Hello crisis my old friend

Hola amigos, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya. 

That is a reference to an Onion columnist from the 90s named Jim Anchower who would start every column like that, although in my case it is a true fact. It HAS been a long time since I’ve rapped at ya. And I have missed you all so much.

I have not been sending out newsies for the past 193 weeks but who is counting, mainly because everything has been going pretty awesome in the world so there wasn’t that much to write about I’ve just been doing a lot of relaxing in the garden, picking flowers, feeling overall care free and relaxed. Haha just kidding it is total shit out there. 

Case in point, just as I was gearing up to send out the first newsletter in 3 years and 7 months, a mob of complete losers in Call of Duty cosplay wearing ski masks and oakleys and vaguely marked POLICE vests poured into the Westside of Tucson and multiple other locations yesterday and arrested 46 people, presumably employees of a popular mom and pop Mexican restaurant chain. People with jobs, families, kids, who have likely been part of this community for years, were taken from their homes and/or workplaces, cuffed, stuffed into unmarked vans and SUVs, and brought maybe to federal jail or maybe to the nondescript ICE field office on the southside next to a car dealership and a McDonalds. Who knows what will happen to them. Who knows if we will ever know.

As far as I know, it is the first major raid in Tucson under our current iteration of fascism, executing 16 warrants across Southern Arizona. Although a couple of weeks ago, the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths reported that Border Patrol illegally entered their camp without any warrants, broke into several trailers and structures onsite, and arrested three people (AZ Luminaria).

As Friday's raids unfolded, dozens of people showed up almost immediately to protest on the Westside (I did not make it there as it was over before I knew about it, not to cover my ass, just being transparent). People confronted ICE agents, calling them Nazis and pigs both of which are perhaps too kind descriptors, and telling them to leave. The men fired pepper spray, pepper balls, tear gas, and flash-bang grenades, and at least one protestor was arrested. One reporter was pepper sprayed in the face.

No presence from our local government, but in attendance was Rep. Adelita Grijalva, which is why you probably already knew that this happened. Grijalva was in the news recently for having to wait 50 days before the Republican-controlled Congress would swear her in following a special election. Anyway, the newly seated elected official to her credit went toe to toe with these assholes, demanding to know who they were and where they were taking people, and for her efforts was shoved and pepper sprayed along with members of her staff. Another group of folks would later gather outside of the ICE facility, where at least one person was pepper sprayed in the face through a fence.

So that's what it's like these days, nameless, faceless agents show up and make 46 of us disappear, and you know this already because it has happened all over the place. How many will it be when it is over, given the optimistic assumption that it will end anytime soon? Tens of thousands surely, hundreds of thousands? It is a nightmarish thing to see happen anywhere, much less in your own community, and makes you feel intensely powerless and disoriented. Because as grateful as I am for the people who made it there to shame and attempt to block the agents, if a sitting congressperson can show up and get pepper sprayed by some clown wearing grim reaper gloves, it feels like our options are limited. And while this kind of government abuse has been happening in other countries and in our own country in some form or another for all of modern history, this shit feels, I don't know, acute.

Very much not to Grijalva's credit, she joined the mayor and members of city council in making sure to scold the feds, but also to shower praise on the Tucson Police Department for "taking care of the space" following the raids, and "making sure everyone was safe after ICE left." In the immediate aftermath, the mayor and vice-mayor Lane Santa Cruz immediately put out a release to cover TPD's ass, saying they were the good ones "keeping our residents safe," and pointing out their clearly marked uniforms.

People who were at the raid, however, pointed out that local police actually arrived before ICE left, with batons in hand to clear the street so the feds could flee with arrestees in tow. Sure enough, the police department has since put out a statement that "federal agents requested emergency support from TPD to assist in exiting the area." In other words, ICE requested a courtesy escort of some 30 uniformed cops so they could safely scurry off with 46 members of the community. As far as I can tell, the number one job here was to keep the deportation squad safe from the people while they terrorized us, so I don't know how that can be represented as keeping our residents safe, but maybe that is just me. No just kidding it is not just me, if the city's men with guns show up to help Trump's men with guns deport our people, I'm having to squint pretty fucking hard to make out where one starts and the other stops. This is, in fact, a perfect demonstration of how these systems of control interlock with each other, even as Democrats try to distance themselves from their political opponents.

It's reminiscent of Mayor Romero using TPD to do the local heavy lifting of Trump's agenda to criminalize poverty and substance use, while simultaneously making dramatic public statements opposing the federal government. In July, the administration put out an executive order on homelessness that called for forced treatment, prohibition of harm reduction, and stronger enforcement of "open illicit drug use" and "urban camping and loitering" in order to "restore public order." Even before the EO, the city council had been passing aggressive new laws banning camping and panhandling, and is now considering a new policy that would give local cops the ability to arrest people who are even behaving in a manner such that a cop thinks they are going to use drugs, are in a location where people have been known to use drugs, or are exhibiting physical characteristics of drug use such as "burnt fingertips."

