 |
The Ten of Swords tarot card from the Rider Waite Smith deck. A person lies face-down on the ground, their face turned away from the viewer. Ten swords impale the person’s back. There is a red substance on the ground under the person’s head, and what appears to be a vast amount of red (A cloak? Their blood?) flowing over the lower half of their body. The horizon shows blue peaks and a yellow sky which are predominantly overshadowed by a massive, jet-black cloudbank that fills more than half of the image. |
Today, I wish to begin with my answers to the question I ask at the end:
Revolutionary love looks like shaping my life around coalitional solidarity, so that our most vulnerable are not alone when they suffer or resist institutional violence, and so that we are not alone in when we speak out to protest systemic oppression.
Revolutionary love looks like putting in the time and effort to participate in active mutual aid in support of our most vulnerable and marginalized people.
Revolutionary love looks like taking many kinds of action--great and small, momentous and cumulative--in compassionate support of our most vulnerable and marginalized people: even if: especially if: doing so might cost me any other person’s approval.
* * *
On June 10, 2024, the Sun moved into the third decan of Gemini, which the Sun rules by decanic dignity, but not by sign. The Sun–source of literal illumination and singular self-expression–is neither particularly welcomed nor outcast in Gemini. However, when in the realm of multiplicity and nonlinear perception, I sometimes wonder if this planet, who is most often associated with consistent identity, might feel most at ease in the role of the stranger.
I have been thinking about how it feels to be constantly trying not to "lose my mind" in the face of collective humanitarian grief. More specifically, I have been thinking about how many times in the last ten months I’ve thought something like these ten words–I feel like I am about to lose my mind–and then returned to the truth of how unimaginably, indescribably comfortable my personal experience has actually been. I’m writing this on a fully-charged laptop with an iced coffee at my left hand. In Gaza, men, women, and children are dying of thirst and getting shot waiting in line for water rations. In the Congo, children are being starved and worked to death in cobalt mines for the sake of the mass-production of new cell phone batteries. I don’t know any of the children whose shattered relatives have posted news or live footage of their murders, for whom I’ve wept. I don’t know them, and I likely do not know you. I do know I am responsible for using what power I’ve got to move in actionable ways that connect me in loving, humane relationship to those whom I mourn.
The text I read for this decan is Michelle Alexander’s essay, published in The Nation in March, 2024, “Only Revolutionary Love Can Save Us Now”. My keywords for the Ten of Swords and the Sun in Gemini are: reckoning, something irrevocable has occurred, and turning away from reality is no longer an option.
I didn't start to write this until July 1, 2024. One of the reasons for this is described in Alexander’s essay: unrelenting grief for the bombed, the starved, the displaced, the imprisoned, the annihilation of our most vulnerable children’s futures, and the escalating wreckage of our shared planetary home. We are living in a wreck. Looking straight into this reality is personally wrecking, and it should be. When language can no longer encompass the horror, only action towards loving liberation can save us.
What words do I even have? Only the below questions, and below them, quotes from an essay that I pray may be of as much help to you as it has been to me.
What does revolutionary love look like from where we are right now? To get up and move forward, how will we move together towards true freedom?
* * *
In “Only Revolutionary Love Can Save Us Now”, Michelle Alexander writes onto the page the many realities that are irrevocably connected to the despair of so many people: the genocide of Palestine, the apathy of people in power in response to a live-streamed genocide, fear of the November 2024 presidential election, climate change, and the normalization of racist carceral violence suffered by Indigenous and Black people in the United States. Alexander shares that in the face of unprecedented suffering and grief, she has repeatedly turned to the 1967 speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr. in which he publicly condemned the Vietnam War and urged all people to change their lives in effort of resisting the oppressive forces that inevitably create the death, destruction, and injustice that we still mourn today.
King was not celebrated for his public condemnation of an oppressive colonial war. He addressed his reasons for speaking out despite mainstream pressure to normalize its oppressive colonial outcomes:
"King said, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” He explained that “a time comes when silence is betrayal,” and that time had come in relation to Vietnam.
"This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers."
