you look so, I mean, they look so happy.

I was kind of taken aback. They were like, yeah, I didn't think I would come back. So I'm kind of in this euphoria. But then they started telling me, which I was really struck, everything you just said, including also they named streets after people that are, you know, they take very seriously continually honoring people that have been killed in the process of that really remarkable experiment and freedom. But this person also said before he went, he said they were so serious.

about him preparing and thinking about what it would mean if he died and so he said he had to like do a whole bunch of things but what really struck me had to be a person that spoke two or three or four languages he had to record and write in three or four languages pieces that were pretty long to people that he loved or communities who was part of for them to have if he died wow um and so for him he said it was a process of him thinking about you know that he might die and really taking it seriously and him what he would want to say to those but you know he said it was such a profound he said he had to do a whole bunch of other things but i was really struck by that it wasn't something they're like don't take this lightly don't just come over and but you know like

this is a really serious thing and you know i i feel like partially again another reason to think about it's not to just dwell on loss and death all the time but to think about the whole spectrum of what we experience as human beings as always there with us right um again i i like feel like feel like I've experienced some of the deepest love and joy and intimacy and laughter at some of, at moments of death. At the same time, I've experienced the most intense sorrow and anger and sadness and blah, blah, blah, I can't separate them, right? So I think right now it's, we're sort of taught that, you know, we'll engage in, you know, organizing or activism, if it's fun, if it feels good. And when it doesn't feel good, we just go away. But, you know, that somehow even, I think within our circles, this idea that it's supposed to be kind of,

always feel good for you and always feel fun and always feel and when it doesn't and i think in a way again to reintegrate all this into our lives to be like no it's just it's going to be hard sometimes but that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do right and there's going to be a lot but it doesn't mean it's but we have to you know i don't know this anarchist summer's going part of we one person said this last more to a real like they go no we're we're we're engaged in serious play you know we have to understand that we're you know we know how to be both serious and playful and we know how to integrate the whole of who we are in this world so i don't know i just think that i really think us more taking seriously it isn't just about us always feeling upbeat and great and you know

one genre right now that's really popular is like poppy little aphorisms and a friend of mine who's a really good poet said it the biggest selling sort of books of poetry now or just like little things that people post on Twitter that are just like upbeat you know feel good things and I think things just feel so bad people need those but the beauty I don't claim to understand poetry in depth but at all but I think again why I wanted this book to be poetic is I think poetry and poetic writing gets at the complexity of the reality of who we are as human beings and the fullness of those feelings right and it doesn't simplify anything down to like a single distinct emotion or a single distinct moment and if we can't realize that they're all

sort of blended together right yeah yeah and start thinking okay not to say that this should be horrible and we should feel bad all the time but to feel the fullness of who we are and be open to that I mean that example I told you the other day what I said a couple days ago when I was feeling bad and a friend could see that on me and I end up leaving that event after about a half of her because I was like well I'm barely able to focus and I was like I got to get out and the minute I walked out I saw someone coming toward me that I know and I could just talk in their face. They looked horrible.

And I was like, I said, well, what's going on? And they burst into tears. And they had a horrible thing happen. Someone they really cared about just got deported. And they may never see them again, right? Which is like a death. Yeah. And right?

And so we ended up having a conversation for a while and I was really struck by. They were like, you know, they were like, I know this is what the system does intellectually. I do this work, I know that people get deported, I know, but when you, it's someone you care about, it's so different, right? It's so hard. And how do we have to take the time to, like, breathe and cry and feel that and not just keep pushing ourselves forward? It's super important and to integrate that, right? It isn't just that we're like forging ahead to do this work to either feel good

about it or to, you know, burn ourselves out doing it, but to feel the complexity of like, We love people and we're going to fight for them and sometimes, you know, and then we were talking for quite a while and talking about how not every time that people struggle to keep people from getting deported, it doesn't always turn out that people get deported, right? Sometimes the opposite happens. And sometimes people get deported. And so how do we hold the, I always use this term, but how do we hold the messy beauty of, you know, and yet we go forward and try to share the pain with each other because that's what sort of is a stress valve that lets us go on, let's steam off together, you know? A friend of mine is a herbalist who does a lot of grief, medicinal herbs for grief. Talked about humans as, you know, if we bottle, I really like this. She had this metaphor of us being like pressure cookers. You know, we hold our emotions inside us so tightly. We're taught to do that. And then people just blow up and they lash out at each other nastily or hurt people or abuse themselves or others.

