It is Bitter Tea That Involves You So: A Sermon on Hope

/10 Comments/in /by

In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

From Page 37 of the Pricipia Discordia, 5th edition:

When Hypoc was through meditating with St. Gulik, he went there into the kitchen where he busied himself with preparing the feast and in his endeavor, he found that there was some old tea in a pan left standing from the night before, when he had in his weakness forgot about its making and had let it sit steeping for 24 hours. It was dark and murky and it was Hypoc’s intention to use this old tea by diluting it with water. And again in his weakness, chose without further consideration and plunged into the physical labor of the preparations. It was then when deeply immersed in the pleasure of that trip, he had a sudden loud clear voice in his head saying “it is bitter tea that involves you so.” Hypoc heard the voice, but the struggle inside intensified, and the pattern, previously established with the physical laboring and the muscle messages coordinated and unified or perhaps coded, continued to exert their influence and Hypoc succummed to the pressure and he denied the voice.

And again he plunged into the physical orgy and completed the task, and Lo as the voice had predicted, the tea was bitter.

When we react to the next thing, we risk being trapped in the passivity of our moment. Life is one thing after another, but lived that way it is short, dark, and bitter. To live in a longer time and a greater frame of reference requires the practice of hope.

People often mistake hope for a feeling, but it’s not. It’s a mental discipline, an attentional practice that you can learn. Like any such discipline, it’s work that takes time, which you fail at, succeed, improve, fail at again, and build over years inside yourself.

The thing people think of as the feeling of hope follows the practice. Just as a body feels weak and stressed when it gets no exercise, a soul feels empty, dark, and small when there is no practice of hope. Just as exercise can be hard in the beginning, and painful when you are pushing the body to build more strength, the practice of hope pushes you emotionally and spiritually, sometimes to exhaustion, but always knowing you’ll wake up tomorrow healing, and with a stronger soul.

Hope isn’t just looking at the positive things in this world, or expecting the best. That’s a fragile kind of cheerfulness, something that breaks under the weight of a normal human life. To practice hope is to face hard truths, harder truths than you can face without the practice of hope. You can’t navigate dark places without a light, and hope is that light for humanity’s dark places. Hope lets you study environmental destruction, war, genocide, exploitative relations between peoples. It lets you look into the darkest parts of human history, and even the callous entropy of a universe hell bent on heat death no matter what we do. When you are disciplined in hope, you can face these things because you have learned to put them in context, you have learned to swallow joy and grief together, and wait for peace.

The first thing to understand about Hope is that it is always a function of time. For hope’s faithful disciple, contemplation of time is a deliberate process. Whether we choose to think of the next few minutes or few millennia, or the past week or the dawn of multicellular life, the practitioner of hope chooses a time frame that compliments their philosophical and instrumental goals. If you want to think about the environment, you don’t just think about what the news says is happening now, you consider the history of the planet, how human forms change over centuries, and what it would mean to deliberately terraform the anthropocene towards the increase of life and peace. You would also think of the last 12 or 50 thousand years, to put yourself in the right context. If you want to consider exploitative relationships, you look both at the relationships in your own life, and how humanity has related to itself since we encountered the other hominids on our walks out of Africa.

Look back to the beginning, back to our mitochondrial mother in Africa, we can see that we are the murdering African hominid. Everywhere we’ve lived, the megafauna, the forests, our hominid cousins, each other, we have killed it all with wild abandon. Everywhere we’ve walked we have left a gray-brown swath of ash in our wake. Accepting that this is part of our nature as humans is key to hope, because your practice of hope cannot be so fragile that understanding the truth can wreck it. Hope requires that you study these terrible truths, and also the truths that the murdering hominid is the first species that learned to love the world. We were the first to speak, and the first to be struck dumb by the beauty of the sunset. We were the first to learn to fear time, and the first to love what we feared. We built special machines to look out into the universe, to find uncountable galaxies, and fall in love with them. The murdering hominid is also the creature that found the atom, came to understand the mechanics of life, that prayed to the planets and stars. We became the conscious tip of the universe, contemplating itself. You must understand that we, the murdering African hominid, we are holy. The very idea of beauty and holiness came from this murdering hominid, and all those qualities repeat themselves fractally in each of its tiny atomic members. The murder and hatred and pain coexists with the wonder and love and genius in all of our tiny and soft hominid bodies. And here, trapped in the progress of history, the only difference between the light and dark is the next choice you make, and the next, and the next, and the next choices we make together as a species.

