40: A fear of what comes next

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Things that do a better job of solving problems we currently entrust with men carrying tools that cause death and pain

Epomops francqueti. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.

One time I was interviewing someone at a foundation that funds climate work and he posed to me this question: If you magically had the power to do so, would you get rid of fossil fuels today? Fortunately, it was rhetorical and he answered it himself, no of course you wouldn’t, it would cause mass global suffering. Which I guess is true in one sense at least because all of these people would be up in the air flying around in airplanes and then the airplanes would suddenly have no fuel and probably crash I’m not sure I do not know a lot about airplanes. All of my readers who are pilots please respond with what you would do if your airplane spontaneously had no fuel. 

I am trolling, that is not what he meant when he posed that question, and was really just trying to make the point that there are different ways to change the world, and moving too fast can cause a lot of pain. 

But I imagine that when some people hear terms like abolition and defunding of police, which have astonishingly become mainstream ideas in like a single week (albeit not among Democratic leadership) they get freaked out because it sounds like something similar to my funny little scenario—that they are in mid-air traveling in an airplane and people are demanding that airplanes immediately stop existing.

A less silly way of putting this is, there is a misconception that abolition—and defunding as a means of getting there—is a solely subtractive action. When in fact, it’s a process of imagining the world that we are morally bound to pursue, and then going about the business of constructing it, while dismantling what was there before.

I think that misconception of abolition as a subtractive endeavor is one of many reasons people fear the idea, a fear that usually manifests in calling it preposterous, or utter nonsense (Mitt Romney marched in the streets with BLM but said “it would be nuts” to reduce our commitment to police). This has been a topic that I am not any kind of expert in but one that I’ve been learning more about over the past few years and that I think about a lot in the context of climate change or whatever really. For a long time I would personally hear the term abolition, specifically prison abolition, and think sure it sounds great but also like a far-fetched or academic concept. As I wrote about a while ago, Why Prisons Are Obsolete in particularwas a really influential book for me, on how I think about prisons for one, but also just activism in general. 

(OK look, I’m going to say right here that I am painfully aware of how it sounds for a middle-aged white guy to be like oh I read an Angela Davis book and look at me I’m an abolitionist but we’re all on a journey here and I will accept your eye rolling I can take it.)

The way she describes abolition as an act of imagination and creation and putting in place a continuum of new structures that replace the need for incarceration resonated with me and put words to a lot of things I had been thinking about and words against things I had been struggling with. I more recently listened to this great interview with Mariame Kaba on Call Your Girlfriend that was making the rounds all week for good reason, as she also describes this same idea in a way that is very powerful, but at the same time, just sounds like common sense. 

To me that is a huge part of what I had always thought of more broadly as an activist mindset, but I’m learning could be more specifically described as abolitionist. Instead of saying, where are we and what changes could we make to deliver some short-term improvements in the moment, it’s asking, what is intolerable about where we are now, and how do we get to a place where that thing is gone. It’s a process of making what may seem like nonsense right now into the only sensible outcome, while revealing what currently seems to be inevitable as complete nonsense.

“It should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation,” Davis writes.

I had always thought of this as seeking transformative versus incremental change, but as Kaba describes it, you can be an abolitionist working on anything from housing to climate. The distinction as I see it is that, for a reformist, even in advocacy on the left, the starting point is always what is possible today. It’s often painted as a more pragmatic approach toward a shared goal, but that critically different framing can direct your actions, knowingly or unknowingly, toward a completely different, if not opposite outcome.

For example, with the very alluring 8 Can’t Wait campaign that caught a lot of attention recently (don’t feel bad if you posted it remember it’s a journey), criticism quickly emerged that these are actually not the right strategies for stopping racist police violence. The response from supporters was, hang on, this is not our end goal, it’s just a starting point that we can do right now. But the question is not about now versus later or small vs big, it’s about the trajectory it puts you on. And the strategies of 8 Can’t Wait would increase funding for police and further entrench our reliance on them. 

The abolitionist goal is creating something different, with the understanding that violent paramilitary forces with racist DNA and no accountability, responding to a city’s every social problem, will never be an acceptable situation. We need something new, so we take funding away from one thing, and give it to other things that do a better job of solving the problems we currently entrust with men carrying tools that cause death and pain.

There are, in fact, incremental steps you can take toward abolition, what Kaba calls “non-reformist reforms.” In an opinion she co-wrote, the authors state that “abolition is both a lodestar and a practical necessity. Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for non-reformist reforms — those measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.” Reformist reforms like piling on more training or rules are merely “asking police not to be police.” 

So back to “would you get rid of fossil fuels today” question, the funny thing about it is, while making a perfectly pragmatic point, it was being used at the time to defend a foundation’s continued investments in the fossil fuel industry. Investments that, I would argue, are not part of a responsible, incremental transition away from oil and gas, but a perpetuation of them. Just as in 8 Can’t Wait, there are strategies—like working with oil and gas companies, or spending billions on new natural gas infrastructure—that could seem like they are a means toward a shared goal, but they are pointing in the wrong direction. Reformist reforms that further lock us into a system that needs to go away. 

Much like defunding the police, the fossil fuel divest/invest movement and efforts to block the supply side through pipeline protests have inspired new hope and imagination among activists, while also striking fear and anxiety into others. A fear of going too far. A fear of losing money. A fear of losing structures that offer the illusion of comfort and safety—for some. A fear of what comes next, because nobody knows exactly what would come next if we abolished police. And it can be hard to know what steps lead in the right direction.

Getting over those fears is not easy, and the uncertainty never really goes away. But in recognizing that we’re in a process of creating and evolving, instead of merely tearing down, that frightening outcome can go from sounding preposterous, to sounding like the only sensible path. 

Related:

Links

Watching

Speaking of lighthearted, I got back into iZombie the comedy detective horror show by the creator of Veronica Mars and Party Down. But surprise, in season 4 it takes a dark turn and imagines a Seattle that is walled off after the zombie virus runs rampant, and under siege by a private security company that publicly executes people with a giant anvil. Yes, yes I know. But it is still a very clever, very funny, and suddenly weirdly radical show.

Huge spoiler alert: Fans of Veronica Mars will be delighted to watch Logan Echolls get an anvil dropped on his head.

I feel like this one did not have enough pictures or little funny things but I don’t know what to tell you people. I have a template for this newsletter and in this spot it says “CUTE LITTLE ENDING” so maybe on days when I can’t think of a little story from the week I’ll just close with that and it will be our little way of communicating that I just didn’t have it in me today. There doesn’t always have to be a cute little ending I guess JUST LIKE in LIFE.

Have a lovely weekend I got a new lamp coming tomorrow gonna get that set up.

Tate