DEAR YOU,

Who are one among many. My husband and I are sitting in our bed on election night and the space is filled with the sound of our own internet searches, punctuated by deep sighs. Trump has won the Presidency and there is a dense and palpable energy between us.

My husband is the first to say, “I am sad.” I say, “I am sorry.” And I am. I am sorry, and sorrow-filled and resigned. One part of me feels like crawling away, deep into the crevices of our daily life, the other half wants to run screaming out into the streets at daybreak. Wants to sign up for every opportunity to “fight back.” Wants to publicly exhaust myself in order to say that “I tried.”

But I will not do that. Refuse in fact to do that, as I have already been down that road, and know that there is nothing noteworthy about public exhaustion, nor any integrity to be found in morally signaling online. So instead, I will just be plain and acknowledge my family and my body’s limitations, and offer an invitation for you to also consider what you can and cannot give.

It is important to note that I write this from the privilege of living outside of America. My body reached its limitations being at the eye of the political hurricane that is the rise of fascism, and as part of this, I made a decision to relocate based off of the luck of having one non American parent. So, this is a removed perspective, one written from a nervous system that is more intact because of distance.

With that said, here is what I can give, and have been giving.

Over the course of the last year, I have been in the process of relocating. And my antidote to disconnection has been to give myself over to opportunities to be in spaces with people who are different from me. Morally different. Politically different. Spiritually different. Part of this had to do with the lived circumstances that I found myself within. I spent last year living on my traditional territory, in a small village, where one of the few weekly offerings for social gathering was hosted by an Evangelical organization. And so that is where I would go to get a little dose of activity for our son. I sat and drank tea and visited with others in a room papered with posters that promised salvation.

This is a place where the entire economy is built off of mining. My office window looked out onto the highway that ran through our town, and I would watch buses transporting workers to the mines while I took organizing calls on climate justice. Nearly everyone I spent time with in-person reaped some direct economic benefit from the mines. It was a year of building intimacy with a place and people where my ideas and views were foreign. And then we relocated again, just a few hours south to a town that serves as a resource and support hub for all of the industry in this area. I write to you from here, where semi trucks loaded with logs drive through town, and companies make plans for liquified natural gas factories, and the narrative of what it means to live and work and produce for industry is in the air we breathe.

Living in this place has been a grounding and sobering experience. One in which I realized that I must be intentional with how I show up. And by intentional, I mean that I have defaulted entirely back to all the teachings that I have ever received on curiosity. I must be curious with how I show up, and with whom I show up to.

In September I started a job with an Indigenous-led legal entity where I have been building out a course specifically for police officers. It is a basic anti-racism course with an emphasis on the history of colonization. The explicit goal is to interrupt dangerous ideas about Indigenous Peoples and harmful policing practices. It is lofty, and something that I never thought I would find myself doing. Centering police, that is. Part of me knows better, because I have experienced policing gone wrong, but there is the curiosity again. I want to know more about who the people that police are.

Engaging with this issue returns me to our most recent book How Do We Come Together in a Changing World? in which we are reminded in an interview with political organizer Lucía Oliva Hennelly to “let it be complicated.” Part of my taking this job and this project on was to live this message out as an experiment. One of my guiding questions has been, “How many multitudes can I hold?”

Strangely enough, all of these “unusual couplings” as Jeanine Canty writes in her contribution within this same book, have been my antidote in the months leading up to the election. No part of the way that the Democratic Party has run its campaigns has felt hopeful or invigorating for me. I am morally opposed to many aspects of its function and public stances on issues that are important to me. And, I also knew from the outset that I would vote for whoever their candidate was, because I do believe that the continual rise of Trumpism is dangerous in ways that are immediate for everyone everywhere. His winning is a signaling that all of what he stands for, is welcome in all communities globally.

What has felt hopeful for me is the way that people surprise me when I am up close and in person with them. The decision to leave the echo chamber of the Bay Area has forced me to further discern and sharpen my analysis based on the reality that many, many people do not think or believe in the same things that I do. Which means that in order to understand why they do not, I have to be willing to ask questions, remain calm through their response, and then continue to ask questions. I am not saying that you should do this, or even that this is the “right” way. But what I will say is that based on these conversations, I am not shocked in the slightest by tonight’s results.