We could fail each other horribly. We could fail this tiny and beautiful gravity well of life that gave birth to us. And sometimes it seems we fail so much, how could we not? But little failures don’t tell us about big ones. Our great successes are made of billions of little failures, followed by failures that weren’t as bad, over time. To only focus on the little failures, that is to be involved with bitter tea. To fight people on social media, to look at the breaking news only as long as it takes for the next news to break, to decide nothing I do or you do could make a real difference in the world, that is bitter tea.

This is when we must practice our hope, and there is much to practice our hope on.

We’ve worked together to reduce or solve problems, like global emissions reductions, ozone healing, and rain acidification. We’ve eliminated diseases, solved navigation, and learned to predict the weather.

There’s so many things we could do! Seaweed farms could provide a key part of the food supply for billions, sequester carbon, and pH balance the ocean. We could use renewable energy at the poles to freeze carbon out of the air. We could provide communication and education for all through a global computer network. We could create global universal healthcare, we could educate every person on the Earth, and call them valuable. We can, and have, learned to live differently, and we will again in ways we can’t imagine now.

Heck, We are ahead of where we thought we’d be by now in the switch to renewable energy. Global poverty is falling at a rate no one dreamed of when I was a child.

Still, we have so many crushingly difficult problems. No one solution will work alone. There will be more answers, there will be dozens of answers, and billions of answers. There will be billions of mistakes along the way, too.

We need coordinating forms better than democracy, and we should be dreaming of those. Dreaming is our duty in uncertain times, though it gets treated as useless and frivolous by those involved in only the moment. But times of political crisis are the moments most in need of utopias.

Consider deeper time, and you’ll see what we call fascism now used to be so ubiquitous it didn’t need a name. It was simply obedience to the order of a society. Societies before the 20th century were so genocidal that they didn’t need a name for it either, until we spread the idea in the 18th and 19th century that killing people was bad instead of glorious. But once a thing is named, we can see it. It’s so painful to understand the contrast, like Adam and Eve realizing that they were naked and noticing it was snowing.

We can improve on mere comprehension of our problems. We can love in the face of intransigence, and endure in our hope. We can learn to use humor in the face of tragedy, staying alive and vital when it might otherwise seem impossible. We can laugh at the ridiculousness of the situations that make our grief. Perspective feeds the soul every bit as much as sleep. We can write blog posts about the way it ought to be, and argue the nuances of a thousand utopias as we do the work of improving this imperfect world.

We can learn to provide for those who hate us as well as love us, merely because they are human, and alive, and all life is worthy of honor and respect. We could seek to minimize suffering and create respect, through universal education, a goal we are so much closer to than we were when even I was a child. In the 20th century, we about flipped the statistics on literacy, from 20 to 80%. But in absolute numbers? Billions of souls read and write, now. They hold time in their minds in ways that our ancestors couldn’t imagine. They know what stars are made of, and what the atom is. Our children are wiser than the wisest of the ancient philosophers. We’re building wonders. Our energy efficiency per person, given what we can do now, rises in a hockey stick, like our absolute literacy did.

We know how to destroy ourselves and need to learn not to, but we have the tools now. It will require wisdom rather than only knowledge. We will need to see ourselves as a deliberate and wise species to do the next things we need to do.