And instead, if we could let the steam off with each other, I think we'd look at each other's eyes and see the steep sense of like we have to have each other's side. we have to be there for each other. You know, those of us who've taken the side to oppose forms of hierarchy and domination have to be there for each other. It's really pain me over the past few years. I think a lot of people have been turning on each other in radical circles. Personally, not over political arguments particularly, but just personally, because I think we're feeling such pain.

And I think the more we release that pain and see, you know, I feel like me personally going through a lot of grief and loss and being around death has made me far more compassionate. There's people whose behavior, unless they're going to be self-reflective, I might not be able to be around. But I have compassion for them not being a bad person, but being socialized to behave in ways by the society to feel hard, right? Which is maybe a different than a few years ago, I would have just been like, to hell with them. And, you know, so even the solidarity and employee to be like, you know, I don't have to, I don't have to like this person. I mean, to me, solidarity, I did a lot of solidarity for the J20 defendants. We're facing like seven

decades in jail, 200 people. And there was 200 people thrown together, most of whom didn't know each other. And over the course of a year and a half of doing like solidarity work to try to keep everybody out of jail, there was a lot of miscommunication and hurt feelings and stress build up because people were facing enormous amounts of loss. from thinking their whole lives were going to be ruined to their, right? They're facing that many decades of jail. There was a lot of tension. And I was so proud of, you know, no matter how much that hurt and that pain and sometimes even nastiness or lashing out got is like people are like, okay, I don't have to like this person, but they are not going to go to jail, right?

Because that's what we do for each other. And I think that's because we're all able to really feel the stress and the pain of, what it might mean if that many people were added to the millions of people that are in jail already. Yeah. And to me, that's really, again, come back to that, like, once we really feel that empathy, we're not all going to be best friends or like each other, get along, but we're going to be have such ties of solidarity. That's going to be so much harder for the state or capitalism or the military police to pull us apart. We're going to have each other's side, even if we don't, you know, we're not going to like that person. They're not cool enough. I don't care to help them, you know, which is often, I'm going to only be there when it's cool.

you know and instead of we're going to be there no you know like this is about all of us experiencing pain and having to do it on necessary losses and unless we liberate everybody no one's going to be free right now yeah i i totally like you know i i definitely relate to the feeling of compassion even if you don't necessarily want to be around somebody and in buddhism there's this practice called meta meditation m-t-t-a it translates roughly to loving-kindness meditation and it's a practice by which you you sort of focus on somebody you really really have no problem loving entirely and unconditionally like your child, you know, or a parent. And then slowly you move on to a friend and then move on to somebody you feel

neutral about. And every step of the way, you're trying to cultivate feelings of empathy and compassion for people as they get further and further away from your closest, most intimate group. And I think that complements your whole idea of this sort of solidarity quite well. And it's actually a pretty proactive way to continually cultivate that in oneself. It just made me think of that It's funny, the one time I did that I was living in San Francisco before the eviction epidemic got the best of me

able to stay there And I was having a lot of It was very stressful part of the loss And I was At seeing a therapist There's great center where you're sliding scale Pay whatever you want And a very queer and feministy

And liberatory clinic And they said maybe this would work for you And did some meditation So I went and ended up doing one of those and the person had us keep going to go you know as you're saying like think of the outer circles to extend the loving the loving kindness and and then they got to so let's think about the you know the the rich the landlords and the rich people and the people and I was like what I think part of it is I'm not advocating like that I can feel compassion for every like until people step out of their role as police I don't have compassion for people exactly so I guess for me it's more about like once people are like I'm willing to take the side of collective freedom and you know striving for a world without of mutual aid and solidarity and you know voluntary association and love and dignity and up once people are taking those sides brought expansively speaking um like then how do we say side by side with each other and protect each other from those incredibly violent structures that when people put themselves into they're going to going to be forced to obey. I feel like so much of, it's so hard to have a language for how much gets stolen from us, including so many practices right now, have become so highly destroyed by being

taken into, into capitalism. So many of our DIY practices are like, anarchists to always leave free bicycles around cities or free things for people to use. And now there's like the paid bicycle things or those new bird scooters that you can use your app to bike around cities and just leave and crosswalks where so people can't go, you know, all these things that are just used to be sort of sharing things are now part of an economy. And all the ways we used to care for each other have been commodified. I don't want to have to, you know,

I want to fight against that too and be compassionate toward those who are trying to decommodify and move back toward a much more humanized ecological kind of care, I guess, as we've been talking about. Yeah, I feel that exact way is like I'll cultivate empathy and compassion in so far as I can, but, you know, there's real world fights the need to happen. And, you know, if you're a fascist or you're a cop, maybe I'll, on some abstract intellectual level, be able to perhaps sort of understand how you might have gotten there or

whatever. But the moments you take the streets wearing that uniform or wearing that swastika, you're an enemy of mine, and I'll fight tooth and nail to make sure that, you know, you don't hurt any innocent people. So I totally agree with that. Yeah. All right. So moving on, we have two more questions. The second to last question is, in your chapter titled Ghost Stories, Rock Paper, Ashes, You talk movingly about your Jewish ancestry and your visits to Europe and the intuitive dread or disgust that overwhelms you at certain places, only to discover later that the location in question was a place where at an earlier time, you know, Jewish folks were banned or where Hitler himself used to hang out or where ultimately countless Jewish men, women, and children were murdered during the Holocaust. Can you talk about just the trauma of being Jewish, especially in the face of resurgent anti-Semitism across the West, and how you've dealt with that throughout your life? Yeah, I've often said, oh, I'm culturally Jewish, and more and more I'm, like, understanding that I'm, there's, like, a long tradition of Jews being socialists and anarchists.

And it's not, it's not accidental. And I feel like things in Judaism stripped away from Zionism and a religious context have had profound meaning to me. me from my earliest memories, but not in a religious context. It's sort of what I start off describing myself. I mean, my earliest memories of, you know, my parents would always be, like, encourage me to think for myself and to debate ideas and to never just take things as given. That's so structurally what Judaism is about, you know, the whole spectrum of Judaism is not about, like, looking to some higher, some God authority

or some Bible, but, you know, the continual debates about what a word means or a text means or how, what a tradition means in Judaism. So there's this profound questioning. You know, you can critique in certain religious structures within Judaism. It's been very male-dominated or, you know, patriarchal. But there's still this really profound way in which Jews question. So things like that have been, and I, the very earliest memories for me is my, you know, my parents saying that would be like, do you believe in a God?

And they would be like, well, you should decide for yourself. But for us, we just know that we don't know why we're in this world. There's just a sense of mystery. But we do know it's about striving to be a good person and create a good world. And that's so structurally part of Judaism, too, in a lot of the teachings. But more and more, I feel like lately in the past year or two, especially the past year, I think there's this whole beautiful resurgence, not just of anti-Semitism, which there absolutely is, but in counterpoint to it, there's so many, especially I've noticed feminist

queers and anarchists who are Jewish, who are being much more sort of public and finding each other and talking about that and returning to teachings and traditions and rituals and looking back to sort of use the lens of Judaism to help explain a lot of things and understanding. I just feel like there's been a sort of resurgence of Jews that are a different kind of Jews speaking out about things. And so for me, that's been really profound because I've been around a lot of Jews that are helping me kind of look at different categories. or concepts in Judaism that explain my politics and sort of how I think about the world. But also historically, so I just read this beautiful little zine about anarchist and sort of anarchism and Judaism.

It talked about how in 1492 that was a pivotal year in Europe or Spain, Jews have been probably some of the longest contiguously displaced people and the longest contiguously persecuted and murdered. people and have had to until the state of Israel have had to figure out ways to maintain community and care and interconnection all around the world without a state. And so that's been a really remarkable to me example of like it's possible to maintain a sense of coherence and caring and interconnection across all sorts of skin colors and cultures and stuff because of this connection of Judaism. But in 1492, that was the year in Spain when the height of the Spanish Inquisition directed against Jews reached its peak of extermination or assimilation. But in the scene, it mentioned, you know, that was the same year, which makes total sense,

right, that Columbus and other people, we think of that year as being pivotal, were sent off to find other parts of the world to persecute and murder. And so the inter-deep interconnection, to me, what's important, for instance, right now, in looking at the resurgence of anti-Semitism is to deeply interconnect it to other struggles of other peoples who've experienced profound displacements through colonialism, profound forms of genocide through colonialism and capitalism. Rather than seeing Judaism as being a way to separate oneself, it feels like it's a way for me to feel more connected. And I feel like Jews who are radical, not Zionist Jews have a lot to say and contribute about what

means to survive about what it means to be displaced, about what it means to face, not just in the Shoah, but for many thousand years, anti-Semitism isn't a thing that disappears. It just kind of goes up and down. The minute there was a rise of fascism, anti-Semitism's always pretty much been deeply connected to fascism. So it didn't surprise me that forms of anti-Semitism are emerging. But when you look at almost all the texts of most of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. They all see the Jews as, you know, that kind of weird conspiracy theory is fundamental to their thinking, and the Jews are always at the center of that. So I think in a way, the resurgence of anti-Semitism has created a counter-resurgence of rebel Jews. And I think that's only a good

thing in terms of, they're at the forefront of some of also the most beautiful forms of resistance, but also I wrote a piece for truth out that looked at the moment. right after the Tree of Life massacres in Pittsburgh, where white supremacist murdered, walked into a synagogue and murdered Jews. And folks that I know in Pittsburgh that are Jews, they were doing the, there's days of mourning, structured into Judaism, where people get together in community and take care of each other. And they decided to do that in the street. And it was both mourning and demonstration at the same time. And they were able to talk about And I went to one in a different city where people were getting together, talk about how, you know, the same week, there were blacks murdered by white supremacists.

There's been churches that white churches that white supremacists have attacked Muslims that white supremacists are killing. And there was a deep way in which that week I was really proud of this resurgence of radical Jews about saying, yeah, this feels so personal and we need to mourn it. And we have our rituals to do that. And we're going to make use of them. but we understand that this is an interconnected, that anti-Semitism is one of the polls of fascism. You know, fascism has a whole list of people that it understands are it's who it needs to eradicate,

and we all need to bring that list together in terms of us understanding to be resurgent to fight it. But yeah, so for me, I think part of it is how to deal with, you know, I've been around a lot of Jews this past year too who just said, you know, there's a lot of us carry a deep sense of trauma because we all come from that pretty much thousands of years of people being not wanted anywhere. And so I think of my own personal biography, I don't know why, but in my whole of my life, I've just had this very sort of sense of not feeling at home in this world and not feeling

sort of deeply wanted. And in a way, I think why, one reason that led me to become an anarchist in particular is like, I really have always kind of been concerned. I didn't even understand that was it related to anarchism or Judaism or whatever, But this impulse to me is that I have this deep longing to co-create community with other people, where we continually rethink with that community as a debate about it and move forward together and question and what we want it to be, a deep sense of a community that's trying to be a community of people doing good and being good people. That's just so crucial, right?

But it's also how I deal with my own trauma, feeling kind of this deep longing in me. And the more, as you mentioned, like every time I go to Europe, it's weird. I talk about this in the piece but it reminds me every time I end up being able to go to Europe again last summer people recognize me as Jewish there and here they don't it's like by my last name or I don't even know how and it's a weird

experience because antisemitism is very much more prevalent or deeper visible there and and I just realize I always kind of randomly end up stumbling across places even when I'm not looking that yeah and it's almost like a viscerally

can feel them and you hear there are other people talking about that, you know, deep from other people's experiences of like how they feel that when they're at certain places, pieces of land that have been theirs for centuries. And as a Jew, there isn't a piece of land that's been mine for centuries. There's, you know, wandering the world. It's been the story of most of people I know. But yet, I feel this longing, longing for a community. And maybe that's where the trauma comes from that compels me to seek out. But I've noticed that around, yeah, I've been talking to a lot of, there's a piece I actually, I just happened to see an article about it yesterday that

kind of relates to our subject matter. It's an artist that for, God, I think it's been some ridiculous amount of time, like 20 years or 30 years. He's been doing this thing called the stumbling stones. It's a different word in German. It's a German artist. And he creates these little paving stones that are within, it says, I lived here. And it was the last known chosen place that someone lived before they were taken by national socialist Nazis to be murdered or tortured or imprisoned or whatever. And he doesn't just look at Jews. He looks at anyone who show up impacted. But I think at this point, it's a largest decentralized monument. There's stones in all sorts of countries around Europe. And they're always in front of the exact

last building where that person chose to live. But what really struck me was in this article, which I hadn't known because I've seen those stones when I walked in. And I just randomly stumbled across the stumbling stones when I was in Europe and I was and I ended up following them around this one city and I didn't even know, I was like, well, how could this be? What is this? And I ended up reading them all in there.

