BLM Update 3: Check-in, 1k Project, Abolitionism

Let's just go ahead and get the BLM update out of the way first, then we can just make a separate post for other stuff.  I think I've been shying away from BLM updates because I feel like I should only make a specifically BLM/social studies post when I have =advice= to give, but of course that's a bit silly -- part of the reason this blog exists is to offer a sense of personal connection and shared experience where there might otherwise be none.  So even if I don't have any advice to give, perhaps someone can gain value out of reading my experiences -- not by learning something new, but simply by feeling less alone.

We're already 2 whole months out from June when a lot of us started to realize that we should be thinking more seriously about these things.  This was never really a sprint for me, and there was no accompanying rush of activity, but for a while I took it on myself to do daily homeworks relating to these issues, whether it be more significant things like writing to a city council regarding reforms, or whether it be more paltry things like simply watching a video.

That momentum has slowed down, of course, for not only me but for many others as well.  I don't feel bad about that though, since the plan was not to keep on doing something every single day until the end of time.  So now we come to the "slow and steady" phase where we must simply incorporate education and activism as part of our lives from time to time.  Not every day, but simply "every so often".  Being one of the activities I have taken onto myself, this is something that happens almost automatically for me, for when I neglect something that I consider a priority for too long, it catches up to me and I have no choice but to address it.  But of course, everyone has their own way of keeping up with things, with following through.

The movement to "become a better citizen", and by that I mean, to become someone who is "on the right side of justice", who supports those in need and strives to make things right, takes many forms, and not all of them involve medals or badges that you can proudly display on your metaphorical social mantle.  The amount of work that needs to be done can seem overwhelming at times; however, I implore you to see the many areas of focus not as a sign of despair, but rather as a source encouragement -- there are a plethora of ways in which you can fight this fight, and by no means should you expect yourself (nor anyone else) to become significantly involved in every single one of them.  When the goal at the end of the day is "to do better than you were before", there are any number of ways in which you can achieve that.

Since we are in the middle of a global pandemic, there are probably many days in which you may not feel the strength to pick up a big project relating to these Social Studies works.  Actually, even if we were not in the middle of a global pandemic, there would still probably be many days in which you would probably not have that strength.  Mental health, after all, is something that fluctuates naturally, whether you realize it or not.

And that's OK.  Sometimes you don't really have that much activation energy to throw around, and faulting yourself for that isn't really productive, regardless of whether it is actually your "fault" or not.

Luckily we aren't in this alone.  The fact that there are many of us in this together means not only that we can come together in numbers, but that we can facilitate and motivate each other -- to provide resources that lower the bar for activation energy.  And yes, this is actually one of the few ways in which social media is perhaps being used well (lol).

One easy way to ease the bar for yourself is to subscribe or follow newsletters, activist organizations, etc. that will periodically offer you call to actions.  The burden of figuring out WHAT to do and HOW to do it is thus taken off of your plate and this can often avert our intentions from the ever-present force of operational procrastination.  Of course, often you are only going to nab at the low-hanging fruit by doing this -- it's arguably much less impactful to sign a digital petition, than to research and then advocate for policies by dialing into a city council meeting.  But as I said, sometimes you aren't ready to do the real gruntwork.  Sometimes the best thing, is to simply find one, small, tiny thing you can put on your todo list, and check it off.  And then do it again.  And then again.  And yet again.  Continual, incremental efforts.  This is how empires are built, and by corollary, how empires can change.

As I said before, there are many different dimensions to this whole thing.  The topics that we are thinking about in our current semester of Social Studies are not limited to simply defunding the police, but understanding how the problems we see in the BLM movement are interrelated and interconnected with the prison-industrial complex, with socioeconomic issues, with incarceration, with class struggle.  When you study (studied?) the Great Depression in history class, it wasn't enough to learn a single-sentence answer to "What caused the Great Depression?"  (for reference, just look at the length of the "Causes of the Great Depression" wikipedia article)  Similarly, when we look at the acts of injustice that we have recently unblinded ourselves from, we cannot simply hope to understand them through a single-sentence statement such as "police = bad".  For that does nothing to answer the question of =why= the police are bad, how the policing system was designed (around incarceration and servitude), and how it operates in conjunction with systems of economic profits.

I'm not sure if that really works as a lead-in to this, but anyways, I was recently made aware of "The $1k Project", which hopes to facilitate trusted matches so that donors can provide $3000 over 3 months directly to a family that is in need due to the ongoing pandemic.  The idea being to provide direct financial assistance to real people.  Of course, if you do not wish to donate an entire $3000, there is an option to contribute a lesser amount (min $100) via a group campaign, and all contributions are matched.  Anyhow, this project might seem a little bit unrelated to the other social studies stuff that is going on, but in the end, as I mentioned above, it really all is related, in a way.

To close off this lengthy post I wanted to briefly mull over some thoughts about prison abolitionism, police abolitionism, and such matters.  I cannot pretend to have fully reached my conclusions about what the "correct" course of action for these things is (if there is one).  But I think I've realized that there feels to be this stumbling block for many of us when we think of abolishing the police and the prison system entirely.  There's a strange resistance that comes up in my mind when I think about tearing down the policing and prison systems, and I think it's a little more than simply resistance to change and the fact that "it's always been this way".

The way that I've been explaining this to myself is that it's hard to abandon these systems because it's possible to imagine a version of policing and imprisonment that IS just, and that operates in a way that facilitates what we actually want out of our justice systems, rather than aims to incarcerate unfairly, to employ forced labor, and to serve as a malicious tool.  There is a world where every officer is impartial and trustworthy, where they are both held accountable to the highest standard and meet that highest standard.  And where the prison systems are designed to rehabilitate rather than to profit.  And I think part of the internal resistance in my (our?) minds to this idea of a world without these systems, is that when we imagine these systems we imagine the versions that they "ought to be", not the ones that exist today.  And when we see that these systems are not functioning the way they should be in our minds, the first thought that comes to mind is "why can't they?"

The answer to "why can't they?" is a complicated one that, again, has no single-sentence explanation.  But even without the conceptual understanding of that answer, I think it's fairly clear from the empirical evidence that there is no working path from here to there.  And I think framing things in this way has helped me understand why it is not enough to fix a broken system -- and why the system must be redesigned from the ground up instead.