So what’s stopping you from getting out of your writerly comfort zone and devoting more time to politics?
You mean other than the coronavirus? Well, for one thing, my students. Especially right now. They were fragile and overtaxed before the pandemic hit; now some of them are falling apart and disappearing. This phenomenon brings out a pastoral impulse in me; I want to help them as people, not as writers or literary critics. So, I’m doing a lot of “retail” teaching — writing emails, zooming with small groups, and just trying to keep track of the technology, the administrative decrees, the “student of concern” forms. All this takes time. And if anything, I’m feeling even more stressed than usual at this hectic time of year, simply trying to keep up with it all and make it work. Then there’s this problem: nobody has a plausible political strategy. It’s one thing to put your life on the line in an army with a battle plan; it’s another thing to try to run across the interstate at rush hour. There are indeed incisive political analyses available. And people have got excellent policy ideas — if only “we” are wise enough “to implement” them. But how do policies get implemented? You and what army? The white supremacists have an answer to that: they are recruiting soldiers — literally. And veterans. They’re building up their own latter-day Sturmabteilung. Meanwhile, what strategy are the gun-control advocates advocating? Write your Member of Congress. Well, okaaay . . . but . . . do who my Member of Congress is? It would make more sense to write graffiti at a well-trafficked location. It’s hard for me, ruined by reading history, to imagine the kind of economic and social changes that would be required to reverse global heating without a lot of people getting arrested, beat up, and killed. Or worse, beating up and killing. Or creating the perceived threat of those things happening. The auto workers in the sit-down strikes in Detroit in the 1930s shot car-door hinges at police cars using inner-tubes as giant slingshots. And they won. But you can do that kind of thing and lose, too — especially if you live in a surveillance state, as we increasingly do. It seems like, in today’s globalized mass everything, profound change comes about (1.) when the people with the money (and therefore the guns) decide they want things to change; or (2.) when a whole lot of people get so desperate and angry that they can’t help but rebel. That is, when people become more mad than scared. I don’t see either thing quite happening, vis-a-vis climate chaos, in the global north (let alone the United States) just yet. I’m more optimistic (if that’s the word) about the possibility of forming locally-based social structures and cultural norms that, if not changing things for the better, can at least prepare for things to change for the worse. Forget your Member of Congress: if you want to have an impact as an individual, pressure your local city commission. But also forming mutual-aid networks or neighborhood gardening (and canning) projects. Or even neighborhood picnics. Now is not a bad time to start. I think this is why I’m attracted to the “Autonomist” political philosophy (which is seeing a kind of renaissance in Europe), with its philosophy of implementing whatever social and economic change you can, now, where you are, rather than trying to do so systemically, at a national level, via mass movements. In the meantime, we in the US have an election coming up. And we haven’t come up with a better strategy — or at least a better mass movement — than electoral politics. So in the short run, it’s ID-ing your voters and GOTV, GOTV, GOTV — get your people to send in their mail-in ballots, and don’t waste time trying to change minds. This may require setting aside our pens and laptops this summer and fall. But afterwards, we may have a Member of Congress who will read what we write.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |