There is no community without accountability.

I'm so sorry you had to find out this way. It's heartbreaking. I, I don't know. I thought there would be more time. I thought you'd realize faster somehow.

I wish I had the training to do more about it. And the time, you know. An extra 24 hours in the day. Even though neither is enough.

You have to want a different outcome.

If you're angry or scared, focusing on the object of those tense, muscular emotions, I want you to hold on for a second. Don't worry. You'll be able to go right back to it if you decide you still need to.

Take a deep breath. Now think of something completely different. A time when you felt safe, looked after. When someone told you a joke and you laughed without wondering if it was ok to, or who was watching. Be in that memory. It's real. It happened, it is possible.

So many animals play. Monkeys play jokes on each other. Myna birds watch over their pair buddy while they eat. Every night my cat settles happily into the crook of my arm. We're meant to be this way.

Stay there as long as you need. Take ten, fifteen minutes. Don't look at your phone. Put it on silent. Just gently, slowly breathe in and out.

How do you feel now? Better? Are those songs of anger and fear out of your head for now? Good. We're not going back to those places just yet. I want to talk about a small picture and a big picture first.

The small picture is this: Our brains are not just one thing, one organ. It's many things, and they all have to work together (and sometimes separately) to make the person that is you in this world.

From your brainstem, which lets you be a body but also keeps you still when you're dreaming, to your premotor cortex which plans out your movements, to your frontal lobe which helps you hold other people in your heart and mind, they all have a part to make the song that is you.

And they never, ever stop as long as you're alive.

Just like the way the brainstem keeps you alive by beating your heart, there's a part of your brain that is meant to help you protect yourself and others: the limbic system.

It sits right in between the halves of your your brain, and it's involved in so many things: memory, sensory information, emotions, social processing, impulse control, and arousal--the business of gearing your body up to deal with intense activity.

Scientists called that intense activity "fight or flight", but there's at least two more examples: freeze, and "tend and befriend". There's that trope about a mother suddenly developing the strength to lift up a crashed car to save her child. The limbic system does that job.

It connects emotion and memory to what is happening before your eyes, and gives you the opportunity to do something intense and fast about it.

I want to try to get you to understand that that is a wonderful thing. We're not quiet, grazing animals. We're creatures that run, quarrel, weep, and love. It goes with the territory.

That's a two-edged sword. The limbic system is only a small part of your brain, and it's a very fast one.

When your amygdala matches what you're sensing with a memory of an intense experience, it takes on the order of tens of milliseconds for it, and the rest of the limbic system, to get you spun up and running hot.

In comparison, it takes hundreds of milliseconds for your frontal lobe to activate, even in the best of times.

I want to be really clear about this: the part of your brain that tries to detect and respond to emergency is tens or hundreds of times faster than the part of your brain that can imagine and consider other people in a way that does them justice.

That's why people and things seem so black-and-white when you're thinking with your limbic system. That's why things seem so urgent, so simple. All you need to do is just *do* something, right? And if it's not working, you just need to do more of that same thing, right?

Whether it's use more force, or yell louder, run away from a problem, or give more care. Whatever responses are most deeply etched into you, as inevitable as water running through carved channels.

We are so little of ourselves when we're behaving this way. We say and do things we wouldn't dream of doing under any other circumstances. We let anxiety take the wheel.

And anxiety is the queen of self-fulfilling prophecies. There are so many outcomes we are terrified of that we walk right into because we focus on the fear, or the anger it summons.

It's scarier to imagine that our fears, shrieking from one of the most strongly connected parts of our brains, could actually be wrong. That whatever it is we're imagining has more to do with the past than the present.

It is harder to disobey what your strongest emotions are telling you. It feels *too* right. Anything else would be giving up control or power.

Trauma makes it all worse. An experience becomes traumatic when it overwhelms your body's ability to respond and cope. Think about it in this context: Normally we try to record experiences and let them change us based on how it felt and how it turned out, right?

So we learn to reject things that taste like they might be poison, learn to love to do things we discover we're good at, seek out things that we knew were safe when we're hurting.

But a traumatic experience overwhelms the parts of our brain that make experiences part of us. We have to make sense of them to make them part of us (integration).

Traumatic experience being stored in your brain is like tearing the membrane of a microphone by blasting it with an LRAD. And then trying to hear the words in the sound when you play that recording back.

If you get hurt badly enough, even the playback doesn't work right. It plays when it shouldn't--in your dreams, in waking life--and the physical response is way out of proportion to what is happening around you. Your brain has been harmed.

Right there in that crucial place, the limbic system.

That is the small picture. It's inside each of us.

Let's take another break. There's nothing so bad you can't make it worse by rushing or panicking. It sucks https://twitter.com/lesbianwastes/status/1340076534997032960

Here is a big picture.

This one is going to talk about terrible permanent things happening to people, like suicide, war, and genocide. Just so you know.

The fast majority of human cultures and peoples of history haven't had cops or prisons, or capitalism. They didn't have sin and retribution. They didn't visit that kind of hell on each other, especially not the way we've industrialized it now.