A few months ago, while back at our home in California, a community member who supports undocumented workers, shared that they were angry that they put Kamala in the race. From their stance as an on the ground, day-in and day-out organizer, it lulled people back into a sense of complacency. They felt that before Biden dropped out, when it was so clear to everyone that he was no match for Trump, it galvanized necessary organizing. This is an analysis that I have also heard from other organizers. The dichotomy being that when we have someone who is more willing to work with us, that we are provided some wins, and are in some ways “safer.” And also that people go back to sleep, and our movements lose the necessary grit that is needed to bring about systemic change. An easy and recent example to point to would be the level of energy that was brought to the streets in the summer of 2020, while Trump was in office. This organizer lamented the challenge posed on both ends. Kamala wins, we settle for incremental change. Trump wins, we harness the energy of mass rage, yet risk losing so much more. Like our ability to even protest, as evidenced in this recent Patagonia article.

All of this calls on the memory of where I was when Trump was first elected back in 2016, as I am sure it does for all of us. I was 25, organizing at the United Nations in Marrakech, and was blindsided, as was seemingly the rest of the world. By this I mean, the entire UN process seemed to grind to a halt the morning after the election, and everywhere I looked were people dressed in business casual with looks of disbelief and tears streaming down their face. By no coincidence, this was also the day that I deeply injured myself organizing, in a way that fundamentally changed how my body functioned. Over these last 8 years of attending more doctors visits than I can count, whenever I am asked to recount when the myriad of symptoms that I now live with began, I have the marker of the day Trump was elected as the day. It was a day that I should have been lying in bed resting, as I was in the midst of a severe case of food poisoning, but I did not. Instead I chanted in the face of global media, hosted a grief circle in front of the UN flags, and ended my night screaming myself hoarse in a room filled with other organizers from across the U.S.

I know better now.

I know that we are in a marathon that will likely last the entirety of my lifetime. I know that we have succumbed to the spiral of history, and that tonight is a signal that it will be years before we experience the actual bottom of the bottom, before we can begin the ascent. And I know that when we practice the golden rules of organizing—talk 30% of the time, leave 70% of the airspace for them, ask elicitive questions, and offer curiosity— that we are offering a level of generosity that is rarely afforded to anyone anymore. And perhaps this is the real takeaway from all these mashed up thoughts. When they say “we will not go back,” I hope they/you/I/we mean, that we will not go back to how we isolated ourselves from those who thought differently than us. Yes, Martin Niemöller’s words, “The nicest neighbors made the best Nazis” rings closer and truer than ever before, and I also know that most people do not change when we yell at them. I know this because when I am yelled at, I will often just walk away.

I am reminded that the work of changing minds happens in intimate spaces. The nooks and crannies of the internet, a conversation held over a meal, the way we are genuinely surprised when we learn something profound and new about someone’s life. Within the pages of a book.

I also know that not enough minds will change fast enough to stave off the many unnecessary deaths that will continue to plague a country that creates policies orientated from scarcity and fear. This is the truth of the matter. We will continue to lose people both near and far. We have not finished our collective descent into the underbelly of what many people believe it means to be American. And so we must adjust our orientation towards survival, over most everything else.

We must stay grounded in reality at this moment. Over the past few years, I’ve felt troubled by an emphasis on the idea that morality and strategy are inherently the same. Refusing to engage with the systems that ultimately provide the backbone of our society is dangerous territory. When we only sit in spaces with people who echo back our own ideas, our shared visions are incomplete. And when we only work with what’s been given to us, we foreclose diverse possibilities. The task is to live rooted in both realms, to balance what is here and now with the broader vision of what could be.

Our work now is to not lose touch with the structures of our societies, or the people who inhabit them. By centering the most vulnerable first; moving towards the work and teachings of movement ancestors like Harriet Tubman; leading with curiosity; and taking note of everyone and everything around you, we can both update our analysis and plan for the years ahead.

May you be protected.

by Kailea Loften
Co-Editor, LOAM