Thanks for this. I look forward to thinking and feeling through lots of these amazing questions with you …

Love,

Jess

But I did read a few and the post.

Thanks Jessica…so much here to ponder on. It’s amazing.

I’m ruminating on all of this. I especially have something to say about relationships, love, being a mama myself and this productive/scarcity mentality, working in a non-profit, and paying the bills.

I also wish I could write you a more substantive comment, I’m at work and resisting to be online to read everything that there is to read. how much does blogging contribute to this as well?? know what I’m saying.

It’s complex, we have no blueprint, outside and within non-profits here in the US. Cost of living is high, isolating communities, mental health, god how do we get there?? how do we measure sustainability?? how do we measure accountability? how do we measure without the scarcity mentality?? I just have more questions..

BOOM! That’s it! That’s the resistance to love—because it makes us vulnerable. And most of us have experienced the (public) brutality directed at people perceived as vulnerable, as well as the (private) attacks from those who love—or used to love—us.

So when I was writing up above about what attributes I think make me situated for being the battering ram, I sure the hell wasn’t trying to say I’m a badass. Quite the opposite, because I’m resistant to opening myself to that vulnerability. That I had to learn to make room to being open to it, at times. To learn discernment about being open, rather than continue my MO of just being hard and closed because I thought that was more effective. It wasn’t.

And I’m not “BFF” with the brother I mentioned above. I’m sure his cell phone number is around here in some notebook or another, damned if I know where. We almost never have any contact with one another outside of the hall—-we’re just there a lot. But the fact that we were once vulnerable to one another against all odds does inform our work in the union. I don’t know how. I’m still learning what it means to trust. It’s not easy for me. But I think knowing that capacity is there—it affects my dealings with other people now; knowing that vulnerability can mean something more than pain.

They don’t live under the illusion that those of us in the U.S. do–that have had to deal directly face to face with “the giant”–and their communities have been literally completly wiped out. But if you look at groups like the Zapatistas, that have rebuilt devastated communities–they very specifically name *love* as their very first building brick–or dignified rage–the first manifesto began their journey of recognizing each member of their community as necessary and vital, and it’s only gotten more in depth since then.

When you are rebuilding a community, you have to build an ideology to live by. Preapproved rules that everybody agrees to live by. And by “rules” I don’t mean–don’t shit on my front lawn–but the person standing next to me is just as valuable as I am because we all came from the same place–or we all are interconnected–and I am as dependent (or *vulnerable*) on the person standing next to me as s/he is on me.

The AMC confronted this reality at the last meeting I went to. They researched existing structures of community dependence and found that one existed in nature that represented the values we all most wanted to build on. I have the pictures of the explanation–I can post them later. but it was, again–a *practical* investigation into “impractical” things, like community dependency, love, growth, self care, etc.

Ok. now, my three minutes have turned into fifty–it’s time for me to go back to bed.

but who am I kidding, I am going to post those pictures first.

i guess i learned that you take care of folks first then they trust you.

maia, yes!! Yes!! That, ‘xactly. That is what I was trying to say in my example above, yet you said it more succinctly. What Fire Fly said about plain old solidarity is—correct, but only partly so. It starts out as plain old solidarity, and relationships with most folks you’re organizing with stay on that level.

But as maia said, the action of solidarity forges bonds over time. Bonds that are deeper than merely knowing we’re coming from a similar place or working toward similar goals.

One thing I’ve learned over the years, was that I have to allow room for those incongruous relationships to develop—the bonds with people I never thought I had anything in common with. Because over the years, you do develop an almost familial relationship (with all that entails, the good and the bad. more on that later!).

Friday night was union meeting night for me. The last item on the agenda at our meetings is “good of the union”. That’s where people might remind others of things going on in the community, or things happening in the lives of members, reminders to go vote, or asking for donations for people in need. One brother stood up and asked for a donation to a fellow in another union whose teenage son was killed (whether that was a mere hit-and-run or outright murder is still up for grabs). Now, that’s solidarity. No one else in the room knew that kid, or his father—but it’s just what you do.

