Photo credit to Associated Press
I live with my partner and our two kiddos on a small urban homestead just outside LA. Our lives are centered around the small community of like-minded parents who live in the surrounding area, with whom we’ve created a homeschool for our kids. So when COVID-19 hit, our lives didn’t change too much.
Many people I know have had to rethink everything about their lives in response to this crisis. And we’re not immune to that -- we had to move the homeschool online and feel the challenge of caring for our elders.
But our lives were already so interdependent with those of our neighbors that we have a deep support network to draw on. If someone is out of eggs, we send up the bat signal and there’s a homegrown supply on the front porch the next morning. A community member recently went to the hospital with a heart issue and a meal train and legal council were immediately established. A few weeks ago, we all took our kids together to the BLM Pride March in LA. We’re a community.
This community didn’t build itself. It took hard work over many years to build that level of trust. And I believe that this work, the project of building cooperative and interconnected communities that can support each other through crises, is the work facing all of us right now.
Because as different as life in this country may seem today than it did just a few months ago, there is even more upheaval ahead of us. November is coming.
I’ve been worried for a long time about our democracy. How many stolen elections and purgings of the rolls will it take for voters to just check out of the process altogether? How much gerrymandering can people withstand before voters start to realize that their vote doesn’t matter? How many people have to be kidnapped off the streets in Portland before we conclude that we don’t live in a democracy anymore?
Democratic leaders in Washington haven’t done nearly enough to protect our democracy. The progressive movement has not been able to build the power needed to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. Black voters, the most loyal and important Democratic voting block, are feeling more taken for granted and unrepresented than ever by the Democratic party in 2020.
And right now, we have a president in office whose closest advisors are talking openly about delaying or cancelling the election. Who knows what they’re talking about behind closed doors.
Concern over what Donald Trump may do has gotten so real that Joe Biden says his number one concern is a constitutional crisis come November. Trump is actively working to prevent people from voting by mail during a pandemic to suppress turnout. He’s sent in federal agents to tear gas unarmed peaceful protesters in Portland and D.C., and is threatening to send them to terrorize more cities.
And we all know that there was major interference in our last presidential election. It’s reasonable to conclude that there is similar interference happening now.
We can’t afford to let this happen. The last four years have been the culmination of a 40-year political project by organized white supremacists and their allies within the Republican Party to seize state power in a backlash against the civil rights, Black Liberation, and anti-war movements. Right now, the white supremacist movement is at a peak of its power in modern times. Through its alliance with the Trump administration, it controls all three branches of government. Democrats still control the House, but they can’t get much done without the Senate. If we allow organized white supremacists to win this election, the total erosion of our democracy will be complete.
But just as the white supremacist movement is cresting in its power right now, so is the movement for Black lives. Black people are rising up against the violence brutalizing our communities in the largest global civil rights movement in human history. Confederate and colonial monuments are falling.
And all of this is playing out against the backdrop of a global pandemic that has introduced ideas like the universal basic income, rent strikes, and Medicare for All to a bigger audience than ever before. Progressives, radicals, and liberals are uniting behind the leadership of Black folks, making our movement stronger and more united than we have been in decades.
So here’s where I’m at: The best thing we can do to prepare ourselves for whatever is coming in November is to deepen our relationships, all the way from the level of neighbors helping neighbors to the level of the progressive movement. In a world this unsettled and uncertain, we have to rely on each other, on communities of people with shared values. We need to be more interdependent, not independent. We need to recognize that our struggles are different, yet united, and that our individual well being is bound up with the well being of other people.
The Sierra Club is doing that by showing up in a new and deeper way for our partners at the Movement for Black Lives. We mobilized hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteers to get out into the streets on Juneteenth in defense of Black life. We finally seem to be recognizing, as a Sierra Club community, that none of us will be safe from pollution and climate chaos until we are all free.
And I know many people within the Sierra Club are showing up in their own local communities, forming mutual aid networks to support each other through the pandemic. Justin Onwenu, a Sierra Club organizer in Detroit, was recently profiled in the New York Times about a mutual aid group he helped to found on social media to help his neighbors support each other with PPE, child care, toilet paper -- whatever people have to offer and whatever people need. The campaigns for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly converted into mutual-aid networks to get people’s basic needs met.
Now that those networks are built, what will we do with them? Organizers in the environmental justice space gifted us with the idea of organizing at the speed of trust, a concept I rely on often. But this pandemic and uprising have accelerated the formation of those bonds, forced people into deeper intimacy and mutual reliance. It feels like maybe the speed of trust is moving a little faster these days.
We don’t know exactly what will happen in November, though things are becoming more clear every day. Trump could refuse to leave office. He is already actively working to delegitimize the election in case he does lose. We don’t know what role each of us or the Sierra Club at large will play when that moment comes.
But we do know that in a crisis, relationships matter. There’s a slogan that comes from spaces where homeless folks self-organize: "You only get what you're organized to take." That seems more true to me than ever right now. If you haven’t already joined a mutual aid network or local social justice organization and deepened your relationships in your local community: The time to get organized is now. If you’re not already an actively participating member of your local Sierra Club chapter -- we’ve been expecting you.
And if you haven’t thought about what you’re going to do to protect our democracy from turning into a dictatorship: Consider recent events an invitation to do so.