Craig and I recently posted a statement and some resources for further reading on Make (also on Facebook as a group called “I still think marriage is the wrong goal.”) I thought this might interest Enough readers who are as dissatisfied by the neoliberal gay agenda as we are.
Makezine move
Hi Friends,
I wanted to let you know that Craig and I unfortunately lost the domain name we’ve used for years for our zine/website Make, so we’ve moved the site to a new spot. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the horribleness of how capitalism runs the internet, but I won’t trouble you with what is probably obvious about how webspace is owned.
Teaching Poverty Law
This semester I’m teaching Poverty Law at Seattle U. Law. It has been a fun and challenging task to put together a syllabus and decide what should be included in a class covering such a broad topic. So much of what is taught in law school I would consider rich people’s law and so much of what poverty lawyers do in the day-to-day is not covered in law school courses or tested on the bar exam. Trying to create a class that might address all the enormous constant legal issues faced by poor people (eviction, criminalization, child welfare, public assistance, old age benefits, immigration, low-wage work, Medicaid, consumer rights, credit, gentrification, etc.) and all the ways that the law structures our economic relations to create poverty is daunting. Continue reading “Teaching Poverty Law”
Scarcity Art
I thought others might enjoy this video documenting a recent performance of one of my favorite artists, Emma Hedditch, which touches on issues of scarcity, public/private, collaboration and support.
Notes from a Wealth Redistribution Conciousness-Raising Dinner Party
Last November, Jess and Dean worked on putting together a dinner party that would function as a kind of group consciousness-raising session about wealth redistribution. We invited a number of friends, several who did not know each other but were connected socially through us and others. The group we invited included people from a range of class experiences and current circumstances. We created the event based on the idea that a key way to make change around wealth redistribution is to start conversations in our intimate circles that are overtly aimed at being non-judgmental and where people can address fears and concerns and teach each other models and ideas for addressing them. Continue reading “Notes from a Wealth Redistribution Conciousness-Raising Dinner Party”
(Red) Campaign Criticized
Enough reader Aaron With recently wrote to us to share info about a campaign he is involved with focused on accountability regarding the philanthropy-themed (Red) advertising campaign. Aaron’s message, with links to the campaign, is below.
Letters about Poverty
by Lis Goldschmidt, Dean Spade, and Pascal Emmer
These letters originally appeared on Make and the first two also appeared in the anthology Without a Net (Ed. M. Tea).
Dean-
Hey. How’s things in NYC? Tired here. Just home from hanging out with everyone. Feeling really tired of the class stuff we were talking about the other day. Tired of people fronting like they’re poor or grew up poor or whatever-like it’s cool to be poor. You know the deal. They put it on like an accessory. You know? Just like co-opting any culture. Do you know what I mean? It’s like people who wear ‘native garb’ from wherever they’re exoticizing at the moment-but the thing is they take it off when it gets old to them.
I guess I’m just feeling pretty pissed. Like I can’t take it off. Like it IS old. It’s always been old. And makes me feel old and fucking tired. And small.
I don’t mean to rant.
The main reason I’m writing is ‘cause you carry the facts and I feel like I need them. You know the details that I think can help me not feel erased by these kinds of nights. You know how much mom made. You know the welfare info. It sounds dumb-I know what it was like but I’ve spent my whole life pretending it was something else-my whole life trying to pass as something else–I need the numbers to feel justified or some shit. I need those numbers to prove me wrong or call me out or something. Does that sound weird? It’s like I’ve even convinced myself…also like I want some fact to separate me from those people.
I mean I remember it. I remember what it was like. I remember the shame and all that. I remember that greedy excited fucked up feeling I got when she’d bring home the groceries. I remember swallowing myself one zillion times. I remember that heavy fucking cloud that hung around our tiny house. That fog that made it so hard to breathe. That stress that kept us all quiet and angry and sad. Remember?
I’m scrambling for something good and light but it goes back as far as I can remember. It only got darker and heavier.
The end was the worst, right? I guess fro me it was the worst because I felt like I was the mom when she was sick. You know? Not that we didn’t both have to pick up what she couldn’t carry anymore. But I remember doing the grocery shopping by myself. You know I think it’s really only the last maybe 5 years that I don’t have some crazy fear while in line at the grocery store. I think this is actually the first time I’ve really thought about it. There’s the shame of shopping at the discount store. Scared someone from school would see us or something-and scared that if anyone ever (not that they ever did) come to OUR house they’d see the bags from there. (Not to mention just seeing the house!) But then there were all the times we had to put stuff back-do you remember that? I cringe thinking about it right now. It was terrible. Embarrassing. I remember being scared to look at mom in that moment. How she’d look it all over a have to decide what to put back. How did she do that? How can you decide what food your three kids DON’T need? Can you imagine how stressful that must have been for her? Ugh. I fucking makes me want to puke. Then there was the shame of using food stamps. It’s funny how kids I know now use food stamps with so much pride.