But I was thinking about this conversation through the course of the meeting. The brother who stood up—we’ve got a long and colorful history. He was the very first JW (journeyman) I worked with, in his father’s shop. A family shop. Three brothers, the old man, and the handful of the rest of us. I used to call it “The Family Feud, Inc.” because of the epic displays of dysfunction.

There was a time I hated that man. I mean, hated. With every single fucking fiber of my being. And I didn’t think we had one damn thing in common besides both of us being members of the same union and working for the old man. But.

That was twenty years ago. I worked for that company for less than a year the first time, and came back for another stint a couple years later. By then, I learned a lot more and gained a grudging respect from this man, but I was still the target of his anger for reasons completely unrelated to being on the job. Completely unrelated to me.

Flash forward a couple more years. He apologized to me. I mean, really apologized. He waited all night to do it too—we were both volunteering for a community event that needed electricians, and all of us that volunteered went out for drinks. He waited until everyone else left, until he could get me alone to say what he needed to say, and it wasn’t the alcohol talking. That was the first of many conversations we would have. He is the only brother in the Local who ever apologized to me—I’ve had others who did so more or less through their actions, or who apologized to me via others—but he’s the only one who found his words and did it to my face.

I can’t really say a whole lot about it without revealing private matters—I’ll do that for myself, but not for him. Let’s just say that I discovered that my original assumptions about him were wrong. We never did work on the same job again (and probably won’t), but we have worked together within the union on both an official and unofficial basis. And the relationship we have now isn’t one of mere solidarity, nor is it one of simple friendship. It’s—familial. That’s what happens over the years. It can’t not happen over that length of time, unless you isolate yourself. Not that one necessarily develops a deeper relationship with everyone—just that it can happen between the most unlikely candidates.

Which brings me to michelle’s point, about how enmeshed relationships, even to the point of toxicity, can really throw a wrench into the workings of an organization. I’ve never experienced personally the dynamic she described, but I have seen that, and refused to get involved in certain organizations because of the dynamic she described—where the work being done revolved around a little fiefdom to the detriment of the declared work of the organization and most of the other people in it.

I think it’s necessary to have above-the-board ground rules on ccommunication, transparency and structure in order to mitigate those tendencies—because in any organization, certain people will be the indispensable worker bees and some others will gravitate towards the…power positions; the ones that get more visibility and authority.

So, when bfp talks about accountability and ground rules and laying it all out from the beginning—that makes perfect sense to me. We don’t all have the same ways of communicating. Misunderstandings will develop. Hell, I find it so damn hard to communicate on the printed page! That’s why I hang back so much in the blogosphere—in my Local, I’m thought of as kinda being “Encyclopedia Brown” ‘cuz I read a lot, use a lot of $10 words, and can do some on-paper wordsmithing at times. Inside, it’s really difficult. I rely on a helluva lot of nonverbal and semi-verbal communication to get my point across. Add in the various nuances that we invariably bring to any conversation, and damn! it’s tough.

I also hesitate to get involved in these conversations because I’m a trade unionist, and that’s seen as more establishment, not radical. I reject that, because I’m Old School with my unionism. I think people really underestimate the effect of the Palmer Raids and such on the development of unionism in the U.S. There’s a lot of fuck-up-ed-ness in what passes for the labor movement in the U.S.

But one of the things I think we do right is having structures that limit the effect of personal relationships. Of course, how operative that is in any individual union or Local is directly related to how democratic it is, how power is shared and transferred, and how diverse the group of people within the power structures of the union or Local is. But having rules for communication, having a chain of command/responsibility that everyone understands, having elections, having to negotiate different jurisdictions of work within the same Local—all of that serves to help keep a ground floor that people can work with (at least, I feel that way about my Local. I’m well aware that not every Local functions that way.)

Whew! It’s about time for me to shut up now! But I have to say something about this:

and if your organizing doesnt center care-taking then i wonder what the fuck are you organizing for?

because I agree with it, and disagree with it at the same time. I feel that the most unions (including mine) give a lot of lip-service to care-taking, and sometimes even do some of it well (such as taking up collections or donating money to members or others in need). But. As a mother (and a single mother at that—as in, no co-parent. My daughter’s father is dead, and before that he was in-and-out of jail for meth. He became addicted while she was still in the NICU. I feel the pressure of trying to find that balance because I don’t have a safety net when it comes to time commitments), I have been profoundly disappointed by the gulf between lip-service to family and resistance to accommodating members with families when it comes to union work.

