I'm gonna love the hell out of you

Thoughts on today, tomorrow and a lifetime of tomorrows

Of course I’m gutted right now. And while what follows is my way of processing the giant pit in my stomach, it may not be yours. As you sit in whatever combination of anger and heartbreak and fear and numbness that’s enveloping you right now, now might not be the time for a “what comes next” essay. That’s ok. I hate what you’re likely feeling right now, but I’m also grateful for it. At the core of our shared sadness and rage is a longing for a better world for all of us. We’re scared for each other. We’re angry on each other’s behalf. We’re heartbroken, not just individually but collectively. Those are devastating emotions, but they’re also beautiful ones. As I wrote yesterday, don’t listen to anybody who tries to massage or judge what you’re feeling right now.

I say all that because this is, in fact, a “what comes next” essay. It’ll be here whenever you’re ready for it. It is not a manifesto. I don’t pretend that it will resonate with everybody who dreams of building a less cruel world. I’m just a guy with a newsletter and a book and some classes I offer about how to organize. I’m not the leader of any movement, so I won’t write as if I am one. All I have to share is what comes next for me. Picture it, if you will, as an outstretched hand rather than a pointed finger.

Personally, I’m not going to spend a lot of time arguing about how Kamala Harris and the national Democrats would have won if they agreed with me on more issues or ran “my kind” of campaign, whatever the hell that means. Maybe I’m correct about my own personal predilections, but maybe I’m wrong. Anybody who tells you that they have the secret for how to elect a woman of color to be President in a country that is deeply allergic to women and people of color in positions of power is selling you a line. What’s more, I don’t have any immediate plans to spend my time rising the ranks of the Democratic Party, so in my case any of those opinions are more about self-flattery than anything else.

I’m also not going to spend a lot of time pointing out everybody who is at fault for the fact that we’re in this spot. That’s not because there aren’t many of us who are more responsible for keeping our country stuck in this loop of precarity and cruelty, but because at the core of all of our individual culpability are systems that make us more inhumane to one another. Was patriarchy to blame for the outcome of this election? White supremacy? Rapacious capitalism? Of course, in ways that were both systemic and internalized in the hearts of millions, myself included. There is value in pointing out those systems, but I’ve found that. for myself at least, the more I obsess over naming and shaming individual sin-eaters, the more I miss the point of offering a systemic analysis in the first place. Individual villains are like whack-a-moles. There will always be another. Inhumane systems carry on.

Relatedly, I’m not going to spend much time saying “I can’t believe that people kept voting for him.” It’s a reasonable lamentation, for so many reasons. But at its core, that’s precisely what it is. A lamentation. An expression of grief. And once again, in moments such as this it’s ok to grieve, necessary even, for as long as you need to sit in that grief. But part of navigating grief is also knowing that there will come a time to take a step forward, and that requires the flexing of different muscles. That “how could they?” question has value, I’ve found, but not necessarily for clarifying a path forward.

So if that’s what I’m not going to do, what am I going to do?

I’m going to love the hell out of you. All of you. 

I’m going to love you all the time, but especially when you’re at your most vulnerable. I’m going to believe, with all my heart, that you deserve so much more than the mess we’ve inherited. You deserve to be safe. You deserve to feel loved and respected. You deserve to not be taken advantage of– by bosses, by loved ones, by strangers, by systems. You deserve to not have a gun pointed at your face or a bomb targeted at your house. You deserve to have a job that you love that offers you dignity and a decent wage. You deserve to not be broke and to eat good food and live in a dignified dwelling and go to school and the hospital without paying a bill. If you have kids, you deserve to have those kids on your terms, and to receive help (both from your community and your government) in ensuring that those kids grow up enveloped in love and belief in their potential. You deserve a union. You deserve a neighborhood. You deserve to feel loved and seen. You deserve an actual democracy, in every sense of the word. You deserve a planet to live on.

I will love you enough to know that, if all this is to be true, we will need to fight for each other in a way that is both universal and redistributive “Being safe” means something different for women, for trans people, for queer people, then it does for straight cis men. “Dignity” and “democracy” means something different for those who were promised Reconstruction and Good Faith Treaties but were instead delivered White Supremacy and settler colonization in ever-evolving guises. “A decent wage” means something different for those of us who fear slipping from a world of relative comfort than those who’ve always been on the outside looking in.

I will love you enough to believe this is the case for you across borders and geographies. I love you enough to believe you deserve all this even if I’m angry at the way so many of you voted or heartbroken about all the ways that you support systems that harm.

I will love you enough, however, to also admit that love means respect and respect means accountability. We hurt each other, some of us more than others. We deserve relationships rooted in honesty. Some of us make community harder to sustain than others. We deserve to know that, and to know that trust won’t be earned until new patterns are formed.

I will love you enough to tell you if I ever need people to show up for me, for my communities, for people I love.

I will love you this much, but I don’t pretend you need me to save you. I do expect, however, that there will be so many times in the near future when you ask me (and a nation of ‘me’s’) to stand with you, especially in the worst possible moments. You may need people to stand with you on a picket line, or stand with you when a cop raises their baton. You may need people to stand with you when your house is raided, or when the referendum on the ballot may very well cost you your life. I will sometimes kick myself because I don’t show up in as many places as I would like. I will worry that I’ve let you and us down. But I will trust that enough of us are in love like this that none of us are required to be perfect.

I will do my best to do all things because I love you, and because I live in an era when we are blessed with more information about how to show up for each other than at any other time in history. But I will also know that all that is reactive. It’s trying to plug the dam with our fingers.

