A Collective Coordination
To meet each other's needs
Disclaimer: After I posted this and it went out on email I found a bunch of typos and realized it is an overwrought mess written as if by an amateur. I chose not to fix anything. I'm stressed today and that's what free gets you, so big deal. Thanks to NoBonzo for the stolen image. Their work makes my life better.
This newsletter usually runs on Fridays but you'll notice, if you are coming to it on publishing day, that it isn't Friday. It's Sunday! Last week I didn't post one at all. If everything seems sideways there is a justifiable reason: I've been busy. For that handful of you who subscribe to this newsletter but don't actually subscribe to Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study newsletter, I'm here to tell you I was busy over there last week. I interviewed Montana Senator Jon Tester shortly after the insurrection on January 6th and published that transcript on Thursday. Behind the scenes I posted a discussion topic, viewable only to her subscribers, a couple days after that. And then Sunday—a week ago—she published a piece I wrote about this bullshit pretendians list floating around the internet. You can dig that HERE.
I'm leading with this information not just to share my work and prove I haven't been sandbagging, but because it ties in to the topic I've been thinking a ton about lately: Mutual Aid. I'd say AHP's "hiring" of me to write for her is a kind of mutual aid. She's definitely helping me—a broke-ass writer with a much smaller audience than she has—by offering me paid work, and this whole interchange is happening outside of how these things typically go. It wasn't exorbitant and I'm not going to provide numbers, but I will say it's the biggest payday I've ever had for freelance work. Which isn't saying so much about the kindness and generosity of AHP (who is both tremendously generous and kind) as it is about how shittily freelancers are paid in this industry. It is a hard, hard road but we travel it, in vehicles at least fifteen years older than those of our friends. Gone are the days when magazines paid, as Jim Harrison one said though I can't find the actual quote, enough that one story could finance half a year without a real job. The mystery writer Keith McCafferty told me that he regularly sent checks to freelance writers when he was working as an editor at Field & Stream that were larger than the advance he got for his first novel, which was $15K. I learned this quickly, which is why I am happy for the part-time gig I have at a bookstore. I don't get paid much, but I have freedom to do my writing and I get paid on time like clockwork, which is another knock against freelance work. Freelancers get paid on publication, which often means weeks, or months (sometimes years) after the work is delivered. And that's if we are paid on time. My late payment horror story, and we all have them—many worse than mine—involved a national fly fishing magazine that took more than a year to send me my measly check. I'm not going to lie: I thought more than once about a road trip for no other reason than to put some bricks through a window or two.
I'm going to haul off and quote the first paragraph from Dean Spade's excellent little book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis and the Next:
Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis or are making things worse. We see examples of mutual aid in every single social movement, whether it's people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a ride-sharing system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow, raising money to pay for abortions for those who can't afford them, or coordinating letter-writing to prisoners. These are mutual aid projects. They directly meet people's survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust.
I'd say subscribing to newsletters is mutual aid because the journalism industry is upside-down and journalists and writers are on the clinging-fingernails-edge of survival. Certainly donating to nonprofit news agencies—like Montana's excellent Montana Free Press—is mutual aid. And there’s more that we engage in all the time. Think about the food drives we all see to donate to pet shelters. Winter clothing to homeless shelters. Fucking donations because someone has a health emergency and no insurance. Something along these lines crosses my radar at least every other day. It is a crisis.
In a USA Today oped Tim Cadogan, the CEO of GoFundME, wrote an impassioned plea for a Covid relief package. He writes about how their platform had already been swelling with programs to help people in need, but that the Covid crisis sent requests through the roof. "Our platform was never meant to be a source of support for basic needs," he writes. "It can never be a replacement for robust federal COVID-19 relief that is generous and targeted to help the millions of Americans who are struggling."
