Resistance is Fertile

Why I resist & the need for a global People’s Solidarity movement.

“I don’t run away from a challenge because I’m afraid. Instead, I run towards it, because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your foot.” ~Nadia Comaneci | Photo courtesy of Hello I’m Nik via Unsplash

This piece was originally written for a friend who invited me to post on his blog, in response to the question, “Why do I resist?” As it exceeded the length required, I’ve decided to release it here. The work he was kind enough to publish can be found here.

Rebellion is, for me, a tapestry of the personal, historical, and fiercely empathetic, woven together by the juxtaposed insignificance and expansiveness found in interconnection with all life.

This might have been unknowable to me had I not been torn open to learn it. I was born into unrelenting torture, the dehumanizing identity-erasure of profound slavery, and every kind of abuse imaginable. But trauma can be an astonishing gift, the wisest of teachers, the mirror that reflects the strength of who we really are in a way nothing else ever could and nothing could ever again take away.

I nearly made it out without being alive. My grandmother almost died after being kidnapped during the Armenian Genocide. The starved five-year-old managed an escape, but was weak, lost, and far from home. She knew, however, that clay held nutrients, and she sucked on dirt to survive.

Her elder sister’s betrothed had been scouring the mountainsides on horseback for days when, against all likelihood, he found both her and her missing brother in separate towns on the same day. But he was determined to find his own fiance, a great beauty who had been kidnapped a month earlier to be the bride of a stranger. He discovered where she was being held, tricked the family into allowing her to come to the door, and pulled her onto his horse to race her back to her distraught mother. He asked how she had avoided the forced wedding. The family, she explained, would not let the marriage proceed until she recited a phrase to renounce her ‘Armenian-ness.’ She refused, and it was this rebelliousness, born of her dedication to him, that saved her and the life of deep, tender love that awaited them.

The massacres destroyed 2.5 million of my people, including several of my family, one a great-uncle who begged the men with scimitars not to kill him in front of his young children as they looked on, clutching their mother’s skirt and howling. They cut him to pieces where he stood.

I feel an morbid intimacy with the terror wrought by despots. Over and over again, these hollow men inseminate, exploit, and weaponize ignorance, insecurity, and inhumanity in populations by uniting them against manufactured enemies.

But somehow, through all these bloody indignities, I seized a perhaps-unlikely belief in the unifying thread of existence that knits us into a greater whole. In every face, I see my own parallel life being lived in glorious, messy, intertwined unison, and the resultant empathy galvanizes me. This unique juxtaposition contributes to reflexive resonance with every life that would be denied its full expression. There is a ferocious-mother-lioness compulsion to shield my extended family from the fangs of fascism. That said, all this is likely most directly derived from the impossible goal of wanting to prevent every life, anywhere, from being haunted by the unshakable, dismal, perforating knowledge of what it is like to be left defenseless and undefended.

“An injury to one is an injury to all.” ~Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) motto, credited to David C. Coates by Bill Haywood. Photo courtesy of Quintero Camilaa via Unsplash

We are all so vulnerable now, our very existence endangered. We require sweeping change, both macrocosmically systemic and microcosmically behavioral, but no ambition is too great when the failure of inaction would be so absolute. But even as worldwide fascism is on the rise, so, too, is global rebellion. Within us a fearsome awakening is uncoiling with the primordial hiss of old memories, ancient wisdom, and elemental fury, clawing for that connection to the planet, each other, and our own selves the neoliberals and technocrats have worked to destroy. Just as the genocidal elite have their own intercontinental networks of influence, so, too, should we devise an efficient network (or strengthen, streamline, and consolidate already-existing ones) of international people power. This could have myriad functions in setting right this unnatural world’s daily betrayals, but among them could be: a clearinghouse for best practices gleaned from current and historical knowledge to further our varied missions; facilitation and organization of information, communication, and collaboration; both a long-term and rapid-response activist network for coordinated, targeted, and devastatingly effective global action as necessary (as it is my firm belief that such will become increasingly, sharply necessary). I believe it not only possible, but necessary, to transcend borders, cultures, and our own tribalism to stand, in our full, monumental, astonishing collective power, as a united People against the tyrannies that threaten us all. As the United Nations is not serving us with the necessary rapidity (and was never meant to), then let us create/fortify some version of the “United Peoples.” Transformative change will only happen if we demand it with a steadfast, unwavering voice calling for an axiomatically cogent, ethical, and equitable paradigm, because we are far too short on time to risk our continued existence with the wildly variable vicissitudes of traditional, untenable, localized revolutions.

