If You Want to Go Far, Go Together

or: doing one thing at a time

I write all the time about hope, about beating back despair, and some weeks I think I must be the least qualified person in the world to write on the subject. Because some weeks, the despair is visceral, sitting on my chest like a sleep paralysis demon.

I’ve never actually been a despairing person. For most of my life, awareness of injustice and cruelty have spurred me to action and activism. I’m having a harder time of that right now. The crisis is worse than it’s ever been, and sometimes at night I lie there trying to engineer some solution to all the world’s problems, and it’s an impossible task, and it overwhelms me and I shut down and finally get to sleep. It’s like counting sheep, if you want nightmares instead of dreams.

Maybe it’s precisely because I struggle with hope and despair recently that I’m qualified to write about it. I hope so.

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There’s a sort of folk saying that’s been on my mind a lot recently. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

I can’t solve this problem, the problem of fascism, by myself. I can’t even reason what the solution would be by myself.

That’s a hard realization for me, because despite being some sort of anarchist-communist or socialist or whatever, I’ve always been a solitary person. I tend to prefer working alone. I like projects you can do by yourself. Except… well, there aren’t any projects you can do by yourself.

Oh, sure, I write books, that famously solitary pursuit. My friends help me brainstorm, and my agent helps me find a publisher, and my editors help me revise, and a designer makes them beautiful, and librarians and booksellers help them reach readers. The act of writing is fundamentally solitary (for me and most authors) but everything that makes it possible and worthwhile is a collective effort.

Oh, sure, I built a cabin “by myself” one time. On my friend’s land. With advice from contractor friends and strangers at the rural hardware store and from half-a-hundred YouTube videos. And help setting the foundation posts. And help with the flooring and the wall panels. And help raising the rafters. Most of the hours that went into that house were me alone in the woods, up on a ladder, repeating the litany against fear, but I didn’t build that cabin alone, despite building it alone.

I can’t reason my way through fascism by myself, and I hate that.

Worse still, I don’t know that even all together we’re going to be able to do everything that we need to do. Maybe the task in front of us is actually insurmountable, and I do not like considering that possibility. But fascism has always been the miniboss. Climate change waits behind it, looming.

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A “Blue Ocean Event” is the name for a summer without arctic ice—or rather, a summer when the arctic ice falls below a thousand square kilometers, leaving the water blue instead of white. Ten years ago or so, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was talking about how this might be possible by the end of the century, and possibly sooner.

Some climate change models (more pessimistic models, but not the most pessimistic models) suggest we might have a blue ocean event this summer. We probably won’t, but it’s a serious possibility in a way that would have been unheard of earlier in our lifetimes.

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We’re mostly waiting in this terrible limbo between inaction and action. The problems we face are severe enough to warrant rather dramatic action, but we’re told to hold our breath until the elections. Even more than that, we know most dramatic actions won’t actually make the situation better, because individual dramatic actions don’t tend to change the world for the better, because if you want to go far, you have to go all together.

If there’s anything that gives me hope, it’s what I saw in Minneapolis a few months ago. The problem wasn’t “solved,” not outright, but tens of thousands of people acted (and are acting) directly against the invasion of federal troops in their city. Going far because they’re going together.

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This morning I didn’t know how I was going to get up.

There are all these things that I tell myself, things I believe, like: focus on what you have agency over. Focus on local issues, local problems. Focus on building resiliency, for both yourself and your community.

This week, I ordered garden supplies for a friend, I went to Harbor Freight (suggestions at the end) to get those sweet discount preps, and I showed up to an in-person meeting of local lefty preparedness folks to compare what we know and how we can help one another. We talked about freeze dryers and teach-ins, about tinctures and emergency medicine. This week I organized my basement and I taught a new friend about backup power.

It’s all stuff worth doing.

I still didn’t know how I was going to get up this morning.

What got me up was a text from the rapid response network in my neighborhood, a text that said that federal agents were raiding a house a few blocks away. That got me up and dressed and out of the house, jogging, wishing I was in better shape. It wasn’t immigration enforcement, in the end, just a drug raid (people weren’t being kidnapped for where they were born, they were being put into cages for having the wrong plants in their house. Somehow we’re supposed to believe there is a big difference between those two things).

It wasn’t ICE, but it was worth remembering that people care, that people gathered at a moment’s notice. And that I was one of those people who could care, who could be useful.

And it got me out of bed this morning.

And it helps me to remember that I can be part of trying to do something to make the world ever so slightly better.

And it has me realizing I need a little tiny go-bag just for ICE watch, with a whistle, covid mask, notebook, pen, marker, and know-your-rights cards. Because ICE is acting everywhere, across the country, but so are ICE watchers. ICE watch is not the main thing that I do. It’s not what I focus on, or what I have the most experience in. But if they’re in my neighborhood, then, well, that old saying is worth remembering: “if not us, then who?”

And who doesn’t love the excuse to build little kits?

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The way to accomplish things is to break large projects down into concrete steps and then do those steps. But sometimes you don’t have a real picture of how to accomplish the entire project. Sometimes it’s too big of a project to hold in your head, especially alone, and your job is to just think of the steps that might help and then take those steps and see. It’s worth picking a specific, smaller project (like setting up a rapid response network, or a preparedness circle, or a radical assembly) and finding the other people who want to do that. Because we can go far, together.

(And it turns out if you want to go fast, you probably need to practice jogging.)

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Things a prepper might want from Harbor Freight, an incomplete list

• tarps (emergency shelter, pavilions for large gatherings, disaster cleanup)

• plastic sheeting and duct tape (sealing rooms and windows to keep them warm during power outtages)

• hose clamps and zip ties (emergency vehicle maintenance)

• prybars and axes and sledgehammers (emergency demolition like for rescue)

• tow strap (for vehicle rescue)

• gas cans (store gas for 2-3 months, or 1-2 years with additives)

• weatherproof foam-filled hard plastic cases (store electronics for disaster zones)

• batteries (for everything)

• PPE (goggles, masks, earplugs, nitrile gloves, those big white disposable suits you can wear doing disaster cleanup)

Mostly, I avoid buying electronics and complicated tools from Harbor Freight because their quality is hit-or-miss, but I have had good luck with like, shovels and tarps and such.

Maybe I’ll start trying to add these little mini prepper tips at the end of posts. We’ll see if I keep it up.