A Dispatch from the Maelstrom

An off-the-cuff Indigenous Peoples Day update from the Grouse House

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

With the exception of last week’s short story, it’s been pretty quiet on this Substack. That is because offline, life has been overwhelming. It has been for everyone I care about, everyone who is paying attention to this drowning, burning world. I have tried to write, but my brain has been addled, my thoughts incoherent. The story I posted last week was one from the vault that I drafted last summer and revised weeks ago, back when I could still write a coherent paragraph.

My life has been a complex convergence of personal problems and world events. I underwent spine surgery in August, from which I’m still recovering. The post-surgery brain fog lasted for weeks. I am doing physical therapy, have been going on regular hikes, and am running errands on my bike again. I hope to start running again by the end of November.

I had my final court date for the Palestine protest case in mid-September. I’m incredibly grateful to the friends and comrades who came to support me as I went before the judge and took a plea deal. They dropped the felony charge. I pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor in exchange for a suspended jail sentence, restitution, and a year supervised probation. I am glad to avoid incarceration and to have my freedom of movement back. It feels gross to have to tell the state about my mental health diagnosis and give them a list of prescriptions I carry for pain and anxiety. It feels gross to still have to tell them where I’m going whenever I plan to travel.

I also stepped off the last dose of medications I’d been taking for bipolar disorder for thirteen years, concluding a long, slow process of titrating off meds as I challenge the impacts of the biomedical model of mental illness on my life. I tried to write a piece reflecting on my experiences with madness and the moonscape that is my inner world right now, but I couldn’t make it work. The fact is, I believe the world is unhinged, and the horror I feel is what I think any whole, healthy human being should feel when their region is being pounded by fossil fuel enhanced storms and their tax dollars are paying to have Palestinian children burned alive in hospital beds. I tried to write about why I don’t want to medicate away those feelings: because it would feel dishonest, because I want to be connected to the world, because I want to have a shot at knowing the fullness of my humanity in all its queerness and neurodivergence, at least for a little while, even if it’s late in life. Without the meds, I feel more connected, no longer numbed and emotionally throttled. But as these apocalypses unfold I can feel the world dying, and sometimes it is unbearable. I still have those “as-needed” meds, and I’ve needed them.

What makes me feel better is being connected to others, taking action, being helpful. My crew has helped organize mutual aid in the Shenandoah Valley for the Helene disaster zone further south, and the other day I moved a carload of tools and hurricane relief supplies to a hub in Blacksburg. From there they are being distributed throughout Southwest Virginia and Western North Carolina. I started writing a different essay saying that if we have the ingenuity to organize mutual aid to survive the forced shutdown of an entire region, then we can certainly organize to voluntarily shut down our economy to stop a genocide. But then I scrapped it. It felt cavalier and extractive, leveraging the suffering of Appalachia to make a point. The fact is there are still hundreds of people missing who either did not survive or who have not been reached and may die as a result. We will learn many lessons from this, but we must let the people of Appalachia be the teachers, not outsiders extracting from their suffering and labor for a hot take on mutual aid.

But the death feelings are relentless, I’m casting about for words, so after two scrapped posts I’m typing these words straight into the editor.

The death feelings are deeply connected to my awareness of the wrongness of our way of life under extractive capitalism and the cascading collapse of this death-cult we call a “civilization.” I have questions and doubts about collective human behavior. I wonder whether the majority of people feel the horror and dread that I feel. I scroll Instagram and so many are living their best lives, pursuing and celebrating accomplishments and milestones and partying away like everything is fine and will be “normal” forever, like we don’t have less than a generation to revolutionize our culture, stop burning stuff and mining and using plastic, and learn how to live close to the land again. They seem blissfully unaware of the human-caused mass extinction that is taking place all around us. And when we are presented with political choices about whether to vote or whether to go on strike, we choose loyalty to the status quo and belief in magical techno-fixes. We stump for our genocidal candidate and march dutifully to the polls. A union goes on strike, but continues to load weapons for Izrahell. And I think that it’s not just our leaders who are the villains in this story: people who should know better use what power they do have to protect their privileges under capitalism and colonialism every day. From the rich and powerful to the poor and desperate, we stand with the settlers against the resistance. I wonder whether we even deserve to survive this?

What would it look like to collectively awaken to the gravity of our situation? How do we change course? Are we all stuck on a bus being driven towards a cliff by a mad operator? Or are we molecules in a river flowing towards a waterfall? A bus is a machine that can be controlled if we disable the operator and seize the wheel. A river is both relentless and helpless, only able to adapt and change course if it encounters a hard obstacle. What is the work ahead? Seizing the wheel and stomping on the brakes? Or tossing rocks into a stream in hopes of diverting the flow? Or something else entirely?

Apocalyptic events like Hurricane Helene are what collapse looks like, the inevitable end result of what Columbus began over 500-years ago. History would be so much easier, less violent, if we acted like this was the bus scenario, if we learned our lessons and rose up and dismantled these systems in a controlled, intentional way, justly distributing the necessary hardship through land back and reparations while protecting the vulnerable. But instead we desperately defend the status quo, making the inevitable collapse even harder by surrendering our power and agency, distributing the brunt of the suffering to those who can least afford it.

And so we make it like the river instead. Disasters like Helene are boulders in the stream. They are horrific, but they give us an opportunity to change, adapt, to build new structures, new pathways out of the destruction of the old systems. I keep wondering, what if they don’t let the disaster capitalists and gentrifiers back in? What if they don’t let polluting, predatory businesses who kill their employees during hurricanes reopen their doors? Without income, what if people expropriate their housing, refuse to pay rent, then stand their ground when the landlords send the cops to evict them? What if workers seize the infrastructure to keep the supply chains moving, distributing food and medicine without charge? Those are potentially real choices facing people who aren’t me right now, and therefore aren’t my choices to make. But what I can do is keep building up structures and imagining futures with my crew where I am, because our friends and comrades in Appalachia need the rest of us to have their backs.

And maybe the next hurricane will happen here.

I’ll close this impromptu screed with a book recommendation: The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution From Below. I’ve never had a chance to meet Peter Gelderloos, but he used to organize where I live now, and his hard-hitting but hopeful words are rooted in a deep web of relationships with social movements all over the world. This book talks about what a world beyond capitalism and colonialism might look like, the lethal dangers of the magical techno-fixes of green capitalism, and what we must be willing to do to get free. You can also check out his Substack here.

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