To think in deep time isn’t just looking backwards, but forwards, because hope is about writing the future, not the futility of editing the past. We are in the old age of life on our little watery pearl of a planet. We started around 4 billion years ago, but only have about 500 million years before complex life becomes precarious under an expanding red sun. It sounds like a long time, but if we want to escape our sun’s death, it’s best we learn these lessons sooner rather than later. I’m pretty sure interstellar life takes time.

But let’s bring it back down to Earth. The discipline of hope doesn’t begin in galactic scale. It begins in kindness, in seeing the humanity in front of you, and in yourself. The first timescale of hope is the minute, and then the day. What actions of hope can I practice today? Is it taking time to comfort a stranger, or sometimes to lovingly chastise a friend, because you believe they will become a better person? Hope comes from looking for places to serve something larger than yourself. It comes from cultivating gratitude. Hope teaches you to put the world before yourself, but in doing so, hope teaches you an unfragile happiness in loving the world.

You live in an age of wonders unlike any that came before now. You can’t count them all, you’d do nothing else and then die of old age. But you can take deliberate time to note the wonders of your life. The sorrows note themselves, don’t worry about them. Next time you take an ibuprofen, or eat a fruit salad, or look down and see the curve of the world below you, and all the astounding things we built on it, take note how impossible all these things are. Next time you touch a book and exercise having a mind that can decode it, next time knowledge and wisdom have transcended time and space to change you, or you’ve used that capacity in others to create expressions which change them, take note that power and beauty. As you learn to let it all in, it can be a bit scary. The wonders of the world are innumerable and hard to think through, and it’s work to let it all in. And when you do, you can see the blood in it as well as the beauty. The blood is always there, as is the beauty. But this practice, this wonder and hope, is how better worlds are built. It’s how we got here, when we started off so rough, so mean, so difficult and murderous a hominid.

As hard as it is to be human looking over the world at the beginning of the 21st century, I have often thought that it makes sense that we practice terraforming on the easiest planet we could ever possibly practice it on before we leave. And that we learn how to live in a massively coordinated society of super-powered and psychic beings before we carry life out into vast and empty distances of the Milky Way. I’ve thought: these tasks are so enormous, and so miraculous, of course we’re going to suck at them in the beginning. That’s part of learning to be what we will be, what we decide to be, in the next week, or year, or 500 million years.

Everyone gets involved in bitter tea sometimes, the physical and mental orgy of picayune matters that happen to cause big emotions. But with practice, bitter tea can involve us less, and we can get to the impossible and glorious task of being human.

Once when I was a child, my mother put all of this to me another way: You don’t work for the light. You work, and one day you find the light has been shining on you.

My work for Emptywheel is supported by my wonderful patrons on Patreon. You can find out more, and support my work, at Patreon.

(And if you do support my work, also consider supporting the great work of everyone else here on Emptywheel. More info in the sidebar →)

Remaking the World

/12 Comments/in , /by

Trying to exercise my way though my inevitable decline

“94…,” he thinks for a moment. “94.7% chance of remission.”
I chuckle. “I’m going to need two more significant figures, at least.”
He laughs as well, but continues “The figure is real…”
“But you can’t apply a statistic to any individual case…,” I interrupt.
“Of course…”
We both have the body language of people who are explaining something to each other that both understand, looking for an exit to the next conversation point.
“I’m also happy to accept ‘high,’ the odds of remission are high,” I say. We both smile.

I am sure this man understands my body well enough that I am willing to place it in his hands. I am going to let him cut my throat, and still, I also know that he can’t understand what he’s proposed doing to my life.

A few minutes after this moment my partner and I walked along the slick streets of Paris, making our way to the train station from south of the Seine. It was dark, but Paris is never dark. It is a riot of lights and colors and people and cars coexisting, but barely.

“I am scared of everything” I loud-whispered to him repeatedly. He got a little in front of me, where he gets when he thinks I might absentmindedly walk into traffic. He listened, and I explained that it wasn’t just that I couldn’t see my future, I couldn’t even imagine it. Whatever sense I had yesterday for who I would be in six months, for who I would be for the rest of my life, it had slipped away as we had walked out of that office. All that was left was a warm, indecipherable fog.