I was so, I didn't even know about them and I couldn't get enough of seeing them. It was this weird, eerie feeling and trying to take in each name and really feel that person who had been in that building. But in this article, they talk about how this artist finds places where this happened, asks people in the house,

off an apartment buildings, them to research that person so it isn't him imposing it it's the people that now live in that space to start thinking through what happened there and remembering and grieving or feeling the awful complexities of them maybe their families being part of it

and yeah so how do I think part of it is like and I don't know if that guy's Jewish but I got the sense that he was from this article because in the article it talks about him he was impelled by a Yiddish phrase from Talmud saying that you know no one is dead if we keep saying their name, that we need remembrance is really important. And I think, so to wrap

those Jewish sector, I could talk for a long time because it's really important to me. Right now, I've been really returning to thinking about categories in Judaism, is there's a real sense of wanting to remember and to continue to speak about things and to continue, you know, that horrible phrase in terms of supporting the state of Israel. But I think it's true to take it out of the context of, you know, sort of never again and we won't forget. And there's this idea of remembrance that is super important and partially that's to deal with the sort of what does it mean to be a people that people want to erase.

And that's not distinct to Judaism. That's happened to black people being forcibly removed from one continent brought to another or indigenous people being, you know, forcibly removed from land. The older I get the more, I think that, you know, in more there's studies that show that gets built into your DNA, almost as trauma gets passed on, you know, to each other. And for me, it increasingly seems like a thing that impels my politics.

And when I look back and see, there's a disproportionate number of radicals who are Jewish. And I think that's because they, again, have a deep understanding of, wow, we know how to live outside states. And we're the ones that people blame for capitalism. We're the ones that are seen as the people that are somehow already suspect. The last thing I'll say about Judaism, I just found out, which I think, or two things, which I think are so lovely. So silly, it's taking me so long to come back to now. I'm finding out all of these lovely things. But the Jewish calendar is lunar, and it's based upon a circle, not a linear progress.

And so there's a way in which it understands itself in the cycles of life and not in a linear sort of progress and how we integrate ourselves in life, which I think is really nice. And there's no fixed time for a day. It's based on the moon wherever you are in the world. So how we understand time is deeply connected to the ecosystem we're in. So as a Jew to help work through trauma, I think that's to, you know, come back. to things like the calendar is really important. And a second thing someone told me the other day, which I think is really profound,

is Jews have all sorts of in the religion and in terms of rituals, have all sorts of ways of keeping secrets. And partially you have to do that when you're being chased. Right? When you're being traumatized and killed and tried to erase, you have to figure out ways to do what you, to maintain community and secret.

And so it's kind of interesting that, you know, to some degree anarchists are playful about like, okay, because I understand myself as a Jewish anarchist, we're very playful about like we're operating in the shadows and on the margins and we're kind of need to not necessarily reveal everything but we need to like I don't know not secret in a bad way but in a way to protect each other to get through that it's a really deep profound looking out for each other that I'm kind of getting to so we need to take anti-Semitism seriously there's a piece oh boy I think it's by Sart that looks at anti-Semitism but mention you don't need

Jews to have anti-Semitism. It's a way of thinking and fascists think that way. They think there's some weird conspiracy behind things of people pulling the strings that cause things to go against them. So even if you don't have Jews and even if you're not Jewish, we need to be serious about anti-Semitism as a structure of thinking. So I think it's good that Jews too are re-emerging to take seriously anti-Semitism and and thus be anti-fascist. Yeah, absolutely. And the conspiracies around Jewish folks really even in times where like in the West or in the U.S., for example, when

before we maybe had this resurgence of real hardcore anti-Semitism that we're seeing now that sort of hold the line for anti-Semitism for the next time where it explodes. And you'll hear things like the Rothschilds conspiracy or, you know, terms like cultural Marxism, which huge right-wingers with huge platforms like Jordan

Peterson will say, the idea of white genocide, which is that, you know, the Jewish globalists are breaking down borders and allowing people of different races to enter white countries so that you eradicate white people. All these conspiracies really revolve around hardcore deep fascist anti-Semitism and even

going back to Hitler's mind conf. He constantly tied Marxism and communism with Judaism as two sides of the same exact coin. So that fascist trend goes back a long way. But when you were talking about the connections between Jewishness and anarchism, it made

me think of our friend Zoe Samutsi who's been on the show a few times and she's a black anarchist. black feminist. And she co-wrote an essay called the anarchism of blackness. And one of those arguments was that black folks, given the history of slavery, you know, they've never been able to rely on state forces. State forces have been nothing but, you know, traumatizing and mechanisms of violence and destruction and kidnapping for them. So anarchism in that sense is not even like a position that you want to put forward, but it's almost like a default state. We don't have

a government to take care of us and we never have. And so there's an anarchism inherent in black And in the same way, I think there's a certain statelessness or a certain anarchism of Jewishness, right? You know, the history of pogroms and the Holocaust. Jewish folks really never had a place where they could feel safe under state structures. And the one time, you understand the impulse to build something up like Israel, right, to defend against this horrific, you know, onslaught. So wherever your feelings on Israel are, the underlying, like, need to have safety is understandable. And so the relation between black folks and the sense of, you know, not having ever a state that really protects them or gives a fuck about them and Jewish folks having that same issue, I think is really interesting and sort of coincides really well. Oh, yeah, I read that book recently and I was like totally, yeah, I just really felt that argument so deeply.

