On Monday, November 10th, the Turning Point USA tour addressed its final audience at UC Berkeley, where a counterprotest also took place. Attendees with otherwise opposing ideologies found themselves on common ground, discovering that they shared a deep dissatisfaction with how current political debate so often dismisses the interests of common people.
Later in the evening, The Curious Souls Collective sat down and discussed the ongoing events. The collective, Curious99 (the pseudonym alluding to David Graeber’s “We are the 99%” from the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement), was born of the necessity to have genuine conversations about collective and individual identities, providing space for critique in a colliding multi-cultural world.
We focused then on infighting within the Left, a movement that, while attempting to establish a unified vision, wrongs itself with overcriticism. A question emerged: if we already have trouble understanding each other, how can we even begin to understand the “other?”
In a world dominated by the rhetoric of them vs. us, we are primed to think in terms of distinction and separation before we even begin to debate. As inheritors of colonial histories we attend most of all to who is “best”, loudest, or most visible in personal, community, and global competition.
Societies are consistently formed upon the predictive fashion of resilience; the phenomena of contraries. And on the grounds of predatory division, we experience contemporary political climatic pressure. Looking both ways, left and right, a perceptible number of differences within each section have punctured our space into incongruence.
In addition, language decisively prolongs conflict through qualitative nostalgia — the ability to invoke vividness onto a decaying subject or, amalgamated with implications, events yet to unfold. It is a mechanism of preservation, regally imbued by the awareness of change — a feeling. After all, emotions are what direct our course of action.
Right-wing activists, for example, effectively appeal to traditional values with the growing urgency for distancing idyllic times. Struggling individuals, lacking a sense of community, internalize this severance of past cultural hegemony and lose touch within a realm experiencing what Rebecca Solnit calls “an apotheosis of speed” that makes their bodies and ideas “seem anachronistic or feeble” (2001).
But what kind of change are we enacting when nostalgia is our motivation and our loyalty lies only with ourselves? Change that is regressive and stagnant. We run around doing intellectual exercises, detached from a world evolving without us, still violated in the ways we always have been. Our voices are stolen from us and we get left behind. A sentiment echoed in almost every political movement, the feeling of being powerless and alone.
Perhaps even more harmful than the voices of the radicalized is the pacificity of those who condemn the practice of political autonomy — those who truly believe they are powerless, and preemptively give up, in fear of or outright refusal of change. It is the person who refuses to acknowledge the shifts in our material reality that truly lives in delusion.
A reddit post made under r/berkeley, titled “Grow a spine”, urges that “Showing up is not about ‘winning a debate’ with them. It’s about a community standing up to say, unequivocally, that this behavior—this engine of stochastic terror is not welcome here. It is about showing the people they target that they are not alone” (notesofadistantsong).
Protest is about “showing your teeth” and exercising your autonomy. It is a way of becoming an agent of change rather than a passive bystander onto whom change is imposed. To surrender this power before it is even taken from you, to refuse conversation before it has started, and to assume loneliness before seeking out community is to allow yourself to be forgotten.
We are called to listen to those who have been left behind, tending to the leaks in our society and those living against the grain. It starts with seeing people for what they are, people. When people with different bodies, opportunities, and histories learn and listen to each other, they begin to build a different world.
In Berkeley, our local fight is in the public space of People’s Park. Now violently barricaded and undergoing construction, the land was a space where multi-generational and multi-ethnic identities would collide authentically and provide aid mutually. Now more than ever, we need a space for these discussions to be made public. The people of the park are in conversation to continue using the land as a place to embrace contradiction and practice collective humanity. When the barricades fall, let us meet there, and reclaim our land and our community roots.
Writers: Karina Sanchez-Lee, Natalie Sumitra, Valeria Pineda
Editors: Zara Brandt, Hanan Coronado
Written Nov. 19th.
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