I know you are hurting and I know you are afraid. Eight years ago I was too. I was terrified of conflict, I was afraid and I was weak. In the time since then I have become a completely different person. When there is danger I run toward it. When there is danger I keep a cool head. I am now brave and tough and strong, and I know that you can be too.
The first thing you have to realize is that powerful people are not going to save us. They are the people who put us in this situation to begin with. The way to make yourself strong is to find other people to be strong with, comrades united in the same struggle. For me I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. At the time it was growing overwhelmingly. I gravitated toward safety roles. I started off volunteering as a greeter to keep an eye out for potential safety issues. Then, after I’d been at it a few months one of the local groups of fascists showed up at the church we were meeting at. They weren’t looking for us specifically, they just saw a church with a big rainbow “immigrants are welcome here” sign and decided to try and troll. At first I blocked the door, and when an adventurous group of comrades wanted to go and confront them I provided an escort. About a year later I volunteered as a greeter at the Boston Anarchist Book Fair. This time a small crew from Patriot Front, probably the largest Nazi organization that currently exists in America, tried to disrupt the event. Together with my fellow greeters we (and the whole crowd of the book fair) chased them away.
I relate these stories because I started small. At first the events I was working as a greeter at were completely anodyne, and ended up with no safety issues what-so-ever. But I inched my way up into more and more dangerous situations. And that brings us to the Straight Pride Parade. The successor group to the fascists who showed up at our general meeting above called a “Straight Pride Parade.” The city of Boston went out of it’s way to make sure their free speech rights were protected and they made sure the city of Boston was put under threat of fascist violence. They called in police from all across the Commonwealth, who abused the people who came out to try and chase the fascists out, and in truth that was a police pride parade. In the end, when the crowd didn’t disperse fast enough after the fascists left the police themselves rioted. Captain Jack Danilecki, famously one of the worst and most vile Boston police officers tried to attack two street medics who were treating people injured in their riot. Without the small events to acclimatize myself to the pulse of adrenaline who knows what I would have done? But what I actually did was block the attacking police officer, along with another close and beloved comrade, and we ate a faceful of pepper spray for our trouble and somehow, miraculously, we didn’t get arrested. We just did it automatically, with no delay or fear response.
If you told that story to the version of me that existed in 2015 I would never in a million years believe it. But by shared work with comrades and through shared danger I acclimatized to it. And you can too.
That was 2019 and the time since then we’ve still been busy. We’ve helped a few different orgs, some (many) queer, some Jewish and some from other marginalized identities develop their own systems of community defense. The fascist org mentioned a couple times above has withered away. Patriot Front still exists, although with few members in the region and they limit their activities to putting up stickers and doing even dorkier flashmobs than you can imagine.
Most of the work you would do wouldn’t even be exciting. This summer I was barely out in the streets; I was mostly running various types of safety trainings that we have developed for coalition partners. And one of my proudest moments in the last few months was when I sat in as a marshal with one of those little groups and I got to watch them put into action the training I gave them months earlier. In truth, while I have some “war stories” I have probably been in less than fifteen truly exciting incidents in the eight years I’ve been in DSA.
(Indeed, most of the work DSA does is far outside the purview of this community safety niche I carved out for myself. Locally we have active working groups for eco-socialism, internationalist solidarity, electoral politics, labor and political education—I was mostly doing political education for the first few years I was in DSA. The practical point of this is that no matter who you are, no matter what your skills and abilities are, there is something meaningful you can contribute to the movement for justice.)
The next four years are going to be very difficult. I expect a new generation of fascists to rise to face us. I know I will bleed in the street, and many of you will join me. Last a time around we beat them, and then we allowed a racist, genocidal old mummy take credit for it and purposefully stop short and protect Trump. We need to be more prepared, but the thing is, we have more experience this time. A lot of us have learned the lessons of the last eight years.
Will this time be different? I will do my best but who knows. But fighting is better than the alternative.
