Ep 75: Our Family Went to the Rally. Now What?

Whether you made it to the recent No Kings Rally or not, let’s chat…because a mass protest is mobilizing. But mobilizing isn’t the same as organizing. That is, organizing our advocacy for the long-haul. Mass protests across the country give us a spark of solidarity that many of us desperately need to get out of despair. But for us to win and to stay in this marathon towards collective liberation, this spark of solidarity must be sustained. Otherwise, this spark fizzles out. We sustain it by being strategic about our actions, specifically our actions as caregivers raising young children; as caregivers who are tired, triggered, but still trying to be as liberatory as we can. To help us get organized and strategic, in this episode, you and I are going to explore how movements in the past won --  from the American Civil Rights movement to global nonviolence movements. Then, we’re going to use abolitionist organizing as a framework to help us sustain the spark and organize our advocacy. And because surviving the Hunger Games of racial capitalism leaves us with only enough energy to get through the day (without falling apart…I mean we can’t afford to fall apart anyway), we’re going to be strategic about how to practice these skills too (hint: we practice them in everyday parenting to strengthen our social justice action muscles and our children’s development at the same time). If that sounds generative to you, let’s get started.

[OPENING]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

From Symbolic to Strategic Actions: Sustaining a Spark of Solidarity

We’ve learned from the Civil Rights movement and global nonviolence organizing that our movement playbook needs both reactive and responsive strategies. White, Colonial, Capitalist Patriarchy loves to overwhelm us with one crisis after another, hoping that we’ll be stuck in a pattern of reacting to the polycrises until we burnout and drop the resistance.  Or until we’re intimidated by their repressive tactics like policing and surveillance and we shrink our solidarity and silence our power away. We need organized, responsive strategies too. For example, we can react to an atrocity with a protest, but we also need organized responses like a network of care coordinating protest safety, bail funds for arrestees, or talking points for the media. A protest alone would be a symbolic gesture which might make headlines, the clip might go viral, or the movement leader in air quotes gets to write an op-ed or two. But when the news cycle moves on and people go home, a symbolic protest by itself isn’t strategic enough to create lasting material changes.

And to be fair, I know I’m sounding critical. Sometimes you witness injustices and compassion moves you into action. “Nat, I just need to do something.” I get it. And as a caregiver raising your family without paid parental leave, universal childcare, and other structural support, your capacity is limited. You can only do so much. So I think the question is: as a caregiver with limited capacity but unlimited creativity, how will you get strategic, sustain the spark of solidarity, and meet this moment of fascism with everything you’ve got? 

By the way, did you eat? Are you staying hydrated? Are you holding your breath? 

To help us get strategic, I’d love to summarize abolitionist organizing and give us the lay of the land. So that you can select actions that are right for your bandwidth, plug in, and raise hell. 

Honoring Rage & Grief

But first shall we feel our feelings? To say that we, caregivers, have been nonstop overwhelmed and exhausted is incomplete. Underneath the exhaustion often lies our unmetabolized grief. Depending on your social identities, you might be grieving your complicity and participation in oppression. Or, you might be grieving the childhood and parenthood you didn’t get to have when white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy keeps taking away your people’s dignity. Any way we slice this, it’s hard to be centered. Your actions might be driven by shame. Or, your inaction might be driven by jadedness…both of which make it hard to sustain this spark of solidarity. 

So, if I may, please feel your feelings and when you’re ready, redirect these feelings to fuel your actions. 

Abolition is One Strategic Framework to Guide Our (Two) Actions

To help us pick the action that’s right for our limited capacity, abolitionist organizing can be a powerful framework.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us quote “Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” End quote.

Abolitionist actions come in two buckets: a) dismantling the systems that are working well only for a certain few, and b) building an infrastructure of care that’s liberatory.  

As a caregiver with limited capacity but unlimited creativity, you can choose which bucket feels generative for you to dive into with the bandwidth you have.  

Perhaps this week you’re feeling spicy and you want to direct your energy towards Bucket A: dismantling oppressive systems. Civil Rights and nonviolence movements have taught us that staging a protest is only one strategy. We’ve got other options to hold people in power accountable to meet a movement’s demands. These options include a boycott, a sit-in, a mass general strike and so on. What makes them effective is the organization behind it. Movements aren’t won with a series of scattered actions just like it doesn’t work when you throw 5011 parenting strategies at the wall and hope something sticks. To make these strategies effective, we organize them into a mass, sustained, and escalated disruption of business-as-usual. A march is escalated into a sit-in. A sit-in is escalated into an infrastructure blockade at shipping ports, airports, oil and gas pipelines, or construction sites, for example. Then, we keep applying pressure until institutions meet our demands. A blockade is escalated into a mass general strike to halt the economy. This escalation makes these collective actions strategic instead of symbolic.

Now it’s your turn, my dear co-conspirator. I wonder if you’d like to picture yourself channeling your advocacy efforts in this organized way, specifically to disrupt the status quo and dismantle the system’s business-as-usual. What skills would be required of you? What skills do you already have? What skills do you need more practice in? 