It's really good. But I still would say, like I get what you're saying about, I mean, but there was a battle. There were Jews that didn't think there should have been a state grid to try to. move toward safety and unfortunately those that did won out and they did because there were structures of colonialism and um you know empire building it isn't an accident the state of Israel was built by forces like britain and other things that the anti-state impulse in Judaism that had been there for a long time that wanted a different solution to the question of how do you try to have more safety um and i think in a way what's nice right now is there's again to come back

to this resurgence of in response to the resurgence of anti-Semitism here in North America is that it's allowing for a revisiting of that question of like a lot of Jews never thought this fate was the right answer to that question

which to go back to Rajavah I think is a similar thing I knew Murray Bookshin and really was influenced a lot by his ideas and just felt he's also Eastern European Jew and we got along we know how to talk and argue similarly so he you know his ideas which among

others really influenced what's going on Rajaba and in terms of them, you know, the person who they all looked up to a leader, getting arrested and going to jail, O'Shalan, and then he ends up reading books, which happens a lot when people go to jail and and read books that, when they have a lot of

time, it made him, he was a highly sort of authoritarian structure thought the answer to the question of Kurds was a state and after reading books and other people too, Zapatistas and things. came to the conclusion that, no, we need to liberate ourselves in order to not create a state, but to create what they're expiring with now, right, which is some form of self-governing,

feminist ecological society that looks different than a state. And I feel like, you know, both Jews and blacks and other peoples that have experienced, that understand the state has never been their friend, need to think about, okay, there's the question of liberation, but what does freedom look like and freedom doesn't look like the state it never did that was never the answer i mean i wish a lot of jews knew that um especially because jews were displaced and violence has been centered on jews for you know 2,500 years this is not way before nation states right jews did not fare well under all sorts of political structures it's a real shame you know um and i really appreciate the book um that zoe and william did where you know they also

talk about what you said, but I really appreciate them also talking about, you know, critiquing like the answer isn't a black nationalism that argues for a state either. You know, we have to look at a different understanding of what it would mean. And so if we come, come back to, what does it mean to be anti-fascist right now? I hope we can learn from books like that and from anarchists and from black radicals and from Rojava who say that we need to imagine what a world without fascism would look like. That to me is a much more interesting question than being anti-fascist. what is it a world without bashed them looks like it to me looks like a world without stakes and then let's look at examples of people who've managed to do that you know i'm here like for instance right now people should be following i don't know if they are the fight in unistoten you know people on unseated land they never gave to the canadian government and they're battling really beautifully to say we never gave you this why would we let you have it now to have resource extraction and part of the way they've done that which relates to our topic right now is a group of mostly females have built this beautiful healing center to deal with the trauma of colonialism on this piece of land that is being slated for a pipeline and they built the healing center right on the path of where they want to run that pipeline through and so you know they're saying we never gave you this land and yet you know now we're down to a tenth of what we never planned to give you and we never gave to you we're on unseated land and yet you know the act of resisting continual theft of land is

the act of also healing and mourning and grieving and fighting at the same time it's again a really beautiful illustration and a lot of what they're putting out right now is we're not looking to tell we don't even understand the state as being what we want we have our own forms of governance our own forms of ways of

doing community you know yeah and I mean no one's got the right answer what it looks like of what the right form of self-governance or community or organization is but I know the answer is a multitude of diverse examples that look different no matter what like you can't take rojava and just pop it down in uh you know

omaha yeah exactly and you'll have something different there right that would be cool then and put it in in siberia right right it's like people will organize the way that makes sense to where they are and i really feel proud as the proud part of being a jew is that for most of the history of judasism people have understood that their safety comes from each other from community from solidarity from self-organization, from maintaining their own, you know, language and culture and food and traditions, not from allowing a king or a president to lord over them. Yeah, absolutely. Could not agree more.