The goal, council member Nikki Lee wrote, is to "leverage these arrests to help individuals enter treatment." The mountains of evidence that forced treatment does not work, and that arrest and incarceration create immense danger and harm for those struggling with addiction is not stopping the city from mirroring Trump's agenda and pursuing efforts to simply make people go away. All of which is to say that, regardless of who is calling the shots from behind a desk, when viewed from the ground level, the abuse being carried out doesn't look all that different. Men with guns in different-colored uniforms.

So that's what happened yesterday. And now we shudder or clench our fists or give someone a hug and maybe go to a protest or community meeting, and try to live our lives while 46 of us are now just gone. And we wait for the next thing to happen when we will do the best we can. And it absolutely sucks shit.

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So what's up with you guys? You are all savvy and sensitive people so I guess since we last spoke you have probably been upping your meds, legal and otherwise, probably going to some protests or mournful gatherings, screaming at cops and white supremacists, grinding your teeth smooth in your sleep. Some of you probably lost your jobs, or your jobs have maybe just gotten a lot shittier, or maybe there’s a chance you will still lose your job. Or if your job and your life are still relatively secure and static, it’s just been a lot harder to get up every day and do them, which unfortunately you must still do so you can pay your rent and buy food to eat etc, even though it feels like nothing really matters anymore and what good things we have are going away.

How am I doing so far? Shaking off the cobwebs over here. 

What I suspect or at least hope you have also been doing is taking this time of government collapse, oppression, political violence, plunder, and turmoil and finding some hope and solace in each other, because what else are you going to do. Helping people who need it. Asking for help when you need it. Finding joy where you can and not beating yourself up about it. Getting out of the house and off of the internet. You deserve whatever you can get.

What have I been up to? So glad you asked, in my imagination. 

The book

Well, the reason I put this newsletter on hiatus a while back remains one major reason it has stayed that way for all this time, which is that I’ve been working to turn a bunch of the first run of Crisis Palace into a book. As it turns out, writing a book takes a long fucking time. And this was kind of a weird project. I was thinking it would be pretty straightforward considering I was adapting existing material, but I was super duper wrong. 

I ended up not just stringing together some issues into a collection of short chapters, and decided to instead sort of knit together the related newsletters into more coherent essays around a set of themes. That was harder in some cases than others. And then, of course, stuff just kept on happening! So much stuff. Constantly. Horrible stuff like the thing today. But also some good stuff. And that made it both difficult to stop updating the book, and hard to focus on the book at all for stretches of time. 

But I do have a draft. Have had one for some time it is sitting over there on a shelf, hello draft how are you doing you look awfully sad and dusty. That is because, unfortunately for me mostly, it has been very difficult to drum up any interest whatsoever in this thing. Like any. I took a decent shot at a proposal and finding a publisher, which was a hard sell since it was kind of a scattered collection and I didn’t have much of a name, and even though I knew that going in, the overall lack of interest has been a real bummer. Quite depressing actually and made me want to throw the whole thing in the trash and not do writing stuff anymore at all, but as my friend Zack told me that is just part of writing a book. So more on that in a bit.

Mutual aid as climate action

The other big thing that kept me occupied is that I got really into mutual aid work after we moved from Boston to Tucson. I always knew I wanted to get involved in organizing efforts here, particularly around heat relief and climate justice, but I didn’t anticipate just how much it would consume my life, in a good way.

Specifically, I got involved in amazing group that currently operates out of the park that is right next to our house downtown. It just seemed like a logical thing to do, but then that led me to more groups, more organizers, more fundraising, more coalitions, more projects, more campaigns, more cool people, more hot days. 

So that has been a huge part of my day to day, in a way that has felt very natural and welcoming, like it was something I always needed to be a part of, and I still very much feel that way. I love the group of people I’ve gotten to know in the process, and am extremely proud of what we are able to accomplish. I look forward to sharing more about that stuff.

The other factor here is that as I got more involved in efforts in Tucson, I felt more and more like I wanted to start writing primarily about that work and what is happening here in Arizona, but it hadn’t felt quite like it was the right time to do so. I can’t explain it, exactly, but I guess even as I was getting more engaged in the community here, it felt like I wasn’t at a place where I could write about it in a way that would feel like I knew of what I spoke, or that what I was doing was in proper service to the people around me. 

Even though I lived in Arizona for the first 20 years of my life, part of me still felt like a tourist or a transplant when I moved back. I don’t feel that way anymore. This my home, more than it ever has been. 

What else? 

Oh man a bunch of other stuff happened. Here: 

• After working as news editor for about 4 years, I left my editorial job with Inside Philanthropy. Nothing but love, I just needed to shake things up. I went back to consulting/freelancing for some environmental and social justice groups, and am now doing some work for IP’s new fundraising consulting arm. I do a lot of unpaid work because I am an idiot so if you want to pay me to do something, please do.