So why do it? Because I don’t want it to be that way. Not for me, not for anyone else. For me, working within a (sometimes) hidebound institution is making a difference in how that institution evolves. My presence and participation can change that institution. Probably by increments, but change is always slow at first. It isn’t easy for me, and I get bitter, angry, resentful, etc. It almost feels….well—no, let’s just say it does feel, like a physical pressure. A weight. I feel the fight not metaphorically, but actually in my body and mind. I worry about that. I think that type of thing contributed heavily to my mother’s breast cancer (and I’m almost the age she was when she was first diagnosed, so there’s that).

But I can’t really do otherwise. As in, I still get a big kick out of the fight, too. I think I’m uniquely situated to be one of the change-agents (envelope-pushers? barrier-breakers?), because I’m a loner, an only child, I never have fit in anywhere I’ve been, I’ve never really had many friends so I don’t know what I’m missing by not having many now, I grew up in an abusive alcoholic home so the kind of penny-ante candy-ass bullshit that gets handed out at work or in the hall is strictly amateur class to me, I don’t really give a shit about visibility or credit as long as the work gets done (not saying everyone should feel that way!! not at all. just describing my personal attributes that I think help me out for where/when/how I’m fighting). I wouldn’t know who I was if I didn’t have the struggle.

I know I’ve helped other women in the Local, and I’m helping to change the attitudes and practices for the men, too. I’m seeing the change—-saw some of it in action at Friday’s union meeting in a really beautiful way, in fact.

I don’t begrudge anyone for saying “the hell with it” when it comes to organizations that don’t center caretaking. We all need a break sometime, or we reach our breaking point. Just trying to explain why I’m doing it. I’m not up on the cross or anything like that—I’m just one tenacious underdog who still likes the fight. There may come a time when I won’t, but I’ve got about another twenty years before retirement and I’m just getting my second (third? fourth? nth?) wind.

Peace.

but I wanted to acknowledge how great this conversation is and that I will be coming back to it when I’ve gotten some rest–

and ALSO, that I am soooooooooooo with you maia. I may not know *exactly* what radical love is right now–not enough to put it adequately into words–but I want to back up a bit and say that I very very deliberately chose the words “radical” and “love” to describe what path I was wondering down.

It wasn’t just a cool sounding thing to me, it came from months and years of lived experience where “love” and discussions about “love” have been mocked, blown off, called too “pussy,” mocked, called not practical, not realistic–etc.

And I wanted to consider that, and wonder why a love that is NOT BFF is so consistantly written off by women and men alike. Why, when the root of so many of our problems stem from the very simple and effective animalization of the “other”–and the animalization of the other is *based in hate* or *based in complete lack of human connection*–why is the opposite emotion of lack of human feeling or outright hate–LOVE–considered “not practical”? (or any of the multitudes of other *sexist* terminology?)

Why are men telling me that reacting to violence with love is being a pussy? Why are women telling me “love” is not practical?

Hate is practical? Objectification is practical? Or maybe hate and objectification are what we *know* how to do?

I resist the idea that each of what I am thinking of can be broken down into individual ideas that already have a name. first–for the practical reason that how many sistas eyes glaze over with “this is not relevent to me” when you say “self care”? How many women look at self care as if it is something that only “THEY” need–because self care carries the stigma of “pussy”–or “womanly” or something that is not practical and takes time away from the cause?

but second–because I think there is real fear of “love.” I think love, as maia says so beautiful, is stemmed in vulnerability (and again, I’m talking about bigger, more divine love)–It’s stemmed in allowing an experience–a *person* into your life that you may not want there. It’s stemmed in becoming vulnerable–and good lord god–what fucking *right* to any of us–bitches, faggots, N*ggers, Spics, aliens, have to be *vulnerable*? What right do we have to be vulnerable–and what practical value does it serve when Obama might get shot any damn way, because that’s what happens to our brightest hope?

You know what I mean?