And I really love that whole emphasis on the experimentation in different conditions and seeing, you know, what people in one region of the world can do compared to somebody in a totally different. And just building up, seeing what works and what does it, and sort of looking on all of sort of proletarian liberation history as this experimental process. and studying the successes and failures and, you know, applying those successes to where you're at and discarding what's failed in the past. But I do want to end this wonderful conversations with you. I don't want to end it, but I want to end it on this question if we have to end it at all. And that is a question about anarchism, which, you know, you've touched on a little bit, obviously, in the last question, but it's well known that you're an anarchist and you mention it throughout your work and rebellious morning, but you've also written books on anarchism.

Lots of people who call themselves anarchist often have, you know, differing ideas and tendencies and approaches, because anarchism is such a diverse and expansive terrain. So with that in mind, what does anarchism mean to you and what does it mean to be an anarchist in a world that is dominated by reaction, borders, and blood-soaked bourgeois states? Yeah, I'm

just started reading a book called Rethinking Anarchy by Carlos, I'm going to pronounce his name on table, and he had a really nice part when he was talking about direct action, and he said, which I understand in the sense is like anarchism is about how do we do it ourselves together. So

we understand direct action is a positive thing and he said direct action for him is when we seek to act as if we were free because in acting that way we begin to be free so anarchism to me is this idea that we don't like forms of organization that are about hierarchy and domination and we want forms of organization that are about free people in a free society and that's going to be a constant dynamic living practice of how we expect in that freedom and how we act in that freedom and what kind of structures we have in that freedom so yeah a free people in a free society and so I think about anarchism not as a reaction but as a completely proactive prefigrative ethic and logic and practice it's not looking at a theorist or a book or a recipe of what's right but it's it's people's the common sense of people trying to live their lives together to make lives worth living for each other. I really don't think, you know, I don't know, just anarchism. To me, it just seems kind of like the common sense of what happens when people are thrown into situations. We're seeing

it emerge again and again in a sad ways when people are like, Puerto Rico is devastated by a hurricane and people look around at each other and they're like, wow, we have each other and we have one kitchen for this entire neighborhood. Why don't we turn into a community kitchen so we can all eat? I don't care whether you call that anarchism or not, but to me it's the practices of people self-organizing their lives together in ways in which no one can have power of each other but we can have power together so I don't know to me I'm less interested

again in reacting clearly there's so much to react to when we can run around constantly but I think part of the way again that the things that have power over us that dominate and kill and imprison and deport

the reason they keep us they keep us busy by running around reacting and if we stopped trying to react to their logics and to me what's most profound about anarchism it's the continual practice of a totally different kind of logic and ethic. I really

like the word anarchism as pre-figure we're always trying to practice the world now as we might want it to be and the more we do that the more it'll start being that way because we're doing it. And so then the challenge is to keep those spaces alive as long as we can

which I think why you know I've talked about Rajav on this thing is like it's really profound because it's not just like they didn't just do that for a day or two. They've been doing it for six or so years now and it's cost a lot of lives and heartache. And yet it's created some of the, you know, for the people living it. I imagine qualitatively, you know, overall their lives are so much more meaningful and better. And, you know, so how do we do that in spaces? To me, that's anarchism. It's not the, you know, fine. You can come up with anarchist theories of hierarchy and domination in which are important, like how does it function? And you can come up with a, you know, a list of anarchist

ethics, which I think is really important too, but to me it's just the live practices of people acting out those ethics together. And to me, anarchism is a deep commitment to look around and say everybody, if they weren't in structures of hierarchy and domination, if they were in a culture that the hegemonic values were cooperation and not competition or were solidarity, not throwing people under the bus. Or if that was the dominant thing, I mean, you have kids, right? You know, like you put them in a place where everybody's hitting each other, they'll probably start in the other. You put them in a place where everyone's sharing things with each other, they'll probably start sharing. It's not, maybe they'll be the one kid that won't share, but by and large, people

we're social creatures. We kind of tend to, like, as much as we don't like to, we tend to kind of like, when we're in cultures, we kind of tend to, like, respond to that, right? And the more we just start proactively creating spaces. And I've done, I think that's what, I think that's why I started the same, but I feel like partially most of, a lot of the innercum I've done is I love creating do-it-ourself spaces and then watching what people do with them. Because people become really different in beautiful ways. And it doesn't mean that people don't hurt each other, but they don't hurt each other with such vehemence or intensity or intention.

