Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 105

When systemic racism was finally eradicated all the people slowly came out of their homes, which were all equally beautiful in their uniqueness. Both the people and the homes. All the daddies were rich and all the ma’s were good lookin’.

They gathered in the streets, which used to be filled with cars but were now full of people on foot, and on bicycles, and on scooters, and on magic carpets. There was a sense of accomplishment in the air and music was playing.

It was gospel music and everyone was dancing, with their hands in the air, praising whatever it is that runs through us all. Tugs at us in the middle of the night to remind us how good we can be when we want to be.

Angela Davis and Patrisse Cullors were on a stage. There was an arch of rainbow coloured balloons above them and sparkling lights all around and a big, purple spotlight making their hair and skin shimmer with love.

They were passing a microphone between them and through call and response telling the story of Black liberation and saying the names of all the lives that had been lost in the 401 year struggle.

They knew all the names, which were also etched into a granite wall behind them. Water was falling all around, not because it was raining, but because someone had built a waterfall, designed it to fall to either side of the stage and form a cool pool at the speakers’ feet.

Everyone knew their names because they had been studied at school. And one name stood out from all the rest.

George Floyd.

 If any student forgot his name they’d be surrounded by the rest of the class who would whisper all sort of hints to help them remember.

After his murder, protests erupted in all 50 states and at least 18 countries. At first Wikipedia couldn’t tell you much about it, because it all happened so fast.

You see everyone had been distracted before coronavirus. They were too busy working and shopping and gaming and scrolling to notice that Black people were being brutalized by police and vigilantes, targeted by state sanctioned violence and systemic policies and practices designed to disadvantage them, and that this had been going on for a very long time.

Before coronavirus you could be born into the world and raised to think that it had all happened a very, very long time ago and that there was nothing particularly interesting to remember about what had happened and everyone was over it because of the Civil Rights Movement.

But after coronavirus there was nothing for anyone to talk about for months except coronavirus and at first we were sharing funny memes and thinking we’d have a vaccine by summer. But then everything slowed down, time slowed down, and then we began the backward slip.

He was murdered in that stillness, the eye of the storm, and all of a sudden it actually got through to white people that maybe there was a problem there. And maybe they were part of it. And just like that things went right back to 1969.

There were brave, young Black and Brown children who’d been talking about it, as their ancestors had been doing for generations and they all rolled their eyes and told everyone else to catch up quick and the next thing you knew Zoom was filled with book clubs and some of the people were crying and tearing their hair out and saying they didn’t like to be made to feel guilty.

Meanwhile the more “woke” ones were berating the less “woke” for their ignorance, which wasn’t actually all that helpful. It took them a little while to figure that out, with a little help from their friends, before course correcting and “calling in” with kindness.

So they worked hard, and learned hard, and spoke out hard, and supported Black and Brown folks running for office hard, and protested hard, and got arrested hard, and passed new laws hard, and defunded the police hard, and deprogrammed and then reprogrammed with the right-sort-of-programme the schools hard, and invested in community farms, youth arts programmes, free pizza for everyone, every day hard.

One of the best jobs to have was befriending the children and youth of the neighborhood, getting to know all about what they liked to do and encouraging them to do more of that, getting curious with them about why some of their behaviors caused hurt and some made them happy, talking to them about their feelings and what they dreamt about at night. They called these people Safety and Support, and they rode around the community on magic carpets, breaking up fights and enacting restorative justice, handing out free pizza and kissing babies.

And they knew it was late stage capitalism’s final gasp when Spotify played army ads in between gospel music with the slogan:

Recruiting now and forever

That was the last straw for the fighters for love, justice and equity. The Squad passed several laws to defund the military to the point where they no longer had a marketing budget. The ads would be their last.

Along with the end of systemic racism fell all the statues. All borders were erased off the face of the planet just like that. Everyone was free to go where ever they liked. So the beach lovers headed to the coasts and the forest dwellers headed to the mountains and the rock rats to the desert and the water babies to the oceans.

There was only one government for the whole world and it was run by The Squad.

They had to pass laws to protect the environment otherwise all the happy people would have nowhere to live. But also because environmental degradation was a crime against humanity and the worst breach of the first and most important law, that all of life is sacred, not to be utilized for profit or objectified in order to feed our insatiable greed.

Thousands of years of a certain way of doing things, controlled by a small minority of elites, had divided everyone else into different colour groups and pitted them against each other.

So they took the power away from those elites and distributed it among the people.

Jeff Bezos was forced to give all his wealth away, mostly to people of color led non-profit organisations but also to fund free pizza for all.

Everyone walked the streets safe and proud because they knew in every cell in their bodies that their lives were literally in each other’s hands and the only way to thrive was to make sure everyone had enough.

They built a monument to Harriet Tubman which was made of glass but there was no risk that it would ever break because that’s just how much trust had been built between the people and no one could ever say anything bad about Harriet.

And just like that the clock started ticking again.