action is the antidote to despair.
a note on grief & action. + reading recs, podcast recs, my Marty Supreme review, & more.
There are two spots remaining in EXCAVATIONS, my upcoming memoir container. It starts in one week, and I am certain it will be a nourishing space for anyone who wants to make art and feel a sense of community. Register here. Paid subs get 10% off, code below.
If you’re interested in the anti-capitalist money workshop for folks who grew up without generational wealth, register here.
&A note on the note: from a ~content~ perspective I feel like I need to apologize for writing something so similar to what I wrote last week. From a human perspective, what else was I to write about other than coping with another ICE murder?
Dear friends,
Today is my birthday* and another person was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis. I am working all day at an event for the local literary organization, and I’m glad to be with people compelled to make art, but I am reeling. It’s hard to know what to say or to write. I spent six years of my life in Minneapolis, on the south side, blocks away from where George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti were all murdered. All those memories of donut shops or where I got my gas or my friend’s duplex turned into execution footage on my phone. I was still in Minnesota in 2020, was able to participate in the tragic and invigorating organizing that happened that summer, and it’s entirely unsurprising to me that the community is showing up in the same way; with dangerous love. Love for your neighbors—the kind of love that fuels solidarity— is dangerous to ICE, to the state, to the narrative that we are all safer in isolation. And Minneapolis has that kind of love, in droves. Plus years and decades before that of organizing against colonialism, prisons, nazis, and police. Years of practice in the kind of collective grief that demands more life. Again and again: our hearts are broken, our hearts are stitched back up.
When I get home from work, I cry in bed. I can’t get a hold of Peter and I am so anxious. I am gutted with news of every new death and disappearance, but I’d be lying if I said that the losses don’t hit me uniquely when people are murdered in moments of rebellion. I am sobbing because I know that some of the people I love the most have targets on their backs, with ‘anarchist’ a federal equivalent to domestic terrorist. Peter is probably safer where he is across an ocean, but it doesn’t matter, I am scared, and everyday more worried about him getting back into the country. I feel despair creep up through my toes.
The social center Signal thread suggests a meet-up. Even in the face of the impending storm, we want to create a space for grief and maybe planning. It is hard to leave the house in the cold, but I do. I cry while I embrace my friends there. I can’t help but imagine each of them riddled with bullets. I stand at the altar we have in our space for our local lost comrades. We’ve only been open for three and a half years, but we have collected so many ghosts. I think of all of them greeting the new comrades to wherever it is the spirits go, that collective force that I am certain helps the living keep going. At the front is my Minneapolis family, Jesús, who would have been leading the fucking charge this weekend were he still there in human form. But again: I think in some ways, he still is.
The meet-up isn’t a cure, and some things we mess up, and some things are annoying, but god it still felt good to be together. I re-read a zine on how to de-arrest someone, I make some tea. We connect people to rapid response threads who aren’t already on them, we share resources. I stare at the phrase we’ve had on our wall for years, and I know it’s true:
Here are some actions you might take:
Find your local ICE watch/rapid response network, get tapped in.
Attend this Street Medic 101 training.
Donate to any of these Mpls fundraisers and/or look for fundraisers in your own community and support those.
Rent Support for neighbors in Phillips
Rent Support for neighbors in Central
Rent Support for neighbors in Powderhorn
Supplies for Political Art Making
Diapers and Menstrual Supplies
Northstar Front Line Street Medics
Cook food for someone who you know is involved in movement work (or for a tired parent, or someone working multiple jobs, or taking care of elderly parents, etc. etc.).
Regulate your nervous system.
Determine risk of ICE raids at your workplace and organize there.
Pray, make art, cast spells, sing (in a group if possible), snuggle animals, learn your neighbors names and needs, help shovel snow.
Don’t let this be temporary. One reason we’re here is because not enough people give a shit when the same (or similar) things happen under the Dems. Stop believing in the state, start believing in each other. Forever and ever amen.
***
I really wanted to be writing about the Oscar nominations this week, but that wasn’t in the cards. For my readers who like the pop culture component of this newsletter, never fear, I am all in the game this year, with many thoughts!! More soon on all of that, and more. (Newsletter glow-up this year is happening on a pagan calendar, not a Gregorian one.)
Below, a movement elder you should really be reading, a podcast rec, a roundup of my favorite Minneapolis musicians, and more from the week that got me through. Also, finally: my review of Marty Supreme. (preview: ughhh)
Take care of yourselves & each other, please.
love & solidarity,
raechel
*I wrote this part on Saturday, obviously.
Reading + Podcasts.
