Beautiful, thank you for sharing this, I have shared it widely. Solidarity & positive wishes from all of us at Broken Spoke Bike Co-op.
Josh, is this message online anywhere that we can link to it from our social media pages? If not, could we publish it as a blog post on our site?
Ride on in peace & joy, Johnny
Johnny Fill Administrator & Lead Mechanic Broken Spoke Bike Co-op www.bsbcoop.org --
On 09/11/2016 19:47, Josh Bisker wrote:
This is a message I sent to the Mechanical Gardens. I'm passing it on to you here. Feel free to repurpose. Love and strength and sorrow, everyone.
Josh
This is a message of hope and strategy.
Today we enter a broken future, and the dangers that now loom on the horizon are too numerous to be counted and too massive to be properly appraised. In consequence, we as the Mechanical Gardens now have a tremendous responsibility. "We've got our work cut out for us," is a saying that's been in the air. Here's what I believe that looks like for us. We must make our co-op a place that actively opposes the agenda of hatred, and defends and elevates women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, the disabled, and the impoverished. We must become an organization that embodies social mechanisms for achieving equity, safety, mutual aid, compassion, and environmental justice in our operations and outlook.
This election is a disaster; its fallout will be far worse, snowballing into a series of crises as the new government destroys the many social, cultural, and economic systems that people depend upon for life. For the Mechanical Gardens, therefore, I submit that rather than asking "what can we do to help people avoid the coming crisis," we approach our work slightly differently, asking: "what can we do in the co-op so that after these crises come, after the systems we depend on are undone, that groups of people still know how to operate in ways that support their values and provide safety for them?"
This means that the soft stuff on our agenda -- like creating our guidelines for decision-making, collective respect, and participation -- is the most important work we have cut out for us, alongside our outreach to bring more people into the shop and the collective. These are everything. These are the seeds of a solid tomorrow that we tend and cultivate at the co-op, and that we entrust to everyone who comes in the door, so that they can plant and foster them as well, no matter what calamity comes.
How do we do this? We begin by training ourselves to articulate our values and decide how to formally embed them in our cooperative structure, and deciding to informally embody them in our ways of being. Some of our values stand alone; others will be informed by the risks we see to liberty and justice, such as the threats of persecution, discrimination, sexual exploitation, authoritarianism, police and mob brutality, land exploitation, the devaluing of science and reason, and the fracturing of democratic institutions. We must decide how to value and embed compassion, equity, feminism, mutual aid, environmental sustainabilty, enfranchisement, reason, protection against persecution, safety, autonomy, responsibility, and respect into the bike co-op, both in the institution and in our interactions there.
Bike stuff is important too! Mechanicship especially is critical to the oncoming era of climate calamity, with uncertain roads, settlement conditions, and gasoline access meaning that bikes become invaluable for billions of devastated and displaced people worldwide. (General DIY skills and self-confidence too.) But bikes here might be a vehicle to helping us empower ourselves and our communities to create thriving structures that support their groups' values.
This, I submit to you, is "our work." We have so much we can learn from each other in it. How to be listeners, how to be leaders, how to be community members. How to be strong, how to be nimble, how to collaborate. And how to work not out of fear but of love for each other, those around us, and those yet to come. These things are the seeds of the revolution we need to prepare for.
This has been a bad day, but I'm very happy to be doing this work with you. The world is in trouble, and by coming together, we have found work that will help people survive the dark times ahead.
Josh
The ThinkTank mailing List <a href="http://lists.bikecollectives.org/options.cgi/thethinktank-bikecollectives.org">Unsubscribe from this list</a>