Dean this sucks. I hate thinking about this stuff. I’m trying to reclaim it or something but sometimes it just feels like mom trained us so well that passing is easier and the shame is too thick. Sometimes I think I’d make the world’s greatest spy because I can pretend so well. Time to sleep.
I hope you’re well-
I’m glad we have each other in this.
xo lis
Dear Lis,
I took this letter with me to Montreal where I was showing the film Tara and I are making about trans people and bathrooms. While I was there, the friends of friends had a “white trash†themed barbeque. The people I was staying with called the hosts to voice our protest to this theme, and heard that others were also upset, so we went anyway, thinking people wouldn’t participate in the theme and that the message had gotten across. Of course, we were too optimistic. Many people came fake-pregnant, with giant Budweiser cans, fake southern accents and severe blue eye shadow. What to do? I thought about how ‘trashy’ it is for poor people to have children, how differently poor people’s substance abuse is surveilled and punished, how easily these white people employed a term that suggests that all non-white people are trash while only some white people require such labeling. I thought about the time you were invited to a white trash event where people were encouraged to black out their teeth, and I thought of how mom lived her whole life hiding that she had dentures-like everyone in her family-from a time when dental care for the poor was pulling out all their teeth in adolescence. When she died I learned she had hidden this from me (you too?) my whole life-sleeping in uncomfortable dentures all those nights during our 13 years together when I was too scared to sleep alone-all to hide from even me her poverty shame. (Meanwhile I dreamt of braces other kids at school could afford.) I thought of my own consciousness, starting in elementary school, of the need to separate myself from the term white trash. Be carefully how you smell, who sees your house. Try to get mom not to curse or smoke in front of other people’s parents.
But at this party I bit my tongue, turned my head when they arrived in costumes. Couldn’t bring myself to speak on this rooftop full of people I just met. I spend 60-80 hours a week exclusively talking about poverty and advocating for poor people, but I could not advocate for myself, could not give up the small amount of passing, of blending in. We left fast and Pascal, Brianna and I ranted on the street wondering how we should have handled it, talking about how girl-social conditioning still operates in our trans bodies convincing us we shouldn’t confront. With every passing hour since I’ve been more irate, no place to put it, more anger to add to the churning crushing pile that lives behind my sternum.
Tired. I hear you about being tired. I’m tired of being diplomatic about poverty. Tired of trying to convince rich people at non-profits, rich people at foundations, and rich gay people especially to care about and support the lives of low-income intersex and trans people. I’m tired of helping them notice that we exist, trying not to make them too uncomfortable to give money to the struggle that (when we win, which we will), will end wealth and poverty for everyone. Tired of being gentle and non-threatening and helping them appease guilt about their hoarding so they can act a little. And I’m tired of hearing that you’re getting paid less than the private-college educated man who sits next to you doing the same job, and tired of seeing all my trans friends without jobs, adequate housing and trapped in the criminal injustice system. I’m tired of other poverty lawyers (from upper class backgrounds) telling me I don’t pay myself enough when I make twice what mom supported 4 people with in the years she had jobs, and when our clients are fighting like hell for a couple hundred bucks a month from welfare or ten bucks to make a call from jail. I have to figure out how to not get too tired. Sometimes I think that’s what killed our mom. Somehow, you and I got out of there, out of that dirty house, off those gravel roads, out of Virginia, but she didn’t make it. I think all the time what it would be like if she could see us now-if I could make her a fancy dinner in my apartment (artichokes) and take her to see something city-beautiful, if for her birthday we could fly her to San Francisco and all three of us could have tea in your kitchen and walk around gold gate park and she’d tell us the names of all the flowers. It’s almost mother’s day.