Because I don’t believe that reactive work is enough, I will also spend as much of my time as I possibly engaged in work that many reasonable, smart people believe is impossible. I will continue to lend my hand and my energy in crafting a new political reality– one where truisms we’ve come to expect about the reactionary politics of men, of rural people, of working class people, of White people– are no longer immovable objects.

Again, I know damn well how Sisyphean and utopian that sounds. Lord knows it isn’t easy. Lord knows that one of the things I’m feeling right now is a guilty recognition that I clearly haven’t done enough of that work in the past for years, despite how deeply I believe in its necessity and promise. And listen, I believe in the potential of this work more than just about anybody I know, but it is incredibly hard and tedious. It requires organizing and relationship building beyond election cycles. It’s about believing that if you spend enough time with people that there’s a path between pandering to their worst instincts and screaming in their face. There’s a way to get to know them well enough that you can say “you’ve been sold a lie, but I believe you’re better than that.”

That side of the work might not be for all of us. There are a whole lot of aspects of my identity that make walking into a conversation with a stranger a relatively low risk proposition. That’s ok. But I do hope that more people decide that part of the work ahead will require welcoming more people into the work of love and justice, because the brutal truth is that we don’t have the numbers, my friends. We didn’t eight years ago, and we don’t now. The fact that we haven’t yet built a beloved community isn’t our fault– that world has never existed, and all the money and all the power is still organized to ensure it never does. That’s all the more reason, though, to not waste any more time congratulating ourselves on the pristine political clubhouses we’ve built and instead open our hearts and our doors.

Earlier this year, I published a book about how I spent a whole lot of time focused on trying to cleanse myself through the cultivation of perfect political opinions and not enough time just being in love with other people and sustaining communities rooted in that love (a prescient offering for this moment in my opinion, but I’m profoundly biased). One of the things I’ve heard from folks who’ve read it is that many wished that it gave a step by step set of instructions about how, specifically, to move from naval gazing to movement building. You may feel some of that same pull reading this essay. I get it. We are tired and overwhelmed and we only know how to do the things we’ve done in the pst. It must be tremendously annoying to have me out here spreading the same saccharine message about how we have the power to shift political coalitions while once again withholding you the satisfaction of pedantic, step by step directions.

But also.

Here’s something that I believe with all my heart..

I know firsthand that the decision to not merely love as many people as possible, but to align our politics towards that love rather than the pursuit self gratification, is itself path-making and revelatory. So too is the decision to expand the base of people whose politics are similarly rooted in love and care. Do you know how many groups and organizations in your city, your state, your country are ready to welcome you with open arms once you’ve made that decision? Do you know how much work there is to be done, and how many of us are desperate for more people to do that work by our side? The reason why I resist offering you all a single path is because there are thousands already in front of us, and we need more people walking every one of them.

If you read all this and you truly don’t know where to start, I’d honestly love to help you. That’s part of loving you. You’ll see some examples of ways I’d love to offer support you down below. In the days to come, so many others will have their hands outstretched as well, many with larger platforms and more sophisticated operations than mine. They’re gifts, all of them, but only when you’re ready.

Back to this terrible, horrible, sacred moment, though. Regardless of whether this articulation of one guy’s “what comes next” feels resonant or helpful or nearly enough, I hope you see the spirit in which I offer it. It’s sacharine and overly earnest, but  I mean every damn word of it.  I probably don’t know you personally, but I really do love you, which means I will fight for you and listen to you when you tell me that you need something different. I will meet new people, including people who vote or think differently than I do, and ask them to love you as well. 

I will love you today and love you tomorrow and love you on days when we have more hope and love you even more on days when we have less. I will laugh with you and cry with you. I will care about and for the kids and the elders you hold dear. I will celebrate and commiserate with reckless abandon. I will hope you tell me when I don’t hit the marks. I will ask you to keep me going when I want to give up. Because the truth is that while I’m full of belief in our collective potential, I’m also terrified and I have no guarantee that the day I die the world will be closer to liberation for all. But it’s precisely because I’m filled with equal measures terror and hope that I can’t imagine any other path than this. I will keep loving you today and tomorrow and all the days ahead of us. I will love you in your heartbreak. I will love you in your rage. And will love you one day in the future when you’re once again overwhelmed with joy.

End notes:

-I will be offering two public “what comes next” Zoom gatherings this week. One hour (the same content) offered at two different times– Thursday evening and Friday midday. If these seem helpful, I’ll offer more of them. This will be a space to help clarify your thinking and allow you to be in community with others who are puzzling this out. Everybody’s welcome. Show up in your heartbreak, but please bring your heart. Register here (they’re free, of course).

-As I mentioned above, if you want 1:1 coaching on what to do next and how to plug into efforts in your community, I offer office hours for Barnraisers participants, and I’m happy to make those available to you as well. Just send me an email and I’ll send you the link (garrett at barnraisersproject.org).

-Speaking of “just send me an email,” yesterday I made that offer and a bunch of you took me up on it, not with any particular agenda in mind. It was lovely and you should keep doing that.

-I have no doubt that, in the upcoming days, so many others will be offering “what comes next” resources and opportunities. I’ll be sharing many of these here, but the best place to stay connected on all the other opportunities I’m learning about is to join the Barnraisers Project interest list.

-If you value this work and would like to keep it going, know that I can only do it because of the support of Barnraisers Project donors and (especially) White Pages subscribers. Thank you in advance for considering lending a hand. Each subscription makes it easier for me to say “whatever you all need, I’m here for you.”

-Before pressing send on this post, I decided to re-read what I wrote the day after the election in 2020. After doing so, two things are haunting me: the first is that I stand by all of the words I wrote four years ago. The second is that while I’ve been proud of the path of action and connection I’ve been on, it’s clear that whatever all of us have done in the past four years, so much more is necessary.