Alexander illuminates the shift that King identified as necessary to move forward from the wreckage of colonial violence:
"In unflinching terms, King condemned the moral bankruptcy of a nation that does not hesitate to invest in bombs and warfare around the world but can never seem to find the dollars to erardicate poverty at home. He called for a revolution of values. He said:
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
She then leads us through the significance of love in this call to action, and its status as a necessity, not a luxury:
"Of course, the concept of “love” is often misunderstood and misinterpreted, but it is not some sentimental, weak response. As King explained, “I am speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life,” and this force, he said, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of humankind."
In the final passages of this essay, Alexander calls for an end to all colonial occupation, an end to policing and imprisonment, and active care for our planet. She also points out that what is in the air–the stench of death, the screams of the parents of murdered children, the silence of those whose power could be bent towards clearing even some portion of rubble from off an elderly Nakba survivor whose apartment building was shelled in an airstrike–what is in the air is not just cause for the kind of grief that can wreck us. What is in the air is also multiplying, fractalizing, rapidly communicated acts of revolutionary love that she hopes will grow as a seed does beneath the Sun.
“I know many people feel helpless in these times, but there are countless ways in which we can practice freedom by acting with revolutionary love. Even small acts done with love and in the spirit of justice can help to change everything. Consider, for example, what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, when Michael Brown was murdered by the police and his community rose up, took to the streets, and remained there, even as the tanks rolled in. Palestinian activists tweeted messages of hope and solidarity from thousands of miles away, along with instructions for how to survive an occupation, including what to do when the tear gas begins to flow. Those gestures of love and solidarity were not forgotten, leading Black activists years later to travel all the way to Palestine to learn more about the ways in which struggles for racial justice in the United States are inextricably linked to movements for justice and liberation around the world.
A beautiful mural now adorns the Israeli separation wall at the northern end of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. It was painted by a Palestinian artist who was inspired by watching the protests in the United States following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer who placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. The artist painted a giant image of Floyd next to the image of Palestinian youth activist Ahed Tamimi and slain medic Razan al-Najjar. When the artist was asked why he added Floyd to the mural, he said, “I want the people in America who see this mural to know that we in Palestine are standing with them [in their struggle for justice], because we know what it is like to be strangled every day.” Photos of that mural went viral and were featured in news outlets around the world, something the artist never dreamed would occur. A wall that had once symbolized only apartheid now also symbolizes international solidarity in the struggle for freedom.
We can never know if our small acts of love or courage might make a bigger difference than we imagine. The fact that Black activists today are showing up at marches organized by Jewish students, who are raising their voices in solidarity with Palestinians who are suffering occupation and annihilation in Gaza, is due in no small part to thousands of small acts of revolutionary love that have occurred over the course of years, acts that I hope and pray are planting seeds that will eventually bloom into global movements for peace, justice, and liberation for all.
Twenty twenty-four just might be the year that changes everything. But the way that things change is ultimately up to us. It can be a time of world war, genocide, the collapse of democracy, and the loss of hope. Or it can be a time of great awakening—when we break our silences and act with greater courage and greater solidarity.
Something new is in the air. And it’s not just dread. In virtually every community, people are coming together in remarkable ways—learning about each other’s histories of struggle, marching together, cocreating with each other, planting seeds of something new together, making another way possible: a way out of no way. People are casting off old ways of seeing the world and being in the world and recognizing that everything depends on us rising to the challenges of our times, speaking unpopular truths, and acting with courage and love and the fierce urgency of now."
-- Michelle Alexander, "Only Revolutionary Love Will Save Us Now"
* * *
Closing questions:
What does revolutionary love look like in your life?
What actions of revolutionary love are connected to habits that have already been part of your life for a year or longer?
Who do you wish to help learn those habits with you?
What actions of revolutionary love are new to your way of life?
Who would you like to reach out to ask for support or guidance in further integrating these acts into your way of life?
Who is someone close to you who has shown you the meaning of revolutionary love?
Who is someone who is a stranger to you who has shown you the meaning of revolutionary love?
No comments:
Post a Comment