Take One Step, Every Day

Change is a practice, not an event

While predicting the future is a fool's errand, and history is always weirder than we can imagine, it feels like we're on a pretty straight path of accelerating disaster, fascism and collapse. Here in the US, I can only see two ways the fascist coup ends up resolving, and neither of them involve a return to normalcy. We either grit our teeth, scale up our mutual aid, and brace to lose as few people as possible to dungeons, exile, disease, murder, and suicide; or we hit the streets so fucking hard we open a truly revolutionary rupture, which will also require us scaling up our mutual aid. As a result, when we wonder what to do with ourselves in this moment, scaling up our mutual aid infrastructure seems like a good place to get started.

But how do you get started doing mutual aid? The first thing to know is, it's easy. You can fit it into an already busy everyday life, and doing so will bring you community, pleasure, and confidence in your capacity to fight back. The best thing we can do to feel less alone and less helpless is to help one another, and by building networks of resilience and mutual capacity we don't just feel more powerful, we become more powerful.

But how can we help one another when everything is falling into such dire crisis?

Trans people have been living through Great Depression levels of unemployment and poverty for years, as have many black and indigenous communities. I've heard folks understandably frightened about how to survive the sudden loss of jobs, support, benefits and funding, and while a total transformation of social relations is the only way out of these periodic crises for everybody, there are people in your community with experience surviving worse: disabled and/or trans and/or BIPOC folks will often have extensive knowledge of these survival tactics.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel, but you may have to transform your perspective on your time, your resources and your capacity. One thing people who don't already regularize these community survival practices are gonna have to get used to: dropping everything to help a near stranger with a weird, frustrating or time consuming logistical/emotional errand. Poor and surviving communities often call this "a day ending in y".

One thing you can do is take an inventory of resources you have available. There are a number of things middle class people may not think of as valuable resources but that actually are, here is a partial list of such you might have access to:

Skill with form completion and bureaucracy; Quickly understanding and summarizing information; Knowing how to deal with banks/government offices/managers; Being able to translate official documents

A car; A couch that's empty at night; A full fridge or pantry; Having a printer and stationery; Power tools; Storage space; A yard for kids to play in safely

Being willing and able to sit on hold for long periods of time; Free time in general; Time without anxiety and crushing existential angst; Time that doesn't involve someone else's problems

Access to washer/dryer; Private space/space where someone can be alone; Operational heating; Hot water; Fast internet; Reliable utilities

Beyond this list that many middle class people see as "normal" things to have, there are also more specific disaster and emergency preparedness resources, such as gas generators, chest freezers, solar power arrays, walkie-talkies and radios, water and food stockpiles, emergency cash reserves, camping equipment, water filtration, and much more. (Check out Margaret Killjoy's series on community preparedness for more ideas on this.)

If you're housed, you can give someone you know but aren't super close with your address, and tell them that if shit hits the fan and they gotta get the fuck outta town, they can come to you for a few days. This is especially valuable if you're someone who is not easily connected to them by fascists and or the state.

And you know the neighbors who you're friendly with, you smile and nod and talk about the game or the weather? If you don't have it, get their phone numbers and other contact info. Ask if they'd be into a group chat or an email list. This kind of communication infrastructure is everything in a crisis.

The above are all basic steps towards feeling safe, ready and able to share resources and help one another survive. But there are more specific, intentional projects that will be crucial in the coming months and years. Below is a list of possible mutual aid and power building projects you can engage in.*

Communal child care;
Shared pharmacies;
Food distro;
Mask blocs;
Eviction/sweep defense;
Public spaces where people dont have to spend money;
Community fridge;
Alternate power creation/generators and solar;
Create a neighborhood assembly

Exercise/training groups;
Self-defense classes;
Grief and trauma support;
Self-guided therapy groups;
Elder care;
Crews to distro to elders/immobile/shut-ins
Emergency response teams;
Street and DIY medics;
Free literature/zine distro;
Communal art and crafting get-togethers

