How to Survive Horrible Things Part 1

Greetings from Brenna and Brian, your at-large disabled comrades in residence, freshly arrived from the great lurking California Internet!

Now that a fascist coup is being executed against this country, we think it useful to fortify ourselves with the survival wisdom of our forebears, mining their strategies for overcoming horrible things in solidarity. Many in our socialist movement are already accomplished survivors, though our voices can be hard to hear. Disabled people like us have always had to hack reality in ways unthinkable to the ableds. We long ago learned to embrace "Nothing about us without us," including the universal health care we all deserve and continue to fight for. Solidarity has been at the core of our friendship for over a decade. Courage, like fear, is contagious. We have caught it from each other repeatedly. We'll use this column to keep catching it from others and sharing it with you. 

Bedrock Bodies

My (Brian's) disability began at birth, and I've had to learn the lessons of endurance and maintaining personhood in a world aligned against you and yours that are common to both the disability and antifascist communities. While you would hope that a progressive neuromuscular disease like mine might take a break from eating my muscle tissue to pursue equitable healthcare, childcare, and justice for ethnically cleansed Palestinians, in reality it's the sort of "progressive" that only makes things worse—nominally moving forward but ultimately drifting in a regressive direction. Call it “the Clinton strain of infirmity”. 

But my loss is also my gain in the armor it has bestowed upon me, an armor particularly suited to these cruel times. While the disease of my body may have no treatment and no cure, the disease plaguing my country is far from hopeless. We have solidarity, imagination, and a shared humanity on our side already, not to mention the bedrock knowledge common to disabled people that hope can become action, trial can become triumph, and strength can grow from nothing, like a fiery island birthed from the darkest ocean floor.

Some of us stumble into this bedrock knowledge later in life. In my thirties I (Brenna) was in the middle of a thriving career focused on the legal and policy needs of marginalized people in the Bay Area when my physical symptoms began eroding my sense of normalcy. I ignored them as long as I could, like the busy young fool I was, until they simply took over and ignoring them wasn't an option. Things got grim. I had to stop working and put all my energy into surviving excruciating pain. At a certain point in my advancing personal debility, I became unable to take in useful information about my medical condition, as all the words that might bring me answers started to sound like screaming regardless of the medium of delivery, and the only message I could hear was: Something inconceivably awful is happening to you, and nobody is able to stop it. Sound familiar, political friends? I also began to experience frequent vertigo, not so much a spinning sensation as that of wearing roller skates on the deck of a ship violently overcome by a stormy night sea. 

Finding your way to solid ground when everything is in massive upheaval is no small thing, but anchoring to bedrock knowledge helps. For me, I've learned to spend time daily deepening my awareness that we are all extraordinary living organisms profoundly connected to each other by biology, affect and circumstance. Staying alive to this transcending reality provides strength and perspective even amid the horrors of our current political moment. It helps me notice that the cooperation and connection that is innate to human functioning is always achieving more in everyday solidarity than the destructive cruelty of capitalism and fascism. Grounding in the fascinating fact of simply existing in your own body (have you noticed how rare humans are in the vastness of the known universe?) in the context of community (look at all us silly people bumbling around together on this watery spinning rock!) means more peace and focus, even in turbulent times, even during shock and pain.

Coming in From the Margins

With the return of the malignant magpie-in-chief to the oval office, I (Brian) quickly found myself in a place of stagnant voyeurism. Likely owing to a lifelong love of history, I became a curious bystander to an avalanche of events that didn't care if I'd read The Origins of Totalitarianism or believed that an unhealthy dose of narcissistic detachment might save me from a world where disabled people like me died first, whether by Hitler's order or Covid's rationed care. And, anyway, the Resistance of 2017 had done well enough without me. 

But now I am opting to reject the false comfort of this toxic dissociation, replacing acquiescence with action. Our national politics is at a watershed moment—a recurrence after remission, a lost function in an already failing machine, and a challenge right in my literal wheelhouse. 

The question for someone in a body like mine is, how to plug in to larger social movements? I'd been a card-carrying member of DSA since the first Trump administration, but never found my place among my likeminded comrades. From my wheelchair, I can't fix working class brake lights to fight police harassment, or shout truth to power through my ventilator. Just showing up to a meeting or protest with comrades is life-threatening for me and many others, with deadly respiratory viruses still circulating everywhere and masking so uneven. 

Yet it's not enough to stay on the sidelines when fascism also imperils our lives. So while I might not be able to physically block the levers of capitalism, I do still have my eyes and can write using eye-gaze technology. When I was a kid, the technologies that today make it possible for me to write or breathe or exist didn't themselves exist.  

Indeed, if there's one thing our disabilities have taught us, it's that we're only ever one metaphorical software fix away from a brighter and more survivable future. While for years it didn't seem possible, my (Brenna's) access to new medicine and therapies has meant less time immobilized by pain and more energy to invest in organizing for collective power. Now, with this shared column we intend to contribute to the healing political algorithm DSA crafts for a more livable future. We'd both rather be drops in this mighty socialist ocean than a couple of tears drying alone on a sidewalk that only gets hotter in silence.

So that's what we'll be exploring as the Horrible Things Subsubsubcommittee here at California Red: how to survive them (the horrible things) together. With your help, we plan to dig deep and excavate the wisdom of other marginalized people who have built and advanced community power even when it felt impossible, when the very infrastructures of survival seemed arrayed against them, and when they too felt more than a little impaired and rudderless. We believe that no matter the circumstances, everyday people, especially disabled people like us, can together drive change and answer our own hardest survival and societal questions. We'll be articulating and celebrating that timeless, stabilizing and radical spirit here in this column. 

So send us your own insights and provocations (disabled comrades, this especially includes you), dig in, and stay tuned!