Solidarity, Collective Responsibility, and Shared Humanity:
Speaking from the heart regarding the creation and evolution of MTL COVID-19 Mutual Aid Mobilisation d’entraide
Nature regenerates. It works in unison in its creation & destruction. Nature is a collective entity. It lives on no matter what, in oceans, forests, volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates, in the sighs of tigers and the hum of birds. Nature heals itself.
-sham-e-ali nyeem
Nature has taught me that if humans don’t figure out what revolution really means, nature will make the revolution despite us.
-Tawana Petty
We are all part of the same web of life.
-Chief Sealth, leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes
The only way through this moment is together.
MTL Mutual Aid Mobilisation d’entraide came into being with the awareness that I would need help surviving and meeting my needs as long as this crisis lasts, and it felt deeply urgent to me for others to know that they were not alone with their needs, that we truly are in this together. The wave of self-organized mutual aid efforts that has emerged in the past couple of weeks also shows that I was not alone in this awareness and call to action, and as we begin to coordinate and connect our respective initiatives, we are weaving a grassroots constellation of safety nets to help hold and support the most vulnerable among us. Guided by a collective sense of purpose, trust, and shared responsibility, we are creating an emergent web of life that has the potential to reshape social structures.
I began to connect the dots between my own grim situation and what we are all now facing collectively after a sleepless night of panicked reflection. Feeling disoriented by my lack of sleep and the gravity of what I’d recognized the night before, I began setting up the MTL COVID-19 Mutual Aid Mobilisation d’entraide facebook group without any real plan, driven only by a deep sense of purpose and trust. Self-organized networks of mutual aid require both. As there are now more than 15,000 people woven together here within this web of shared purpose and trust, it feels important to be more clear about why I created this group and to more fully invite you into the heart, soul, and purpose of this group’s on-going existence and evolution.
In the months leading up to the current crisis we’re in, my financial situation has been a disaster. The only way I was able to survive and continue paying for my rent and groceries was through the grace of loans from loved ones and by using the overdraft protection on my checking account as a makeshift line of credit. Unexpected gaps in income happen when doing primarily freelance work: proposal processes drag on slowly, timelines shift unexpectedly, or contracts get cancelled due to issues beyond anyone’s control. However, there’s more to this story, as there is with every story, and I want to share more of my story with you now. Partly, because I believe that mutual aid is deeply personal and also a call to become more human together.
Compassion is connected to humility, to recognizing the ways in which we are both powerful and vulnerable, and to understanding how we are interdependent with one another.
-Laura van Dernoot Lipsky & Connie Burk
Preparing for the end of times feels natural when you’ve already been in survival mode for so long.
-from a poem I wrote at the end of last year
I would not be alive today were it not for the informal networks of mutual aid among Queer kin and chosen family that helped to hold and sustain me through most of my adult life. From the age of 18, I cycled in and out of episodes of mania and depression that destroyed, over and over, just about everything in my life except for my closest relationships. Through all the times I had to leave jobs I loved and couldn’t support myself due to mental health crises, networks of trusted friends and strangers mobilized to bring me meals, to connect me to services, to help me know I’m not alone, and to welcome me into their homes to keep me from becoming homeless. It is a miracle that I am still here, and I owe my life to every act of human kindness that has carried me to where I am today.
As I’ve continued down my own path of healing and am now 3 years in remission without any re-emergence of a bipolar-related episode, I am still cleaning up the wreckage of what I’ve survived while also harvesting the wisdom of all the storms I’ve managed to endure. In all of this, what has become clear is that my story of healing and improbable survival defies any kind of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ narrative. It was a collective effort by people who felt called by a sense of collective responsibility. This is the sense of responsibility in which I stand today.
It is clear that even though I didn’t have much through those turbulent times, I still had more of a safety net than many people. I still grieve the loss of too many dear friends who weren’t able to find the same kind of support as me. Through my experiences and those of my kin, I became radicalized in regards to the urgent need for community care, collective action towards equity and access, and building relationships that have the power to transform social structures.
I share this with you for the sake of context, to connect what is personal to what is systemic, and most of all to be human with you in these times that require us to become more human within the web of life that holds us all. Beyond the current COVID-19 pandemic, at the heart of the ongoing ecological and social crises we face collectively is a crisis of empathy. And, now more than ever, we are each being called into courage and compassion as we seek to know and affirm our shared humanity, our shared responsibility, as we move through this moment together.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it…
-James Baldwin
Safety is not the absence of threat…it is the presence of connection.
-Gabor Maté
Anywhere that Empire’s form of life is suspended, emergent capacities rush in. Through struggle and experimentation, people formulate problems and respond to them together, taking responsibility for collective work and care, and bonds of trust take hold.
-Nick Montgomery & carla bergman
COVID-19 moves with an equity that reveals the lack of equity in our current social, economic, and political systems. The heart, soul, and purpose of this group is mutual aid, and at its core, mutual aid means solidarity. Solidarity aims to co-create a more just, equitable, and compassionate world from the ground up, weaving together our shared humanity despite our many differences.
For more resources and information on the nature of mutual aid, please visit www.bigdoorbrigade.com.
The situation we are in is too serious for this group to become another place on the internet where thoughtful initiatives and earnest questions devolve into dumpster fires of unproductive debate and misguided judgment. Having grounded in the intention of why this group exists, now is the time to draw a few lines and clarify where we stand.
To be clear, our team stands in solidarity with:
- Those organizing around tenants’ rights and/or a rent strike. We don’t have the capacity to fully engage with everyone about these important issues, but encourage you to learn more. For more information about current efforts, please visit the following group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/240858353750606/
- Those who are systematically targeted and harmed by police interventions. We advocate for people to use community-based alternatives to address potentially dangerous situations rather than instinctively calling the police. For alternatives to calling the police, please see the following resource: https://www.aaronxrose.com/blog/alternatives-to-police
Mutual aid is founded in mutual respect, as well as, each of us taking on responsibility for the communities we create together. If you decide to stay here with us and contribute to this group, we ask you to take on the shared responsibility of helping to shape this space and affirming the shared humanity of the people who are here together in solidarity.
Haruki Murakami’s words do a beautiful job of simplifying what is complex in regards to my own politics both in life and in this group:
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us — create who we are. It is we who created the system.
May the hard, high walls break apart, so that we may each survive and thrive together. May all the fragile eggs be safe enough to become a murmuration of birds weaving through the sky.
