On Life in Empire
“We’re all just walking each other home.”
— Ram Dass
Throughout my life, from around age thirteen on, I’ve cycled into and out of various forms of activism. During the longest stretches, I’ve returned again and again to the basics of feeding people and helping out where I can, while working on long term culture change.
Why? First, I believe in people more than institutions. Yes, I know that institutions are made up of people, but they also take on a life and spirit of their own. As an anarcho-socialist, the actions of government have never sat quite right with me, though I’ve engaged with elected government under sufferance, off and on.
Second, the direct political engagement that felt available to me also felt frustrating in the long run. Massive marches. Blockades. City council meetings. The multiple times I’ve been arrested. What was the result? Did the needle actually move? Not against war and support for war, unfortunately. The US government never seemed to care, no matter how many of us were in the streets or how many risked arrest. Unless there were enough of us to clog the courts, we were fleas on the back of the government’s dog.
And there are always too many others who never risked arrest but were put behind bars simply for existing in their skin, giving lie to the relative privilege of my own actions.
More targeted actions—those blockades or other events that included education about the bloodstained hands of multinational corporations, for example—did feel worthwhile to me. Supporting Occupy Wall Street in Oakland and Occupy ICE in Portland felt worthwhile to me. Standing with the families of loved ones killed by police is always worth my time. Sending eSIMs or money to people trying to survive in unconscionable conditions is one small act that has immediate positive impact.
In other words, I haven’t given up. I hope I never will.
With that said, these days as tech companies exploit children and use up community water supplies to keep their generative AI models running, when other companies buy the rest of the water to sell it back to us, when people living on the street because of lack of mental health services and a laughable minimum wage have all of their possessions repeatedly stolen by government agencies, when people’s bodies are consistently policed, when indigenous people are still being disappeared, and queer people murdered, arms are shipped and torture upheld, when the US Supreme Court rules that an individual can kill scores of others in minutes because the rights of guns are more important than people, when the global south has all its riches stolen, and bears the brunt of climate change caused by a few in the north…What of all of that?
I admit we are currently in a complete, escalating societal collapse and that the people who have claimed power over the rest of us don’t seem to care. The glorification of material wealth has spawned billionaire oligarchs with politicians in their pockets. The rest of us are one medical disaster or one slender paycheck away from losing everything.
Living under a collapsing empire on a gasping planet is not safe or pleasant for far too many.
So, what do I do? What do we do?
I return, once again, to helping where I can. To making sure people have food. To hopefully easing the hearts of those who read my books, watch my videos, or see a picture I snapped of a roadside flower.
It never feels like enough, but in this war of too many fronts, it is still all that I have. Culture change happens when we can imagine something better for each other and ourselves.
As I’ve said hundreds of times: Do what you can, when you can, where you can.
We can uplift each other’s voices. We can buy birth control and pass it on. We can escort people into clinics. We can offer safe spaces for queer youth. We can dismantle the machinery that rips apart precious habitats. We can deliver fuel to Indigenous elders. We can drop jugs of water in the desert for those crossing from danger. We can agitate for housing. We can support small farming cooperatives and worker owned collectives. We can redistribute goods. We can share our skills and talents. We can speak truth to power.
We can dismantle the human propensity toward greed, violence, and oppression one kindness at a time. To do otherwise is to give in to despair.
I am neither ready nor willing to pick up the guns of revolution. Perhaps this is cowardice on my part, or a sense of being tired. Or perhaps this is my way of saying that freedom won by violence begets more violence still. Or maybe, as some other people say, we need both those who are willing to fight a revolution, and those who are able to offer succor and aid to the ones most affected by the war.
I don’t have an answer for that. All I know is: Nothing is inevitable, even when it feels that way.
Years ago, while teaching at a conference, someone asked what the use of all this striving was. My response was that if we do not work together toward evolution, we foster devolution.
I do not want to foster devolution.
So, I’ll continue to offer what hope, vision, and comfort I can, through my writing and my art. I’ll support community as best I can, through a series of small, ongoing actions.
A belief in community is important, both locally and globally, because we are all we have. We have to keep each other alive to greet another day.
For, as Ram Dass said, we are all just walking each other home.
And home is held inside each heart, if we allow it to be. If we allow it to grow. Together.
T. Thorn Coyle
June, 2024
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