How we make light in the dark

Hi friends,

Another dark winter closes in around us. If your chest feels tight, that makes sense. If your stomach churns, you’re not alone. If your skin is prickling, that’d be a normal response to all that is happening. The monsters that have haunted the shadows of America’s self-perception are awake and emboldened. 

The version of America that now even the mainstream has to contend with—this brazenly violent, lying, cruel, fascist place—is as despicable as it is precedented. This America is not new. The truth is that we’ve been here all along. There is no going back to the fiction of more civil times or restoring an order that once protected us. For many, the United States has always been an apparatus of terror and cruelty—all that’s changed is that nobody can pretend they are immune.

When we at Next River talk about practicing the future, it is not as a means to escape the present. The present we are living through demands our unwavering attention and participation. But the tools we use to change the circumstances of today should belong to the world we want to live in. ”The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as Audre Lorde famously said. They also won’t build a liberated future. The question we must keep returning to is: which tools can build a future worthy of our labor?  This is not about inventing new things. It’s about tapping into ways of being that are innate to our humanity—the practices and perspectives that live in the wisdom of our marrow.  It’s no wonder the neighborly quality of Minnesotan resistance has surfaced across the discourse on this crisis. “In a democracy, the fundamental civic unit is neighbor,” shared Jelani Cobb in a conversation with Stacey Abrams on her podcast last week. Minnesotans have demonstrated what it looks like to show up as neighbors, galvanized by shared stake and bound destiny in the place they call home. 

The force and integrity of their resistance to the federal occupation is rooted in this commitment to the commons, and manifest in the resilience of the region's mutual aid networks—networks that did not spin up in response to this crisis but have been growing and fortifying for years. Voluntarily taking collective responsibility for the needs of fellow community members is a solidarity practice as critical to today’s survival as it is to a liberated and abundant future. This is precisely what it means to adopt the mindsets and practices of a future worth building.

We should all be standing with Minnesota, channeling resources into these networks if we’re able. We should be bearing witness to what is happening all around the country. (It is clear that our witness is a potent threat feared by this administration and its abominable goons.) 

But, just as urgently, we should be standing beside our own neighbors. Getting to know them, if we don’t already. Preparing to protect them, whether we know them or not. 

It is our duty to remember that we must choose to be each other's business in order to have each other’s backs.

Current inspiration

Joy, beauty, and laughter are our birthright, and also critical to our survival. Here are a few things buoying our spirits these days.

This trailer for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. 

This ode to the movie Sinners.

These words of affirmation. 

This video of pure silliness. 

This joke.