This is Champagne Song from solitary confinement. Please visit prairielanddefendants.com. This is a little mini essay I wrote called “The Twin Cities and Community-Wide Organizing.”
It’s been incredible to see, in the Twin Cities, the huge numbers of people standing together and hearing about seemingly every restaurant on a street, every church, every org and group helping each other in one movement. The work to connect and listen to each other has been constant and building up continuously from 2020 – is what I’ve heard. And that lines up with some of my best experiences meeting, connecting, listening to, and learning from all kinds of different people from all kinds of different backgrounds. I think that meeting people where they’re at oftentimes means leveraging the existing networks and centers of community. I think it’s important to remember that no group effects massive change alone. If you look at history, all kinds of disparate groups have worked together, and I think about that not just in this place, this country, but everywhere across the globe as well.
I want to implore people to get out of their comfort zones and never stop making new connections. Also, never to stop updating your analysis. Finding your people, and in them finding your power, is an important first step, but it’s important not to stop there. We really need as many people as possible to be talking and connected and not to rely on social media for that. That’s really a connection that hangs by a thread; getting face to face, getting connected by phone numbers, Signal, email addresses. Within that, I think it’s important to talk about conflict resolution and avoiding burnout, but also just to broadly remember that no one has really ever convinced everyone that they’re right. At no time in history has everyone joined one group, and never has everyone just got along and been friends. But still, we need to communicate, share, and help each other as part of one effort and one struggle. It’s really too important not to. This is Champagne Song, sentenced to 100 years for anti-fascism.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