“I am scared of everything.”

I have what they call invisible disability. I’m not in a wheelchair, I have no obvious physical flaws. I turn my head to the right a lot, but it took a neurologist to notice this is not a voluntary motion, not even I had noticed. Everything else about me looks like the average small middle-aged woman.

Inside my skin is a different story. Inside, I am broken in many and fascinating ways. Not very well understood genetic problems, a lifetime of mental and physical scars, pain and blood, sometimes far too much blood, sometimes coming out of the wrong bits of me. All of this is my experience of being me. I promise, I won’t get graphic. I will say this: my digestive system doesn’t work right. My joints are meh. I get a lot of infections. My lungs are iffy, at best. My cycles are unusual. My mind and brain, whatever they are together, can be a slippery customer. But none of these things have made me seek out this man and his scalpel.

The bits where the vertebrae touch — that’s not supposed to be like that.

What has brought me to this office happened eleven years ago. My normal life function had declined, and then, I stopped functioning at all. Not all at once, and I fought it as hard as I could with exercise and good living, which as it turned out was not very hard at all. In the end I couldn’t move much. I had daily migraines. I was bearing unbearable pain and I didn’t know why. There were doctors, and more doctors, and tests, and big humming MRI machines. What had happened was that the vertebrae in my neck and the discs between had started pressing on my spinal cord and the nerves as they left my spine. No one knew why.

My neurologist was a straight talker. When I asked him what had caused this, he waved dismissively. “We usually ask if you’ve been in a car accident, and if you say yes, we say that did it.”
“You don’t know?”
“We don’t know,” he replied.

That was when I began to understand how clinicians see attribution and cause, and even began to agree with them. It doesn’t matter what caused something, unless knowing that helps you fix it. And it wasn’t going to help him fix me. Tell the patient it’s a car accident, and help us move on to the next step.

The thing is, I have that clinician’s instinct myself. I am a fixer. So for me, the next step was figuring out how to fix this problem so I could get my old life back.

That neurologist was a wise man, so he let me go see more doctors, and get more tests, and do more research so that I would be able to hear what he had to tell me next: that there was no fixing this. I would decline inevitably. No one knew how fast or how much, but there was no way to stop this, much less reverse it. Treatments like muscle relaxants and Botox could make my life more comfortable, but this was over. This part of my life was over. I would never sit down with a good book again. I would never do a pull-up. In time, I would not be able to carry groceries home anymore. I could not safely lift a child. I would never again go backpacking. One day, I might not be able to put on a backpack. One day, I might not be able to type anymore. No one could be entirely sure how bad it would get, but it would get bad. Maybe the pain would come and go, but I would not be able to fix this.

In moments like these, you don’t simply adjust a set of routines. Moments like these break who you are. They have to, and you have to let them if you’re going to have any future. I thought about suicide. But in a way, suicide was redundant. The person who would have rather died than have my body already had my body. The future that I had imagined all my life was already dead. What I had now was a stranger’s future, and the job of becoming that stranger. I discovered I had no malice towards this stranger, and proceeded to become her, which sounds so much simpler than it was.

I cried a lot. I spent a lot of time pretending it wasn’t true. I was scared of everything. But bit by bit, over the next two years, I learned to be who I am now. I learned how to let computers read to me. I learned to love the voices of Alex and Ava on my Mac. I pushed myself too far and ended up in bed, or not far enough, and ended up frustrated. I made an unsteady peace with this future. I learned to live again, I learned the grace within pain. I even learned to be happy, to love who I was now, even while I couldn’t love how I got here.

I taught the people around me what I could and couldn’t do. That is how my partner got to know me – different than the other girls he’d known. Free in some ways, but not so much in others. My daughter learned she had to help me if we were going to get certain things done, much sooner than I would have liked. I apologize a lot for this thing that I can’t change.