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ~Anne Frank Photo courtesy of Mikael Cho via Unsplash

Unity (not uniformity) is the lynchpin of success (read: survival), and this struggle demands we adopt the ethos of the trench. We are here to win the war being waged against us all. What we need are fellow warriors, the deep, unique solidarity born of battling together for a just existence. There is no room for splintering divisiveness—only intentional, resolute, implacable commitment to Justice and anyone working to realize it. While the constructs and demands of life in the oppression system do not give us all equal latitude for field activism, this moment is ready to meet everyone where they are, so they can do what they can with what they have. The immeasurable amount of time and energy we collectively waste on fruitless distractions from the increasing horror of reality, if adjusted only slightly to harness passion and pinpoint focus, could yield unimaginable positive results. Objection without action is a still, festering swamp which merely breeds more of its own inherent negativity, whereas the inspiring agitation of activism transforms the toxicity of depression, fear, and self-reproach into a self-perpetuating positive. Intense love for humanity and fervent rejection of injustice are enough to resolutely fight alongside each other. This battle for survival transcends us as individuals and needs whatever each of us can give.

“Good things come to those who initiate.” ~Susan RoAne Photo courtesy of Austin Chan via Unsplash

So, “why do I resist?”

I resist because…

…every moment of inaction against global warming is to participate in a worldwide, simultaneous act of child abuse.

…because in this human-caused Sixth Mass Extinction, an estimated 150–200 species are going extinct every 24 hours, 1000 times the normal rate.

…if we fight we might lose, but if we don’t, we already have.

…even if failure is inevitable, to give up now would be the slow, guilt-ridden, living death of awaiting death, of vacantly observing as humanity suffers. Let me be some “ungovernable, nasty-woman, angry-mob, good-trouble” before I die.

…failure is not inevitable.

…fascism and “man’s inhumanity to man” is fundamentally intolerable to me, whose existence has already been twice threatened by tyranny: historical in terms of my grandmother, and personal in terms of my parents.

…my hands are still charred from rescuing my own self from what would have been the cremation chamber of my passion, positivity, and power, and that act of resurrection can not be just for my own selfish benefit, restricted to the confines of my small, brief, and utterly insignificant existence.

…”the fires of this life have tempered the steel of my soul”, and its raison d’etre is Justice. Rebellion is merely the reflexive, resolute glint of its sharpest edge.

I resist because of primordial Rage and universal Love.

…everything I do is an act of love and service to our collective life.

…my greatest fear is failing in my duty to myself, to each of you, and to the communal life-force that demands better of me.

I resist because my conscience is heavier than any action.

…as that witty, white-supremacist war criminal Winston Churchill said, “We must take change by the hand, or rest assuredly, change will take us by throat.”

I resist because I feel that hand altogether too near our collective throat.

…because James Baldwin’s 1979 words are still true: “why do you have to fight for your civil rights if you are a citizen? Because if you have to fight for your civil rights, you are not a citizen.” I demand all of us be treated as we are: citizens of this world.

I fight because this is not mere Resistance: this is a slave revolt.

…and as Millman wrote, “to rid yourself of old patterns, focus all your energy not on struggling with the old, but on building the new.”

So, compulsively, I rebel: trying to fight the old, hoping to build the new, not knowing if any of it matters, but not knowing what else I could possibly do.