ALL Of This - Blog Posts

I want to reiterate something that I saw on Twitter. I'd love to share the actual Twitter thread but of course I already can't find it in the massive swamp of stuff going on right now.

The urge to create new organizations is probably pretty strong in most Center to left Americans right now. To work as an individual, finding ways to help that you can do individually , perhaps even visibly. Somehow doing all the ground-up organizational work feels like doing more than joining the organizations that already exist. I'm here to tell you to resist that urge. This is one of those you are not immune to propaganda moments.

There is a fairly pervasive disease, particularly among folks who have protested and donated but not gotten into the nitty-gritty work yet. It's a very well intentioned instinct that you, personally, can do more to fix things as a leader than as a participant. The more privileged you are, the more you are going to believe this. (White Americans, we are very very susceptible to this, and it is a flavor of white supremacy it can be damn hard to unpack.)

You're going to want to join untested Auntie Networks and say individually that you are willing to help your friends/people you know without engaging in the already massive, already well-established, often led by BIPOC reproductive health organizations that already exist.

Your local abortion access organization, whether it is a mutual aid organization run on Instagram or a registered Foundation/charity with a significant web presence is already doing the work that you think needs to be done. There are already networks of people willing to open their homes, cars, and lives to people who need abortion care, organizations that provide money for travel, organizations that lobby heavily in Washington and even in corporate halls for Reproductive Rights.

The best thing you can do to help right now is to join an organization that already exists. To join up with your community, as locally as you possibly can, and let them tell you what work needs to be done. If you are brand new to this, if you are just now raging and you have energy to burn, it may feel like these organizations don't understand and they are not doing enough. But I assure you, they're working their asses off and they have for years.

There are huge groups of people that even before the overturn of Roe struggled to access reproductive health care of all kinds. Poor folks, indigenous communities, rural communities, black and brown folks, people living in abusive situations, disabled folks, they have all been denied appropriate Healthcare over and over and over again and the organizations they have already created and set up know how to do their best to access all the resources that are available, know how to build on their own scaffolding to extend resources, and are your best bet to do real good.

This is a lot like those can drives every year at Thanksgiving and christmas. It feels good to give these big tangible tins and boxes of food, but just writing a check does so much more than you could imagine. 10, 50, sometimes even a hundred times as much food, and of the types and varieties that people are actually looking for, accounting for communities and cultural values and health conditions. But still every year people love to give 50 packs of ramen noodles, rather than $50, because we have this belief that our individual decisions are somehow more valuable than the community decisions made by those actually working and living directly in the community. We are wrong. Please understand that while this Instinct to be a hero and leader on an individual basis is very well intentioned and understandable, it's a bad instinct put in our heads by years and years and years of stories about just one Renegade somehow being the key to saving the world rather than the diligent work of an entire community.

Here are the best things that you can do right now, even though they will not feel as satisfying as running as fast as you can to try to be a hero:

Stop

You're having a lot of feelings right now. Those feelings are utterly, completely valid. But when you are running entirely on adrenaline, on grief or anger or spite, you're going to run out of fuel pretty fast. The best thing you can do is take a beat to live in your feelings and then turn to do what you can thoughtfully and deliberately. It took the right about 40 to 50 years of slowly, pointedly, doggedly working local elections, working individual candidates, building communities and organizations, to overturn Roe. There is a non-zero chance that it is going to take just as long to turn it back again. Prepare yourself for that. Prepare for a long road. Be ready to put your shoulder in it, over and over. Be ready to take breaks while other people push, but without losing your own hope and determination. Then when others are running out of steam, put your shoulder to the work again.

Look

Search for organizations as local as possible. You're going to want to donate national. You're going to want to feel like you're doing the most good in the widest area. Your local community is what needs you most. Big organizations whose names end up on the news will have tons of donations right now. Search for organizations in your neighborhood, city, township, county, and state.

Listen

When you find those organizations, you're going to have a lot of ideas. Spend at least a month or a few meetings listening to what they are already doing. Check out their websites or social media presences and respond to their direct appeals as best as you can. You will often find that your mind changes once you are actually in the community, doing the work. You will often find that your well-intentioned ideas have often already been tried and may even be already in place in a slightly different manner than you expected.

You will also often find that you are going to need to confront your own privilege, over and over. To listen to the people doing the work often means you need to stop talking. There is nothing wrong with having good ideas, but when you are walking in from the outside you need to have the humbling moment of realizing you may not be as much of an expert as you think you are.

Stay

As I previously mentioned, this is not going to be a few weeks work. It's unlikely it's going to be a few months work. This is going to take years. It's going to take election cycles.

Don't burn yourself out. Don't work furiously for a few weeks, give up, and never return. Work this kind of stuff into your regular schedule. Make this a daily or weekly or monthly commitment. As someone with ADHD, I know damn well it can be hard to set a new routine, but it's better for you to work one day a month for 2 years then it would be to work everyday for one month and then never return.

If you need a break, decide when you're going to come back when you take the break and commit to returning to the work. You can always change your mind. But consistency will be a powerful tool in both building communities and doing the work of making real change.

This is the hardest piece of it. It's easy to settle back into a life of privilege where you can choose to no longer think about such things. This happened with an awful lot of white activists after the summer of BLM. I admit I am as guilty as the next person of getting overwhelmed and never returning to some of the organizations I used to help. We are all human and some people will fall away, but those who have prepared to be out there in the long term will fall away less, encourage others to return more often, and keep the fires burning on our long slow walk back.

Could you please go more on Harry and Sirius and their relationship? I love them so much.