With the anarchist summer school that we did this past summer, we did this thing, which I really loved. I hope it works again this year. We said at the beginning, we go, what if we practice for the next eight days being the people we wish we could be in the kind of space and community we wish we could always have. And we try really hard to do everything differently

in the ways we would want to. What would that look like for eight days? Let's just do that, try that for eight days. And people really took that seriously. And at the end of it, it was absurdly transformative for almost everyone. I can't speak for everyone, but I just watched the number of us

that were like crying harder and laughing harder and felt different than we'd ever felt before. Because, you know, every time things got tense. Someone would just graciously figure out a way to have a conversation about it instead of like ignoring people or being mean to people or isolating. You know, it wasn't that things weren't hard. It was just and when they were beautiful, they were extra beautiful. So anarchism to me ultimately just means like, you know, how do we continually practice the balance of what it means to be feel free ourselves in a free society and that can't be a theoretical practice because we have to exercise

those muscles to get good. And then I think, you know, the flip, the last part of LSA is, to me, anarchism, the only reaction I put in within anarchism is anarchists often are the people that are constantly the people going, huh, that looks like hierarchy, huh, that looks like domination, huh, that looks like institutional violence. And I think the role of anarchists in this particular moment and why a lot of people gravitate toward anarchism is it's one of the most comprehensive critique of all forms of domination of hierarchy. It doesn't just go, oh, it's okay if we have patriarchy because we don't have a state anymore. Oh, it's okay if we have, you know, heteronormitivity because we don't have this and it's not trying to create a hierarchy of

oppressions or a hierarchy of awfulnesses it's trying to say all these things are awful and we need to look at power and balances everywhere and so we need to be critical and i think right now you know even if you know even if those of us who are anarchists are our messages in a bottle for a future world you know because sometimes it gets hard to be in it to be like okay that looks like another form of domination okay that movement looked like it turned into its opposite where people are now murdering each other. Oh, you know, anarchists are often the ones that are saying, no, it still looks like power over other people. And that's not what we want. And so I think that's to me, again, but it's still sort of a proactive action or proactive is that anarchists are proactively

pointing out where we all are, or at least trying to, where we're all, no matter how hard we're trying to not have power over each other, we still often are really bad at those things because we live in a society. So I appreciate that kind of pro-activeness with an anarchism of a profound social critique of hierarchy and domination, but mostly, most anarchists run around profoundly trying to practice forms of

self-organization and solidarity and mutual aid and caring commons and do it ourselves. And most, that's a bulk of what I think anarchists do and what anarchism means to me. And ultimately, I don't care whether anyone calls themselves an anarchist or not. The Zapatistas

don't identify as anything. that in Rojava, they don't plethora out different political beliefs. Who cares? When people are qualitatively self-governing and self-organizing and self-determining in very feministic ways, that's what's important, not some ism at the end of it. Yeah. Could not agree more. Cindy, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on and talk to you.

You're an essential thinker, a really creative organizer, a wonderful and really beautiful, radical and human being. And I would love to have you back on this show for an episode. Maybe we can talk about Jewish history or one other of your interests because I just really love listening and learning from you. But before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find and support you and your work online. Oh, the Institute for Dance Troublemaking, which is the Anarchus Summer School and some other projects. And you can find me on Instagram or I have a blog or other things like that and thank you so much i really really enjoyed uh your questions were very thoughtful and i'm really appreciative for you asking me to do this it was really lovely having a conversation

with you absolutely i feel the exact same way i encourage my listeners to go out and get rebellious morning it is a incredibly moving important collection of works and every single leftist out there would benefit from reading it well cindy you have a comrade and friend here in omaha forever thank you so much for coming on let's let's keep in touch and collaborate again in the future. Thank you so much. Shoot him again because I can see his soul dancing. Shoot him again because I can see his soul dancing. I'm going to miss this place.

If you give it to me, I'll give it back much harder. If you treat me like a son, then I'll treat you like a daughter. Everyone has a future. Everyone has a soul. Everyone has a heart. They have a mind. They have control. Oh.

He often dance or dances like he has something to pray because he does. He sleeps a couple hours and in the morning hates the morning when he wakes up. He often dancer dances like he wants to make a friend but he doesn't. I got contacting mixed with itching everyone who doesn't see it's kind of hot don't want to go to here there's nothing left to go on here there's nothing left to go on with the loving sense of tender in your eyes Shoot him again, because I can see his soul dancing.

Shoot him again because I can see his soul dancing. I'm gonna miss this place I'm gonna miss its face just like a vein inside my heart oh Thank you.