Resistance

However we can, whenever we can, to the best of our ability, to whatever limit we can tolerate, for as long as we can hold out, so long as we do not betray, and can continue to bear the weight and the burdens of any friend, comrade or stranger.

That's how we resist.

What we resist is not simple, nor simple to describe. In fact, its greatest virtue (for those who rule and benefit from it) is its appearance of compounded complexity.

It's part of who we are. We are raised to belong to the thing which consumes us, to experience doubt as a double bind, to labor to overcome our own resistances as a matter of responsibility, pride, membership, morality, self-respect, vanity or honor. We have our personalities organized for us, to collapse under the weight of that bind made obvious. We are organized towards self-betrayal at the first hint of obstruction, or realization.

The essential point, if there can be one, is that the whole of society is organized to consume us. I don't mean that as a statement in the abstract. I mean it literally. When your boss's boss orders a thirty dollar glass of wine, it is your suffering he drinks. It's our suffering.

Our private agonies and alienation are not in competition. Some obviously have it worse than others. I know my own good fortune in escaping Lawrence, or not being born in Burkina Faso. I also know that there are days that Burkina Faso and a childhood without abuse would seem like a temporary paradise.

At the point of resistance, where we meet others who want to struggle, who want to fight, who have reached the apex of a necessary question, our origins matter less than our aims.

"What is that question? " you might wonder.

I'll gladly tell you. The question is, "Why shouldn't everyone have it easy?"

I mean, everyone. If you can ask this question, I kindly submit to you that you are all the way there.

So why not take the next step?

Why not resist?

Perhaps your involvement will not resemble my own. I am comfortable with hatred. I'm good at it, and I know that there are plenty of people whose only merit is that they are on the receiving end of my practiced enmity and life-affirming malevolence. I cannot look at my oldest child without knowing this for an exact truth. I cannot wake up in my own poisoned body and foreshortened life without reminding myself that an entire catalog of persons live their lives with greater ease because I broke myself to feed my children, according to a set of enforcements which guaranteed either compliance, or criminality. And I was long a criminal. It's rewarding, in so much as disobedience is its own end. It's also the sort of life which selects for the worst, and the hardest. I have kicked a man's nose almost completely off his face because, in the end, he had the audacity to sneer at the obvious poverty of my friends and I. We nearly killed that man, because we lived lives which demanded a terrible hardness.

Perhaps you also live that life, but call your hardness "career" or "family" or "self-preservation." It probably does preserve you. That's the price of entry to our collective existence. We select for cruelty, or for an involved detachment. We learn to blame victims for their conditions, turning against those honest enough to break with sanity, or sobriety. Villains we might honor, if only from afar, but everyone hates the drug addict and the welfare mother. Especially those who turn their self-preservation into charity, or worse, the plastic hatred of a comfortable pity.

You may not obtain the same hatreds as I. I suggest that this is no obstacle.

We have a common enemy.

It has thousands and thousands of faces. Yours might even be among them.

I know mine once was.

Let's agree to be honest about our complicity. All those points of connection with the machinery of our degradation are points of entry, as well. It's a trick of self-deception to believe that disengagement will stop its operation. It won't, because every slot one of us vacates will be occupied by an equally, or even more desperately desperate party.

The machinery is organized to consume us, to break us down, to constrain our thoughts towards a narrow focus and to run us as separate and isolated platforms, using whatever operating systems keep us divided, which keep each of us from turning our positions into loci of resistance, sabotage and revolution.

The trick isn't to escape. The needful thing is to capture the machinery, the tools, the wealth of our oppressors and turn it against them. There are so many of us, friends, comrades and strangers.

We are legion. We are the many.

And we can do it.

I'm willing to stake my life on that.

[If you have any doubt that our lords and masters understand the stakes, see the post directly below this one.]

(It's impossible to spell out how many people owe to this stupidly simple expression of a thought. But, most every one of you who have been generous enough to comment over the last year or so, and especially this week. Thank you.

The stupid simplicity is my own. The credit and inspiration, due to each and all of you.)