Immortal Intellectuals

 

I met a guy in college once who confessed to a bit of road rage. I was disappointed by this because the guy was really cute, but the idea of dating someone with road rage was an immediate no. 

Anyway. This just goes to explain that people can change, because last week I had my own fit of road rage. I blasted Monster by Skillet and tried my hand at excessive speeding, then a truncated slamming on my breaks, to jolt my soul back into resonance. It actually helped me, and I was surprised by this.  

I have a lot of thoughts to share, largely because my computer crashed for six months and I'm only now getting it back. lol. I'm thinking a lot about our political climate, how we are descending into fascism at an unprecedented but not perplexing rate. I am trying to think about how we all survive. And I do mean all of us. I do not think we are in a circumstance where protesting is going to do much good. I wish it would. but, part of me has grown increasingly disillusioned with protesting. People fetishize it. they do dangerous things, risking people's lives. to be clear, i support property destruction. Capital will never have value over human life. But, there is a certain strain of antifa protesters who have a death wish. they think the violence is punk, and consecrates them as good revolutionaries. I think staying alive is punk. Whatever the cost.


Ericka Hart once said white people cant be revolutionaries and i believed her. It was good for me, because at the time I was in a very academic setting and I thought being an academic could somehow make me a good revolutionary. I needed to give up on that dream to see how I was playing into the system, how academics co-opt decolonial and anti-racist praxis for their own covert and capital gain. 


but, lets just say a few of my heroes have disappointed me. I'm realizing that no one is coming to save me. The people who I trusted to be beacons of love and intellect have fallen to the charisma of domination. 


I still believe in being an intellectual, but I believe the best intellectuals are accessible. I really do think a lot of academia is just bad writing, because people are obsessed with seeming smart. and I think we sort of gaslight the public about their ability to understand oppression. 

Part of being an anarchist it the affirmation that the public has within them the ability to care for each other and dictate their own path towards liberation. Now, of course, that's not saying this is a divinely-gifted knowledge. Just like a language, we must learn how to disseminate the undoing of hierarchies. But it's also not supposed to be something painfully cerebral, past our ability to relate back to our own lives. This is one reason why I still defend identity politics, because I believe everyone, even the cishet white frat boy, can articulate how our systems of domination have robbed us of our humanity.

Anyway. I have decided to return to my revolutionary aspirations. I may be a revolutionary fuck up, but I don't think that negates my ability to aid our collective liberation. I think we learn best when we fuck up. I'm no longer interested in being morally superior to anyone. 

I have tapped to my wall a quote by Toni Cade Bambara, " do not leave the arena to the fools". It's simple, but it's become important to me. I will define a fool as anyone who is so scared to fuck up that they will not enter the proverbial arena. Or, someone who thinks they are incapable of fucking up. Its funny, but I used to be both of these things. 

I think there is a certain brilliance that can only be found in burning your life down. If this impulse to be revolutionary ignites my destruction, I know I will survive. 

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