Lessons from Organizing
From Mimipedia, sourced from my brain (and references)
What do we do |
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Peepol at a CACHE Meeting |
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Originally Published: 7/4/25 |
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Yesterday, the House and Senate passed Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” which will strip healthcare and food access away for millions of Americans and give ICE $100 billion in funding over the next four years. With every news article, the summer atmosphere becomes more grim. The preceding winter season is when conversations and fears move in a congealed fashion, slow and cool. Summer, in contrast, is when desire and action alchemize into a fire. At the beginning of July, my bones feel thawed and rested from a bountiful Pride, my mind agitated by world events, and I ask myself “what do we need to do next?”.
Organizing for me in Catskill has been a rocky endeavour and filled with surprises. My housing advocacy group has shifted seismically and rapidly over the last year and a half, and it has made me reconsider everyday where I am putting my limited energy. When we first started doing our housing work, so many people showed up as a call-to-action for the wrongful eviction of our partner organization. The number of people created so much momentum and we felt like we had so much power to change our community. Following an initial, successful fundraiser, we delved into local politics and legislation, and we had a strong win for our village a year later when we got the board to pass Good Cause Eviction law. But unlike the first fundraiser, this legislative effort took all the time and energy that the remaining group had, which had dwindled from twenty to six. Finally, our small group experienced a crippling interpersonal conflict at the end of last year between two members that really cemented an internal sensation that something was not working and our work was unsustainable.
This first half of this year, we continued getting the community to engage in a lot of organizing, but it’s been stressful to me and others. I took on the responsibilities of setting up meetings and getting people together, and frequently felt like I was the only person holding the group together. Outside of our meetings, I have been told that I can’t take time away from the group or it will fall apart. I propose ideas for organizing that are received as either too aggressive or too cowardly. I spend hours setting up meeting locations, agendas, and communications to have no one show up. I have several people contacting me at all times asking me to add new objectives to our group’s overflowing laundry list, only to then ask us to switch tactics. I am frequently overwhelmed by doing everything that precedes an organizing action, and so I become pessimistic when we are called to do something. It feels like I am trying to roll a boulder always growing in size.
However, when I can get perspective on the weight of these feelings, I find them to be more inconsequential than how I see them in moments of high stress. Feeling like you are pushing against an immovable object, I have learned, is not an indicator that you are not succeeding in “the work”; in fact, it is an indicator that you are actually tangibly grappling with it. I think from the outside, organizing and change is seen as the hero’s journey with definitive climaxes and resolutions. Perhaps a narrative like Star Wars’s downfall of the Galactic Empire or The Dark Crystal’s journey of the Gelflings. Unfortunately, it is rarely like these examples. When we are trying to make positive change in the world, we are more specifically trying to change people. All of society’s pains, and potential reliefs, are performed by people who make up and support the way the world works. For housing we are constantly attempting to get tenants to unite, landlords to concede, municipal governments to listen, and homeowners to support. When you are not fully engaged in organizing work, the concept of evil and good are so abstracted that you don’t even consider the complexity that is required to change someone’s mind to orient them to support a cause. A person has an entire life influencing their decisions before you introduce them to a random housing bill during a phone bank or with a flyer. So once people start getting into the nitty gritty, most disengage because feelings of moral confusion and awkwardness diverge from the safe, heroic story arc that they thought they were inserting themselves into.
Beyond my own housing work in my tiny village, this recognition is important for grappling with questioning what we are supposed to do with our everything-but-fascist state. People are freaking out and getting turned off with trying to engage. “We marched for the No King's Day protests, but it didn’t work!” But what most people, who have never thought much about how to change the world don’t understand, is that this sense of powerlessness is not unique to us. We feel like we are tiny and useless in the wake of a big bill being passed and our neighbors being kidnapped off the streets, but the truth is, we were never bigger than when those weren’t at the forefront of our mind. I was not more powerful when my housing org was twenty people instead of five. I only felt more powerful because I was riding an ephemeral change that was larger than myself. You were not more powerful in changing the world before this moment; it’s just that you perceived more things to be going your way. And so when we awaken to our tiny-ness during these moments where it feels like the world is in peril, we feel the need to retreat from trying to make change and enjoy that last pleasures that no one else can take from us yet: home, a bed, movies, mental escape, love, a yummy meal.
But what is the sustainable antidote to this sobering despair? It is getting real about how much the world you know has always been a struggle; that life is a struggle. We perceive this experience to be the beginning of the end because everyone perceives the psychological transition from naivety to realization as an actual, material transition in the world from renaissance to apocalypse. But everyone needs to learn that the world has always been a renaissance and apocalypse at the same time. When your ancestors were dying of the plague, someone in the village was napping in the sunshine in a meadow of flowers. When you kissed your lover on New Years, someone was breathing their last breath after their house was bombed. And when your great, great grandchildren trek fifty miles across a nuclear wasteland to get a sip of water from the last clean spring on earth, they will make a joke so funny that their famished friends all fall to the ground laughing.
Organizing in my tiny town has taught me that a sustained movement to affect change cannot be dependent on this story with discreet conflict and resolutions. The consequences of change are out of our individual hands, so we cannot judge the story solely by the outcomes. There will be times where the change is aligned with what you desire, so you must engage so that the change is more potent. Sometimes the change moves us away from peace and justice, so you must engage so that the change is less potent. And sometimes, we have no idea where the change will take us, and so you must engage because it could change the world for the better.
Life is a struggle and will always be a struggle, therefore, we must embrace the struggle and do what we think is right anyway.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
- Octavia Butler,
Parable of the Sower