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I share the words of my colleague and friend @tcita, who consistently can write what is in my brain:
“Y'all are making me tired. I don't want to hear how the political system isn't doing it the way you want so just forget the whole thing when y'all never showed up before or saw the issues before in the first place. That's not how change works. That's not how activism works...
...Folks have been fighting and doing the work for change for centuries in systems that excluded us even more than the one we have now *and we still moved the needle.* The work is hard...
...We don't just get things because we demand them and we certainly don't get them by demanding them and then saying we won't participate because we didn't get what we wanted at that moment. Read a history book. Talk to an organizer. Work with those on the ground...
...But stop quitting and absolutely above all stop telling those who do the work that our work doesn't matter. It matters. Your voice matters. And it matters when y'all sit and bash those of us who have hope ...
...and hold onto ideals knowing change will likely be incremental because people still matter to us. Harm reduction still matters to us. You still matter to us even when all you want to do is stomp on our hope. Tearing us down will only keep the system you so loudly decry...
...Mourn that your ideal isn't happening right this second then get on board and get to work.”
And other quote from muckraker (and immigrant) Jacob Riis, that I saw is also relevant:
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it...
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it...
... Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