Raves/music and art shows/happenings;
Tagging, wheatpasting and propaganda teams;
Direct action research clusters;
Prisoner letter writing
Jail support
Prison books program;
Returning from prisons support;
Legal aid;
Anti-fascist researchers;
Cop watch;
Doxxing teams;
Anti-fascist street patrol;
Strike and picket support

Local resistance info sharing;
Community announcement threads/accounts;
Digital safety trainings;
Building Mesh networks/independent comms
Radio and walkie-talkie prep,
Food/calorie gardening
Urban guerilla gardening/beautification;
Land-reclamation
Hospital and clinic defense
Create a squatted hospital
Learning how to squat

Driving lessons;
Flying lessons;
Abortion support and doulaing;
Building cross state support networks
Community cooling centers for the summer
Community snow shoveling
Building DIY air purifiers,
Building heaters for people/heater bloc
Teach people lock picking

Organize people who want to learn trades/building into labor brigades,
Tenant unions and rent strikes;
Land projects where people can lie low
Land projects where people can get away for a few days
Festivals and rituals
Birth and pregnancy support
Grief and death doulaing,

There is a lot of work to be done, but the good news is, you only have to do one thing!

If none of the above call to you, figure out one that does.

Whatever you land on, take one (1) material step today towards doing it. This material step might just be texting a bunch of people: "Hey [friend], i want to start a free store. Any interest?" The material step might be researching online to figure out if people in your area are doing that or have done it in the past, or asking a local punk/DIYer/organizer/transsexual with a special interest if they know anything about it.

Then, having done that material step, you're gonna go back to your regular daily stuff. But first you're gonna put in your calendar/mind palace/a stickie on your forehead a reminder to take a second step tomorrow. That second step might be, say, getting everyone who said "yeah, sounds cool!" into a group chat together.

Good second step! Now you've been doing mutual aid for two days. Fucking rad. Lets plan a third step tomorrow.

I know what you're thinking: "Vicky this is slow af, what the hell?!" I promise actually doing the thing? It ripples out, motivates everyone else to also do one thing. One thing a day is genuinely high level!

You've already got so much on your plate: kids, work, housework, decompression, bills, errands, school, dates, fun, sleep, etc. etc. But you can probably take time to do one step. In fact, one thing a day is insanely efficient. Anyone who has worked in a crew for a long time knows that if everyone in that crew did one thing a day toward the project, it would be going about five times as fast as it does now.

OK, so, Day 3, you've got the group chat, now you're gonna propose a meeting time and location/make a calendaring doohicky. That's it. That's Day 3. One text/email/calendar invite. Is that really slow? Because to me it looks like you went from literally just having an idea about something you want to do on Sunday to having a group making plans and discussing how to make it happen by Tuesday.

"But Vicky, this is incredible easy, basic shit." OMG you're right! Building community is second nature, it's what we do, and we're fucking good at it. We're evolved to do it, and this world has built a massive ideological and material apparatus of violence, time wasting, work and separation to make us forget.

But the thing is, we haven't forgotten, instead histories and communities of resistance have kept these skills and cultures alive. We're still here. The only way we're really doomed is if we forget how to take care of each other, how to organize, which is what the fascists want. Practicing care for one another is a small but achievable victory over their misery and hatred, a major part of the fight against despair.

Morale is a terrain of struggle.

These are dark times, but these practices have gotten us through the "good" times too. This world of the colonizer has only ever had "good times" for very few. More USians than ever are about to lose the last vestige of those good times. Welcome friend. We've been here, and we know what to do. Grab a shovel

*I've included links to more in depth guides, zines and step-by-step introductions for a few of the projects above: if you have one that you'd like to share, please send it to CAWDistroSubmission@proton.me

This is an expansion and edit of a thread I wrote on Bluesky. As I regularly mass-delete my posts, I thought collecting these thoughts together here would be useful for me and, hopefully, for others. Image credit to N.O. Bonzo @nobonzo and JustSeeds