But things always change anyway. Over the last 18 months, the bad thing got worse. I didn’t understand that for a while, because I didn’t want to. Each unproductive day, every headache, every clenched shoulder, they stood alone. I didn’t put them together. I tried to work harder, pushing through. I spiraled into depression and pain. I went to bed, I got up and tried again. I didn’t want to see it: just try harder, and it will go away. I think now that I thought if I couldn’t see the future, maybe it wouldn’t be here. I messed up commitments, and apologized and hated myself for it. I went to the data to fix myself, like I always do. I started keeping a daily log of how I was doing.

That’s when I couldn’t not see it anymore. The decline they’d promised had come. I had gotten a pretty good decade, but the future was here. I wasn’t so much scared as I was angry and sad. My determination had carried me as far as it could, and it was time to shift again. I started using voice dictation. I started recalibrating everyone’s expectations, including my own, of what I could really get done. I got another neurologist. I admitted that I was sick, and that I wasn’t going to get better. I moved into my life again. There was more lying in big humming MRI machines, scanners, and X-rays.

Then, my new neurologist looked over the images, and referred me to a surgeon. One of the last things a specialist had said to me 11 years ago, as I was leaving his office was, “Well, maybe they’ll invent a prosthetic.” I went and looked it up at the time, and they were working on one, but it wasn’t finished or approved for medical use. I put the whole business out of my mind when I lost my insurance, and didn’t think about it again. I had to spend my energy on learning to be me in a body I hadn’t expected, and I knew counting on future medical research often leads people to disappointment and depression, waiting to live in a future that might never come.

But my neurologist referred me to a surgeon because they had invented a prosthetic. I went to one surgeon. We chatted, little models of spines in hand, gestures at the tiny bones, explanations. I was hesitant. My partner and I talked about it a lot. He found another surgeon, one who had worked on probably a thousand people with my particular disability. We got on a train to Paris under a gray rainy sky. We sat with him, another little model of a spine between us, and we chatted. My eyes flicked between the little delicate bones between us, and the doctor. I glanced sideways to see my partner watching me. The prosthetic is called the Mobi-C, and the doctors are pretty damn sure they can fix me.

And so, on that Monday night, as I wandered across the Seine, thousands of miles and many years from where this story began, my future died again. My identity was breaking again. “I am scared of everything.” I whispered to my partner. “That man doesn’t know what he’s proposed to do to me,” despite the fact that this man was a world expert in what he was proposing to do to me. Who was this me that might read a physical book again? That might go backpacking, do a push-up, dance again? What if I can’t make myself into that person? What if I fail this new future? How could I not fail this future, when I don’t even understand its shape?

Even as I write this, a date is getting set. A hospital stay is being scheduled, paperwork is getting passed around. Sometime soon I will go to Paris again, and lie down on a table. A man will cut my throat carefully, to save me. And in doing so, he will kill me. And I will wake up, in a bed, thousands of miles and many years from where I was born, and I will not know my future, or how to live in it. They invented something, and everything will change for me, again.

I have a meeting today. As I write this, I’m still disabled. Coordinating my hands well enough to type is difficult. When I leave the house to go to my meeting, I will do so as a disabled person. I will carry things strapped to my hip rather than my back. I will cradle my arm so that it doesn’t swing when I walk. Politically, socially, physically, and in my own mind, that’s how I will move through the space between me and my meeting in a few hours.

Is this one of the last meetings I’ll ever go to, as this version of me? My identity is getting ready to change, to die, my mind is trying to prepare, but I don’t know who I’ll be when I have all these new abilities. To move though the world without constant pain, to carry things, to be expected to work and live without the sleepless nights, the instability in my hands, the scraping sounds in my neck. I don’t know how to do that, I’ll have to learn. It’s not what I’ve practiced for most of my adult life, and I’m scared I’ll be bad at it.

