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