Even AOC raising $5M for Texas relief is an indicator of how messed-up our society is. Yes, it is generous of people to give to programs like AOC's, to GoFundMe programs, but everyone already is in the form of fucking taxes. Instead we are just making rich people richer. We are being robbed and we are letting it happen.
I really struggle to find hope in the midst of all this. The grift is so immense that they aren't even hiding it from us. Americans have been so bamboozled that we seem to be blinded by our own loyalties. Can we hold ourselves accountable to meet climate change requirements? What about debt forgiveness? Covid relief? Fucking HEALTH CARE? Can we look into future generations and see what it will mean to be good ancestors and make changes to improve the lives of people a generation or two down the road, or are we going to just sit on our asses for five more good minutes for ourselves? I wrestle with despair because we are thirty-whatever days into the post-Trump era and we are hurtling toward business as usual, and in that direction lies doom. And if you are one of those people placating us doubters with the old, "Give him time, give him time!" lecture over Biden, how much time does this guy need? He's been in politics for what, fifty years? He was V.P. for eight years. How much time does this guy need? If you buy into that, you are a sucker and as much a problem as he is. In fact I trust Trump more than I do Biden. At least with Trump you knew that he was going to choose whatever the shittiest option possible would be and be unrepentant. Biden will cry and kiss a child while his goons are chasing the grandmother out of her rent-controlled apartment to make way for some new donor-sponsored grift on the other side of town. It's sickening.
If I wielded the kind of wizardly witchcraft I aspire to, I'd magic up a big dome over the greater D.C. area, but no one who is there would actually know it's happened. Let them continue to believe they are actually doing anything. We would divert our tax money elsewhere. We could pay talented designers and coders to create a believable world for the Domers to live in. Actors could pose as dignitaries and such to let the Domers believe there is contact with the outside world.
I’m not writing today with “do this, do that” solutions. Mutual aid is something you do, not an organization you join. You can create Solidarity Networks that transcend political parties, organizations, whatever, and I urge you to. Just do something to help someone in need, whenever you can. And then do it again and again and again.
I am in love with the world. I believe in the spirits of all living things, and by “living” I do mean everything. Not just people, but the spirits of the earth and rocks and trees and flowers and weeds and rivers and oceans and bugs and animals and birds and everything. We can, and must, take care of each other and ourselves and all of our brothers and sisters. Because no one else is going to do it for us.
I'm all in on the dome.
I've never been able to make enough writing to quit my day job -- maybe if I'd been braver about being broke I would have written more, but I was terrified of being homeless and so I kept my day job and bought a house. It's paid off now, so that helps. But still. I mean, over the 3 years my novel was in print, I made about 25K total. It was such a shitty amount of money, and all the people who were taking little bits of it (cough cough agents) kept telling me how fucking grateful I should be, which enraged me, that it was clear the whole publishing system was set up for people who had inherited money or married it. I did get a visiting writer gig out of it, but I've never figured out how to make money as a freelancer. That's why I do tech writing. It pays.
On the mutual aid front --one of the things that keeps me from losing my entire mind as Livingston becomes a bougie suburb of Bozeman, is the Food Resource Center. After 2008, when town was hit so hard, the LFRC set about building intentional food resilience. The food pantry was reconfigured like a grocery store, they put in a Health Dept rated kitchen that people can rent, they started teaching classes to skill people up for the local restaurant businesses, and they started buying from local producers then processing and freezing for their clients. They provide frozen meals for seniors made from local food. They started a (very bougie) bakery to raise money to bake bread and ship it to food banks across the state. They partnered with the Hospital and Farm to Schools to get more local food into local institutions, and to teach kids, even rural kids here, what good food is and where it comes from. This spring, as it all went to shit, they worked with local ranchers who wanted to start a pipeline for donating, slaughtering, and distributing ground beef to food banks around the state. It's local food for local people. It's mutual aid. And now that we have so many retirees who have moved here, there's always volunteers. Sadly, thanks to the pandemic and the collapse of tourism, they're needed more than ever.