I am often amused by the fights over what is called “identity politics.” Identity is the unifying theme of my life’s work, and it’s what I think about every damn day. As someone who can reasonably claim some expertise in how human identity works, trust me when I say: it’s all identity politics. Maybe what people mean by “identity politics” is just being plain about what makes politics, because there are no politics separate from identity. Identity shapes how you move through the world, what you expect from it, and what you expect from yourself and others. The constituents of identity are the building blocks from which we create individualism, or collectivism. It’s where we get class and race, sure, and also taste, morality, custom, and justice. When you construct yourself, you construct the world. I don’t mean in a post modern we-can’t-know-anything kind of way, although that can be part of it. I mean that you pay attention to your world based on the way you see yourself, and that attention, in aggregate, makes the world.

Where your troubles began.

Understanding this can help make sense of the world right now. Our identities are running into our technologies and getting broken by all these new powers we have. If you have never considered yourself someone who might one day speak to millions, you might not craft what you say on social media to cater to an audience of millions. Then, one day, maybe you do find yourself in front of an audience of millions. And if that day comes, your future as you knew it dies, much like mine has and is doing again. In truth, our futures die many times in our lives. Tiny deaths accompanied by futures we don’t know how to live in. We pretend it didn’t happen and push on, or when that fails, we change. Eleven years ago, I changed, losing a future and gaining the identity of a disability. Now, I am facing the loss of that disability, the loss of who I am. I’ll be needing a new identity soon.

Looking around me, I see the flavor of my own anxiety everywhere. We all have access to the bulk of human knowledge now, we can find nearly anyone and speak to them. We can make things appear, and make ourselves disappear, all with an ease that we couldn’t explain to our own great-grandmothers. We can spend our days alone, locked in our houses, listening to the inner thoughts of hundreds of people thousands of miles away. Our thoughts and words make and change the physical world. No wonder we’re so obsessed with wizards and superheroes these days — they describe our lives to us more accurately than our literature does.

Who are we to have these powers? We don’t know what to do with them, who they should belong to. We’re tourists playing at being minor deities, except we don’t get to stop playing; this is our future now. Who do we have to become, now that we have all these new powers? What if we can’t make ourselves into the people worthy and able to use the technologies we invented? What if we fail this future? How could we not fail this future, when we don’t understand what it is?

You are reading this far from where you were born, in an unexpected world, on a device that didn’t exist a decade ago, facing a future none of us know how to live in yet. You are not disabled in a way that you once were, a disability you didn’t know you had is being pried away from you, and you don’t know who you are becoming. We don’t know where we are now, except that it’s many miles from home, and we have to make the future now.

We are scared of everything.

Conversations are from notes or recalled to the best of my ability. They are mostly right, but may not be exact wording. 

My work for Emptywheel is supported by my wonderful patrons on Patreon. You can find out more, and support my work, at Patreon.

Living Without Shame is a Political Act

/5 Comments/in , , /by

What we lost when we lost Fred Hampton

Every year on December 4th I tell people about what was done to the 21-year old revolutionary, Fred Hampton, by the government of America and his city of Chicago in 1969. But this year I wanted to talk about what Fred Hampton gave us before he was assassinated, and maybe what he could have given us if he’d lived.

The facts of the case are extensively stated elsewhere, and you can find them with ease. The simple version is this: Chicago police working with FBI went into the apartment he was in, and shot him repeatedly. They shot him until he was good and dead. But I don’t want to focus only on that, because it doesn’t do justice to Fred Hampton or what he was part of.

Hampton was a charismatic leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. The Black Panthers are a tough subject to this day, and there will most likely be people even in the comments of this article claiming that they were evil and violent and that their demise was justified. There’s a lot of reasons the greater portion of America would have hated and feared the BPP, and still does. The Black Panthers were communists at a time when communism was practically synonymous with Satanism in America. They were black liberationists at a time when much of white America was still freshly wounded by the loss of Jim Crow segregation. They refused to lay down tools of violence, originally constituting themselves as a party of self-defense particularly in areas where police brutality was killing black folk, and they frightened police with a promise that they’d shoot back.

