I’m spending this Valentine’s Day leading visionary fiction workshops with my sister Autumn in Northern Ireland. Inspired by Octavia’s Brood — the anthology of speculative fiction stories from social justice movements that I co-edited — the workshops focus on collective storytelling based on contemporary political and social issues.
As I listen to the emerging stories, I hear how close conflict and heartache are to the surface here in Northern Ireland, and how aware people still are of difference in each encounter.
I am reminded of South Africa, Brazil, Egypt, and of course, the U.S. Each of these places has had moments, led and pushed by revolutionaries, where it seemed they were evolving beyond a greed-centered society. And each one has faced the long challenges of governance, the depths of corruption, the stronghold of false supremacies, the resilience of greed and competition. In this place, within that global context, I am learning a lot about love:
Love is boundaries, not borders. Boundaries give us room to recover from harm, to realize what we must let go of in order to move forward, to act from real agency. But boundaries are not borders — walls of stone manned by armed guards, constructed by fear, never to be crossed. Borders perpetuate a myth of separation that is not true to how resources or life flow on our planet.
Love is distinction, not fraction. It is a sign of life, to have distinction, difference, diversity at the level of biology, identity and philosophy. But where we begin to identify as only one or two portions of ourselves — our skin, religion, place of birth, sex, ability — we participate in the lie that difference makes us less than whole. These aspects of identity are crucial to understanding history and current conditions. But to truly love ourselves whole means we remember our primary nature as humans in relationship to a living world.
Love is the humility it takes to listen without needing to correct, to consider at all times that we might be wrong, or at least ignorant.
Love leaves no room to hide what we’ve done, who we are — revolutionary love wants to face it all, intact, and to grow, together. Love can’t be used to destroy people, but it can teach us the behaviors we must stop if we want to grow. Love helps us fortify our inner and interdependent strength without constructing moats around our authentic selves.
Love is truth, not projection. Our enemy is never really other people, because with a few clinical exceptions, other people are not motivated by a pure desire to do evil, no matter how abhorrent their behavior. Our enemy is the common practice of letting trauma and loneliness fester into violent worldviews, greed, hatred, defensive superiority and knee-jerk othering. Love brings us through the illusions we project at and onto each other, into the places where we are vulnerable, where we grieve, where we’re afraid.
We need movements rooted in love right now, movements powered not by difference and exclusion and punishment, but by common ground, compassion, humility, healthy boundaries, patience and healing.
Love allows us to flow together toward a shared future.
A song comes on the radio as we travel across the stunning, contested landscape of Northern Ireland. It speaks to this revolutionary love we need: “Love changes, changes everything.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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