One skill that I think will come in so handy when we keep applying pressure through strategic escalation is our ability to be in our discomfort. That is, to know our triggers and reactivity and to have a way to take a beat and turn that reactivity into an intentional response. 

If I may plant a seed here which we’ll nurture together in a bit, how and where are you practicing being in your discomfort in everyday life? Or if you’ve named other skills that will help you take direct actions with your co-conspirators like organizing bail funds or pre-making protest safety kits for folks at the frontline or organizing a sit-in at a community garden to prevent a construction company from building an apartment building that will further gentrify the neighborhood, or whatever the actions are, how and where are you practicing the skills required for you to be effective? 

We’ll come back to discuss how to strategically practice these skills daily when you’re exhausted so that your actions are not performative. Okay? Let’s move to Bucket B: building an infrastructure of care that’s liberatory.

Perhaps you assess your bandwidth this week and decide you’d like to redirect your energy towards co-creating an infrastructure of care with those in your political homes whether they’re in your local neighborhood or in your virtual affinity group. Some actions might be coordinating grocery drop-offs for our immigrant neighbors who are being targeted by ICE; or co-creating a toy swap party where the neighbors connect with one another, get new toys for their tiny change agents, and engage in political education together; or co-hosting a movement and sound healing session for community members to engage in healing activities to stay centered as we get free.  

Now it’s your turn again. If you’d like, picture yourself channeling your advocacy efforts in this organized way, specifically to co-create community care and disrupt the community’s codependency on getting help from the system that hurts us. What skills would be required of you? What skills do you already have? What skills do you need more practice in? 

One skill that comes to mind is power-with, not power-over. It’s sharing power with your co-conspirators so you can survive the Hunger Games of capitalism together, engage in political education together, and care for one another in solidarity instead of saviorism. In addition to collaboration, power-with is also making decisions together. Power-with is also moving together through conflicts, hurt, and harm with accountability instead of punishment. So, how and where are you practicing power-with in everyday life?

A Recap

If you’ve been a long-time listener, you know I’m a practice gal. Talent is lovely but I value consistency even more. I’m certainly not the most talented therapist-organizer-auntie but I sure show up to the practice. That’s why I’m inviting you to take another step after you participated in a mass protest. After you attend a mass protest and wave your signs with your family, our responsibility becomes sustaining that spark. I invite you to find a political home and keep showing up. As caregivers, you and I know that our children can’t afford this spark of solidarity to fizzle out. We’re playing the long game for our children and future generations. So we must stay strategic. Stay steadfast. Stay in the struggles. Stay ready. Stay rooted in values. Stay in the practice. 

Staying Strategic When You’re Tired

I know that the intensity of fascism makes us want to do everything, help everyone, and join every cause. Your heart is bleeding and your head is spinning. By being strategic with our capacity and creativity, we pick one bucket at a time to take action in. 

Then, we stay militant and keep practicing liberation -- in community organizing, in our homes, in everyday parenting. 

It’s strategic because this practice is feeding three birds with one scoop of peanuts. One, you get your reps in and strengthen your social justice action muscles. Two, your parenting is aligned with your liberatory values. And, three, you’re promoting your child’s development at the same time. 

How’s that tracking for you so far? This podcast is a free resource for you to DIY your approach to making everyday parenting political. Another resource is Raising Change Agents: Practicing Social Justice in Everyday Parenting – a book I wrote as a love letter to you which is officially published as of today. You can choose the right resource that will accompany you in your practice.

If you recall, one skill we mentioned when dismantling systemic oppression was being in your discomfort without reacting or freaking out when the State or institutions deploy repressive policing strategies. As a caregiver, you already know that you get to practice this very same skill when your child pushes your parenting buttons. Instead of reacting and punishing your child, you pause and respond intentionally to them, meeting them where they’re at. It’s a transferrable skill between home and community. In the Raising Change Agents book, you’ll map out your reactivity cycle and try out different ways to stay grounded in Chapter One, titled, “But How Do I Stop Snapping and Screaming at My Kids?” By practicing this skill at home with your child first, you strengthen the skill so you can bring it to your community organizing with clarity and confidence (without feeling performative). 

The other chapters will accompany you in unlearning policing in parenting so you can power-with with your child and prepare them to survive and thrive. They’ll accompany you in unlearning white supremacy’s perfectionism and use what Harriet Tubman and disability justice movement taught us about how to gauge if you’re on the right track. They’ll accompany you in connecting the dots between social justice parenting and child development research too. I’m humbled and excited that the book is available now anywhere you buy books.

Thank you so much for ordering your copies and sharing them with your beloved communities. I hope you hear the intention in my heart that it’s not about book sales. Rather, it’s about using the book to be in service of our collective liberation.

[CLOSING]

The more the Empire exhausts us, the more cunning and creative care must be.

By practicing liberation with your child, home becomes a site of resistance and a practice ground.

As a caregiver, you play a powerful role in our movement. You raise the change agent within you and within your home, making our liberatory movement intergenerational. 

I cannot thank you enough for always coming back to care with me. 

In solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.