But contrary to much of the narrative about them constructed in the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation against the BBP, the group wasn’t focused on violence. There were a few people unhinged, because there are always a few people unhinged. But on the whole the people who joined the BPP were utopian and revolutionary, and they spent more time, money, and energy building the society they wanted than shooting at the one that opposed them. They were politically astute and moral actors, setting up children’s breakfast programs and health clinics in cities across America. None more exemplified the hopeful and bright part of the Black Panthers than the brilliant Hampton, barely a grown man at the time. Think about what you were like at 20, and then think about a man without any advanced education, organizing in Chicago, coordinating aid, and uplifting people with speeches that would immortalize him and inspire generations.

Pretty good, right? He scared the living shit out of white people.

Whether Hoover and the other old guards of the white establishment were conscious of it or not, I believe the reason they hated the BPP so much, and Fred Hampton in particular, was that they refused to be ashamed. It was in everything Fred Hampton and many other panthers did. They didn’t dress in suits. They wore what they wanted to, groomed like they found themselves attractive as god made them. They spoke the English they used to communicate with each other, not the Ivy League dialect that helped make black activism easier to swallow for white folk. Their language was rich and evocative and brimmed with their emotions; a language that treated black people’s emotions as if they mattered. They celebrated themselves. Fred Hampton in particular thought so much of himself that he believed he had the right to be magnanimous to white people. He famously called for white power for white people, just one more category among many others, and invited us to be part of his vision for a socialist utopia.

He had no shame, he needed no shame. After hundreds of years of oppression he was happy to call all men his equals and companions, and afford to others the dignity he claimed for himself.

I don’t think it’s easy for most people to understand how much this would make powerful white people hate him. It is no mere repudiation of racism and capitalism. For people like Hoover, that old white establishment, it was an invalidation of reality, the order of things upended. It was worthy of any violence, any evil, to end that damned presumption, to put all the people back in their places. It was worth it to break all the laws and kill the motherfucker before he spoke another word to us, so that’s what they did. They took him away from the BPP, the black community, and the world. They tried to bury his name with him. They tried to bury his ideas and make them never matter, but in that, they failed.

Working in queer activism through the 90s, I started to understand the political mechanics of shame. As the co-president of my college’s LGBTSU, when the issue of what letters to add or subtract came up, I cut the conversation short by renaming our organization Pride. I wasn’t the first or only young queer activist to do this, the queer movement had learned the power of rejecting shame from black and feminist activism. Nothing about what was between our legs or what we did with our bodies was for you to judge. We rejected that judgement, and whether to talk about our bodies, our loves, and our sexy times, or not, became simply a personal choice.

I didn’t know about Fred Hampton, or the Black Panther Party, when I did that, but having learned my history, I don’t believe I would have had the tools to do it without them. I never became a communist or a socialist,and I don’t believe everything the BBP and Hampton did about the world. But I became a utopian, and I respect the heart it takes to be utopian. To act on being utopian makes you a revolutionary, and thus Hampton and the BPP were fated to live and die revolutionaries without their revolution. They paid terribly to give their ideas to the world. And none more than the brilliant, beautiful 21-year-old Hampton, assassinated in his sleep next to his pregnant partner, never to see his child in this world.

Every year I cry about that. Every damn year.

He’s good and dead now. I’m so sad that the old scared and twisted white men of power never let us hear him, see what he would have made. But we aren’t dead, and Hampton reaches across time to us through his speeches, through his particular utopianism, and charges us to speak our truths, without shame. To elevate each other in our endless varieties, without shame. To unashamedly fight for utopias and not settle for small lives. To believe without shame, to love without shame.

My work for Emptywheel is supported by my wonderful patrons on Patreon. You can find out more, and support my work, at Patreon.