• I became a board member at the Institute for Anarchist Studies, a grantmaker and publisher that I am very proud to be involved with. They are just the greatest people creating and supporting amazing work at the forefront of radical theory and activism. 

• The group I work with joined others in successfully campaigning against a sales tax ballot initiative that would have raised $800 million, two-thirds of which would have gone to the police and fire departments, including for 1,000 new police cars, a bunch of new surveillance tech, and a fixed-wing police plane. It was pitched as a housing and social services initiative, but only a sliver of funds would have gone toward such programming. We annihilated it on election day.

• Tucson became ground zero for the data center water and energy wars when the Amazon secretly colluded with the city and county to establish massive complexes of centers that would use more power than all city households combined, and become the single biggest user of water in the city. The entire community rose up and killed the initial plan, but they're still trying to push it through in a different form.

• I helped launch this mutual aid project that I am super proud of called Agua Para el Pueblo, which sets up free community drinking water stations all across the city. We started with 3 and now have about 30. There are even three in El Paso, Texas, where another group replicated our model with plans to expand. 

• I took a substantial fall while hiking in Tanque Verde Canyon and had to be helicoptered out and had a handful of injuries, one of which required surgery and a lengthy recovery. That sucked! But I did get to take some hard drugs for a while so that was one silver lining. 

• When I was recovering from that hiking accident I got really into watching movies on DVD from the local video store and I still am it is honestly out of control how many movies I watch. 

• We had to say goodbye to our sweet old dog Jacoby, who we miss dearly. The other two pets are still kicking. 

What now? 

Again, so glad you asked me telepathically. 

The newsletter is back in action. It has been a big hole in my life for a while so I am excited to get back into it. I’m not quite sure what the frequency will be I have to feel it out, but there will be some regularity. It will be a little different than it was when I set it down. A couple of things that it will certainly involve: 

Publishing The Book via the newsletter

I mentioned losing momentum on the project, but I have to say, I think quite of a bit of it is pretty good and do still want to get it out there. My plan from here is to tidy up and publish the chapters I like the most, serially in the newsletter. This is going to be a big focus of Crisis Palace for a little while. Maybe not the entirety of it, but at least every other issue until the fucker is out, and then I plan to publish at a reasonable price as an ebook and maybe even as a print version.  

Crisis Palace, a newsletter from Tucson, Arizona

The next iteration of the newsletter will be largely about, for, and/or by people working to create a better world—fighting for housing, climate, food, health, and transit justice—in the Tucson region. Even so, I think it will be very much of interest to subscribers who are not in Tucson, maybe even more so, as most of the stuff I do in these newsletters is about linking the local to the national or global, and because Tucson is a very interesting place.

This region is a microcosm of the many interlocking crises that we are all contending with now, whether it’s homelessness, poverty and inequality, extreme weather, immigration, white supremacy, the legacy of colonialism. And it’s a strong example of all the beautiful collaborative efforts happening on the ground to confront all of that and more. It is a special place in terms of our challenges and our community responses, but I also think that what we are learning is relevant to anyone right now. 

What not to expect

One thing the rebooted newsletter will not be is a sort of weekly dump of national current events and horrors. There is enough of that out there. I’m not trying to be John Oliver or whatever. There will certainly be talk of the collapse of government services and rise of the police state. There will be talk of ICE, of trans rights, of genocide. There will be talk of oppression and liberation in all forms. But it’s not going to be a weekly version of, “can you believe what the man did this time??” I just don’t want to do that and you don’t want to read it. 

There's also probably not going to be too much on philanthropy, and I know that's how some of you got here, so just want to be up front about that. I still think it's an important topic and I still do a lot of work related to funding and fundraising, but it's not my main personal focus these days. I will not be upset if any of you philanthropy nerds want to dip out.

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In terms of what other kind of stuff you can expect — a lot of opinion and essay writing from old big mouth over here, but also guest essays from community leaders and radical organizers, Q&As with the same kind of folks, the occasional movie and book analysis of course, and I’d really like to do some cultural coverage exploring the art and music scene here, which is closely connected to the activist community. 

Still gonna do the links, music, books, TV recommendations. Maybe some kind of classifieds featuring upcoming events and opportunities. 

I think you’re going to LOVE IT.  Here are some of those fun little bits now.

Music

Rosalia, Lux

Books

Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez, a multigenerational epic about magic, violence, wealth, political oppression, and family drama that is probably more extreme than yours.

This is the best book... maybe out of all the books. I can't even begin to describe how much I love it, and all of Mariana Enriquez's writing, I might have to do an email about it.

Until next issue, take care, nice chatting with you again, and always remember that every time someone uses the transporter in Star Trek, it kills the person and creates a replica at the desired destination.

Tate