It used to be that going out on your own into the world was a dodgy proposition, and in some cases, a capital punishment. Who knows what was waiting for you out there.

And in many cases, the people around you were *your* people. You belonged. They belonged. You had a relationship with the land. You belonged to it, too. All of it was precious and irreplaceable, even though it was in abundance.

Cutting those ties would be a profound, possibly fatal trauma. I don't even want to think about it. I know people have done it to themselves and to others, I know we live under a genocidal empire, but I can't hold that kind of harm inside me all at once.

We need the sun and the land and the water to live. We need other people to live. We need our place and our people. We need to look after and be looked after. https://twitter.com/strqmul_iskwist/status/1339999017397207040

Every time a kid, or, just as sickeningly, a grown adult, is bullied into isolation or suicide, every time someone is tortured with solitary confinement or all of the other shit cops get off on, it's an echo of that genocidal harm. It maims, kills, and destroys.

The toxic culture that we live under tells us to behave as though none of that were true. Tells us vengeance satisfies, the guilty deserve punishment, the people in your life are disposable, that we should suppress "tribalism", & that land, water, & sun are resources to exploit.

We get taught not to apologize at a car accident because it might become an admission of guilt. We get taught to look away from houseless people begging for money because they're gross, different, failed, abject.

We get taught that we pay taxes and someone else we've voted for (but never really known) will take care of our problems, but we're also taught to dislike those taxes. Maybe we get taught to do better in grade school. But that lesson is almost never repeated.

I'm talking about white culture, such as it is. But the Roman Empire preceded the construction of whiteness. They weren't white, and neither were their statues. This is an imperial disease, one that ends up flattening everyone and everything that doesn't get ground up into fuel.

It has been in our brains and bodies since before we were born.

Block and move on. Accuse, counteraccuse. Escalate. Avoid. Ghost. Pretend at nice, and use gossip for power. Cancel them. They're problematic. They might be a cop, too. Anything but confront and wrestle it down together.

We know this isn't right. We wouldn't be fighting so hard, giving so much, grinding ourselves down when there's no other resource available. We are all of us *trying*.

I believe that. I sort of have to, you know?

We are going to fuck up. We are still poisoned. People who have had all of their history and culture (and even melanin) buffed and beaten out until they're just white,

people who a white empire still punishes for not completing that poisonous bleaching in this generation, we are carrying twisted histories and historical traumas. And the cops are only too happy to pile more on.

Remember, we're guilty sinners in the eyes of a culture like that. They want to beat us and separate us until we learn to be just like them. They want us to punish each other until we give up and believe that they can't be stopped.

They want to be the only way. They want us to live that atomized, lonely life all the way to the end.

They sincerely believe that their best, most exploitative oligarchs and scientists will give them another way out, and they're willing to beat, kill, and imprison forever anyone who refuses to go along with it.

That's why they cracked down on the Lakota: they wanted the uranium in the Black Hills. And they got the Diné and Hopi councils to lawyer up and sue each other over land they used to share without borders, all for strip mining coal out of Black Mesa for the corporate state.

We live such short lives, so many of us so disconnected from our ancestors that it's so hard to imagine that we can do otherwise. That we *have* done otherwise for most of the time we've been humans. This is almost all we know.

And non-carceral justice takes a long time. (But not as long as a US criminal trial.) Enough time, and safety, for everyone to cool off their defense mechanisms--that limbic system.

It involves a lot of talking, about where everyone's coming from--whoever's aggressed, whoever's been victimized, and the communities they're part of that absorbed the effects. Finding out what each person needs, and what each person can give.

That changes as the finding out goes on, because people understand each other better. That's that transformation you hear about. We all change as we go through it, and it's more powerful the more sincere and deescalated everyone can stay. It is therapy for a whole community.

People are pessimistic about anarchism, because all this sounds like a tall order. But it's the only thing that has ever worked for more than a couple thousand years in a corner of a world at a time. And you have to keep beating and killing people for that other shit. Fuck that.

And I think that the real reason anarchism doesn't sound promising is because it's been wound up by white people into this weird abstract acultural ahistorical idea, as though it were software you could just run on any group of people. That's not how it's ever worked in history.

I believe that anarchy, or something like it, is what happens when people get all the toxic shit out of their system, regain their individual agency, & take care of each other like they aren't so replaceable.

Anarchy happens when they finally become a people, without any need for all this concentrated power and control.

I won't tell you what to do. But maybe, think about how we were all we had when the feds and the wildfires had us backed up against the river. We are still all we have. As long as we don't give up and run away. And that's only going to be more true in the future.

We have to learn to heal each other's wounds. And we have to learn to let each other do that.

That's the big picture.

Speaking for myself, there are people who are pissed off at me in this. I should have treated them better. I want to apologize to them and hammer it out together. And there are people I need accountability from. I need them to own what they did and make it right.

And this whole empire is coming up for an accounting.

I think that's why we're in this together.

One afterthought: It occurs to me that the opposite of accountability is impunity.

And in a way, impunity is impossible to forgive.