Honestly, yes. Like I think I already wrote most of what I think about them, (here, here, here, and here) but I love their dynamic so much and one of my pet peeves in fic is when Sirius is villainized for no reason and treated as a bad influence in Harry's life.

Like, Harry's life is lacking in competent adults he trusts, and I wanna talk about how much Harry trusts Sirius since I haven't covered that yet, I think.

Dumbledore is extremely competent, but Harry doesn't trust him. Snape is also extremely competent, but Harry would rather deal with whatever himself than tell Snape about it (except in life-and-death situations like at the end of OotP).

Then you have characters like Hagrid, who Harry trusts, and is definitely good intentioned, but not very competent. Molly and Arthur kinda fall into this category for the majority of the books.

Remus in book 3 came close. He's competent, and Harry likes him, but that trust and seeking of a relationship is one-sided. It's always Harry seeking Remus out, Remus doesn't want to be involved in Harry's life and keeps running away like Remus does. (There's a reason Harry keeps calling him "Lupin" in his head)

Then you have Barty/Fake Moody who is competent and Harry trusts and grows close to only to later be revealed to be a Death Eater during book 4.

Basically, Harry has a shitty track record with mentor figures in his life. Then comes Sirius, who loves him, wants to have a relationship with him, who is intelligent and competent (Especially during GoF), and who Harry feels he can trust.

Throughout GoF and OotP, whenever Harry has a problem, be it strange dreams from Voldemort, his scar hurting, the Triwizard Tournament, him just having a bad day, Umbridge, anything, the first person he goes to (or wants to go to), even before Ron and Hermione — is Sirius. And that is so important to me.

Like, growing up the way he grew up, Harry isn't the most trusting of kids. He often goes and acts heroic because he doesn't trust adults to do what needs to be done and so he feels like it's his responsibility. Sirius was the only adult in the books and when he told Harry: "Stay away from it and let me check out what I can find out first", Harry listened. In GoF Sirius tells Harry not to leave school, and to watch out for Karkaroff, and Harry does so. He actually believes Sirius has his best interests and he lets him be a responsible adult in his life.

At least, more than he lets anyone else.

I did mention it in the past, but Harry feels just as responsible for Sirius as Sirius feels for Harry. Harry never got to be a child, so he doesn't exactly act like one.

At the beginning of GoF he tries to lie to Sirius that his scar doesn't actually hurt so Sirius would stay safe and away from Britain. Sirius doesn't buy it and comes anyway because Harry's safety is always Sirius' number 1 priority.

Even when his mental/emotional state deteriorates in OotP, he is mostly talking about endangering himself, not Harry.

And with this behavior, it's easy to see why Harry comes to trust Sirius so fast. Sirius is a connection to Harry's parents (something Harry's always looking for), he says he loves Harry and would do a lot for him (including escaping Azkaban by swimming as a dog across the North Sea), and it's clear he's prioritizing Harry in a way no one else has before.

Is Sirius' fixation on Harry's well-being necessarily healthy? Not exactly, I mean, there is a reason in all the airplane safety instructions they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before you help someone else, and Sirius would definitely put the mask on Harry first. But given both their circumstances, this is honestly what they both need to feel a semblance of family.

Like, their connection, for both of them, is a kind of lifeline.

Harry needs to be the most important person to someone after he has been treated like nothing for years. And Sirius, I think, needs to care for someone else, to feel he is helping and doing something good. If he's helping Harry, he feels his own life has a purpose.

It's so very visible with Harry just how much of a lifeline Sirius became to him after such a short time. Like, I reread books 5 and 6 recently, and at the end of OotP, after Sirius dies, there is a shift in Harry. He stops caring as much.

What I mean is, there is a reason Harry has his "there's no reason to call me sir, Professor" moment in HBP. After Sirius dies, Harry loses his last bits of self-preservation. At the end of OotP he starts sassing Snape:

Malfoy’s hand flew toward his wand, but Harry was too quick for him. He had drawn his own wand before Malfoy’s fingers had even entered the pocket of his robes. “Potter!” The voice rang across the entrance hall; Snape had emerged from the staircase leading down to his office, and at the sight of him Harry felt a great rush of hatred beyond anything he felt toward Malfoy. . . . Whatever Dumbledore said, he would never forgive Snape . . . never . . . “What are you doing, Potter?” said Snape coldly as ever, as he strode over to the four of them. “I’m trying to decide what curse to use on Malfoy, sir,” said Harry fiercely. Snape stared at him.

(OotP, 851)

Snape is shocked, he doesn't even know what to say to that because Harry doesn't speak to him like that before. Before, even during the Occlumancy lessons, Harry is mostly polite because he feels he has to be. After Sirius dies, there's none of that. He's sassier, snappier, and angrier, and he carries that with him through HBP and DH. Said anger isn't just towards Snape. He snaps at Ron and Hermione throughout DH even without the Horcrux, and he lifts up Mundungus by the throat in HBP. I think a lot of his focus on Malfoy is because of how lost he feels throughout HBP. He goes out at Remus with his worst in DH when he wants to join them in the Horcrux hunt. I mean, Remus needed someone to talk sense into him, but Harry didn't need to be that mean.

What I'm saying is that when Sirius died, one of Harry's major lifelines was cut and he's in a weird sort of lashing out throughout HBP and DH. Yes, he knew Sirius for a very short time, but he was the person Harry trusted most in his life — and then he was gone.

It's not to say he never got angry at Sirius, Harry did, and that's natural and healthy, honestly. But it doesn't change the fact that in GoF and OotP when Harry needs to rant, needs someone to talk to, wants advice, he first goes to Sirius, then to everyone else.

I just feel so much about these two.