Reflections, in progress.

Ok, so people have been trying to convince me that blogging is  an appropriate forum to post thoughts that aren’t necessarily fully formed. I’ve been wanting to write about Revolutionary Giving (the weekend long session/workshop/conversation/meeting put on by POOR Magazine last month), about a feeling/idea I’ve been turning over in my mind, but it’s hard to describe and constantly evolving.

POOR’s pedagogy happens through poetry, song, theater, and storytelling. It isn’t easy to write about, so instead of trying to describe Revolutionary Giving, I want to reflect on it and offer some of the thoughts I’m left with. The questions at the heart of the session were the same questions that drive Enough: what does real wealth redistribution look like, both on a systemic level and on a personal level? What does economic justice look like when our politics are about anti-capitalism? What does it look like in communities and movements when we acknowledge that we have very different levels of access to resources, safety, privacy?

My inclination is to respond to these questions with concrete strategizing, tangible tactics for shifting systemic power. And I want that…but what I want to write about here is more personal.

We did an exercise during the session involving going around in a circle in the room and sharing moments of personal crisis, bearing witness to each other’s stories and how they’re connected to our relationship to systems of power. Tiny from POOR talks about how the space we have, in the moment of doing this exercise, isn’t necessarily a “safe space,” and she reminds us that poor people are never offered a safe space, are forced to tell their traumatic stories to cops, social workers, courts, and other agents of the state on a regular basis, with no assurance of emotional or physical safety.

But the thing is, when I’m working with POOR I do feel safe in a very particular way, because the concept of safety is redefined as being about interdependence.

What always totally kills me about the values that middle-class and wealthy people are taught in the U.S. – that I was taught growing up – is that safety is something we are told we can achieve by isolating ourselves and hoarding lots of resources. POOR calls this the cult of independence, and more than anything it is what comes to mind when I try to describe how I think capitalism hurts all of us, even if we’re profiting from it.

I’m less good at personal storytelling in a public forum than I am at anticapitalist rants, but for some context:

I think about my grandmother, who spent her life as a full-time caregiver for her children, her grandchildren, and her partner, and who was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and is overcome with shame about the ways that she needs to be taken care of, now and increasingly. 

I think about a friend, raised professional middle class with the solid safety net of well-off parents, and about the fear that creeps into her voice when she talks about saving for retirement – the unwillingness to consider that anyone will help her, the certainty that she is a failure if anyone does, the feeling that no matter how much money she saves from her large professional salary, it can never be enough. 

I think about one of the breakout groups in a workshop I led recently, discussing what happens when we walk down the street avoiding eye contact with people asking for spare change – that in those moments, we must lose a piece of our humanity.

I think about this book I read called Invisible Privilege, by Paula Rothenberg. It’s a memoir about growing up wealthy, and it’s the first book like that that I read when I was just beginning to come to terms with my own class privilege. I don’t remember any of the book now except for the epilogue, which is vivid in my memory: Rothenberg describes her aging father, no longer able to care for himself, isolated from community but able to afford constant professional care, watched over at the end of his life by a rotating crew of nurses rather than by people who love him.

I think about my own dad, an introvert like me, living alone in a fancy condo with all his physical needs met, needing nothing from anyone, taking care of himself, for now – and I think of my grandmother, who now lives in an assisted-living facility hundreds of miles from her home. When she moved there, away from the house she loved (their family finally settled there when my grandfather left the military, after moving constantly for my dad’s whole childhood), I wanted to organize my aunts and uncles and cousins, all her children and grandchildren, to go there to help them move and offer love and support – but it came too close to touching my grandmother’s worst fear, which is to feel that she is a burden.

We’ve learned the lessons of capitalism, and on some level we believe them: if you can’t take care of yourself, if you’re poor or disabled or targeted by the state, it’s because you’re weak, because you somehow failed. If you can’t take care of yourself you will be let go, you will be alone, you are no longer valuable, you no longer exist.

During the weekend with POOR, the main theme was community reparations for all displaced and colonized people. Reparations as a concept has gotten kind of abstract, but I’m invoking it as an acknowledgement that the current way that wealth is distributed is based on theft, and if we acknowledge this we have to acknowledge that the theft is still happening and that it will keep happening until we make some massive shifts.

I want to hold the balance between personal transformation and systemic transformation, but an important thing about the session was the way it asked us all to look hard at the way we live reparations in our own lives, how we relate to our own resources and to other people. Many of us don’t have simple identities in relationship to legacies of stolen resources (as if we can say, we either own stolen resources or have had our resources stolen from us) – we all have multiple, shifting positions in relation to power and access. But unpacking our histories, honestly assessing our resources and where they came from, feels like a place to start. And it feels like something that many of us are less likely to do the more access/privilege we have.

On the last day of the session, as we brainstormed about what reparations looks like, this train of thought emerged: if we aim to share/redistribute our own resources, let’s look at who we already share resources with easily. For many of us, it’s our families and closest community. If we have privilege, our close people often do too. So if we want to shift how we share resources, to create interdependence in wider communities that are cross-class, we have to be intentional about how we create community.

This feels hard to write because of how complex it is. I don’t want to oversimplify, and I’m not suggesting that if rich people just had more poor friends, there would be economic justice and reparations. What I mean to talk about is this germ of broader change that exists in all of us right now, ways to live that reflect the change we are trying to build. How do we hold ourselves accountable to our personal and collective histories, to our principles and our dreams? What does it look like to make that leap, if it is a leap, to defining security as interdependence, and to put our resources into creating that rather than into a retirement fund?

This, more than anything, is why I do the work I do with rich people. Because the more I understand about capitalism, the more I feel in my bones the lies that I’ve been taught, the false lessons about what makes me safe, the isolation from community that is so often the legacy of wealth. And I increasingly understand that my own safety and power—and everyone’s—lies in stopping cycles of theft and accumulation, and figuring out with other people how to take care of each other, how to keep each other safe, how to untangle all of the ways we are taught to keep systems of power and theft and exploitation going, and how to refuse.