I am writing some curriculum for a program on Self-love, Sisterhood love and Revolutionary love for young women of color. Would it be okay if I quoted parts of this post as part of the curriculum?

Thanks and much respect!

Radical love probably doesn’t mean the same thing. Or all of the same things, at least. I agree with all my heart that it’s necessary, but it probably doesn’t mean you want to hold everyone you work with forever and ever.

Just that you’ll hold them when they need it.

I also think that it’s necessary really examine “love”–because “love” has become such a devalued thing in this society–like I said in other posts–ripped on by sexist men who want to be the studs, dismissed by practical women who’ve had their hearts beaten one too many time with it, mocked by asshole presidents with an agenda…I think it’s something that needs to be examined and brought back into the limelight and “recovered” if only because the reasons it’s been “lost” are so incredibly and deeply political….

I don’t know if I have anything deep to say about this subject or any answers, but yes. Yes yes yes. This is the core of radical politics. It’s the core of everything. Love is what we need to be thinking about and talking about (and expressing!). We dance around it because we’re afraid of being vulnerable, but it’s where the real revolution starts. I’m SO happy to see these posts, on such a deep level. Thank you!

Because the thing about “time and energy”–I’ve found that you *have* to make the conscious choice to put more time and energy into “self” or “love” than “organizing”–and especially when we all have such limited resources when it comes to time and energy–that is an incredibly hard choice to make. And I think it’s a deliberate thing, at least here in the U.S., to force especially poor people to have incredibly limited “time and energy” resources–if you’re too tired to do X–well, that keeps the status quo in place, right?

I’ve discovered two things–1. I’ve been able to be much more efficient in my use of “time” when it comes to actual organizing since I’ve begun really centering myself and loving myself in a political sense. when a person is healthier, they can get more done, right? and 2. I think it’s an incredibly unhealthy model of organizing that asks a few people to give the majority of their lives to organizing so that the rest of us can skate buy doing nothing–which is what the 501c3/nonprofit/NGO model follows. 20 people at the local women’s center doesn’t a revolution make, right?

We’re going to need millions and millions of people to bring about “revolution”–and the thing is, if we have millions of people, those people only need to dedicate 2 or three hours (or a much smaller portion, at least) of their lives to “the cause”–which opens up the “time and energy” thing considerably, right? (I got this idea from Andrea Smith, btw)

I think it actually goes the *other* way, where we call focusing on our individual selves narcisistic–when in all reality, isn’t it a narcisistic by product of the “Pull yourself up by your boot straps and save the world because only YOU can do it” culture that gets so many of us to believe that an individual pulling back from 50 hours of organizing to 50 hours of deep personal meditation is actually *impeding* “collective action”? Or that there is something wrong with telling a single mother who has 3 hours of spare time a week that her sitting with her friends and laughing till she cries is not deeply political work? And why on earth wouldn’t we, as organizers, want to mobilize that three hours of laughter time, since that’s all she has to give?

I’m thinking of the women in detroit that organized a “vote for obama” campaign by organizing a dance group at the local bar. If people only have a few hours a week, and decide to spend that time relaxing at a bar instead of knocking door to door–why on earth would we try to convince them to knock door to door instead of getting up and dancing for obama? You know? I guess more to the point, I actually think it makes *more* sense, politically and with community organizing in mind–to look at the few gaps of time and energy that people *do* have, and listen to what they’re saying is important to them to do during that time, then to say, let’s engage a massive campaign on convincing people to give up there precious time and knock on doors or stuff envelopes or whatever.

In my community–in my personal life–people are interested in organizing, but their actually scared to death as to why they are unable to walk a block without killing themselves. Or why they have such issues with food. Or why they can’t wake up and stay awake. Or how they are going to feed their kids because they just got laid off. These are the people that need to be mobilized. And these are the people who *can’t* be mobilized because the traditional model of organizing suggests that they give up their precious time to do something that *doesn’t* fix why the feel like shit or how they’re going to feed their kids.

I don’t know. I go around in circles trying to talk about this stuff. In many ways, I think that Lisa is 100% correct. If you could “write” love, it wouldn’t *be* love. But at the same time–I also think that it’s necessary really examine “love”–because “love” has become such a devalued thing in this society–like I said in other posts–ripped on by sexist men who want to be the studs, dismissed by practical women who’ve had their hearts beaten one too many time with it, mocked by asshole presidents with an agenda…I think it’s something that needs to be examined and brought back into the limelight and “recovered” if only because the reasons it’s been “lost” are so incredibly and deeply political….

To be honest, I have no idea what “organising that centres relationships” looks like or does — a lot of what’s been described as ‘radical love’ is outside my experience and anything I can hope to grasp — so I don’t think I have anything to contribute to a definition of ‘radical love’ other than a critique of it.

I think I summed up my feelings at Noemi’s blog:

I feel like there’s been a huge disconnect somewhere between acknowledging that the non-profit industrial complex/capitalism isn’t a nurturing space, and assuming that “love” will solve all the problems. Assuming it’s there, it’s working, that it needs to be promoted, that there’s the time and energy available to do all that… those are, in some ways, assumptions of privilege that not everyone has.