You asked for the facts. I carry them around like the chip on my shoulder. The most she ever made was $18,000 one year. Our welfare was less that $400/month. We got a total of $50 when we three spent Saturdays cleaning the glass and mirror store, less when we cleaned houses. The Social Security Survivor’s Benefits our foster parents got for us were about $500/month each until we turned 18. (It’s sick that she could support us better by dying but there was not money to help keep her alive.) The jacket she always wanted when she was in middle and high school, that all the other kids had but she never got, was $7.02 Canadian. The most important fact, maybe, is that if we’d been in the same situation after the 1996 welfare cuts, we wouldn’t have been entitled to the same benefits because of her immigration status, and, in my estimation, we would have had a much harder time keeping a place to live or staying together as a family as long as we did.
I love you, Lis. You’re my memory and my witness, and my only connection to all that we’ve lost. I love that you keep the sweatpants mom got in rehab and that I slept in them when you were caring for me after my chest surgery. When I’m not biting my tongue, it’s because I’m thinking of how quickly you call people on their shit, how vicious your wit can be, and how you always have my back.
Love, Dean
Dean —
This is not an editorial note but a further reflection on the night we attended that fucked-up party. Internally and with other people I’ve been hashing out feelings of anger, repulsion, and frustration about how events went down and the way in which I responded to them. Mostly I felt horrified and betrayed by the fact that the party’s theme had not been dropped (or remotely questioned) by the time we arrived when the host had been confronted in advance about the theme’s malicious nature. In the end, the decision to attend the party at all was under the assumption that we would be participating in a barbeque, and not in something with a “white trash†motif.
Of course, things did not play out that way and we found ourselves amidst attendees clad in “trashy†clothes, either fake-pregnant or drug-addled. In my head I thought about people’s costumes and behaviors as racial and class minstrelsy, where masquerading as white and poor shored up this tacit claim to a clean, bourgeois white identity. Recognizing that not everyone shared this assumed middle-class white background would have the disrupted the suppression of guilt and denial of privilege enabled by white trash fetishism. You are so right to point out the racist and eugenicist implications of the theme as well.
What remains more troubling to me than people performing “white trash†was how i found myself utterly silenced and unable to confront them about their fucked-up behavior. It’s intense to think about how deep girl-social conditioning runs, compelling us to be diplomatic and non-confrontational when the situation called for the contrary. But that aside, it’s really important to acknowledge the differing degrees of marginality we experience in a given context. For you, not saying anything to the people at the party might have been a survival strategy. For me, having never had to deal with food insecurity or the social crime of being poor, not saying anything meant being complicit with the theme’s anti-poor message. Though i thought things had been rectified beforehand, i’m responsible for having invited a friend to a party where there was a known chance that they could be made vulnerable. Also, part of surviving is knowing that we can depend on people we care about to advocate for us is situations where a vulnerability to oppression prevents us from advocating for ourselves. In this sense, my silence meant failing to be an ally when it was needed. As well, you didn’t know any of those people, which made it difficult to engage them in any sort of challenging dialogue. Some of the folks there i consider friends and many do good political work, so i was distressed by this strange peer dynamic which shutdown conversation and isolated (and dismissed) those who took issue with the theme.
This has got me thinking about strategies we can prepare for the next time something like this happens (b/c sadly, it’s bound to). i attribute my silence and inaction to not having been ready to deal with the surprise and severity of what we witnessed. While this may be legitimate it’s certainly no excuse. Being able to respond with immediacy requires a little fore-planning, like enlisting all of your friends before the event happens to dis-invite themselves and to make explicitly clear their refusal to participate in anything so fucked-up. Or, deciding to collaboratively crash the party with the intent to make sure people get it. i remember that person who came wearing white articles of garbage and thinking how subversive that could have been with a different intention. Confronting with tact, creativity, and most of all NO COMPROMISE is an idea that consumes my thoughts a lot. Next time i’m fully prepared to make a stink, knowing that whatever vicious or defensive bullshit others might level will be outweighed by the support of people i love.
I really appreciate the letter format of the communiqués between you and Lis, not to mention both of your sharp analyses and your incredible accounts of surviving and reckoning. Transmitting something political though a correspondence with someone you respect and care for deeply has this ability to communicate in unconventional ways. Class stuff is so difficult to tackle in general but especially on a personal level because of the incredible guilt or shame and social reticence around it. It’s ingrained in us from early on to conceal our economic status, to actively avoid discussing class privilege in real terms, and to deny, vilify, or (for upper-class liberals) romanticize poverty. Having just read some of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America†and its rave reviews by upwardly-mobile liberals, it disgusts me to observe how issues of poverty are only believed or taken seriously when interpreted by an educated, middle-class person. Where much of academic writing about poverty fails is in addressing why poor people can’t speak of their own experiences and fucking be heard. This is also why the letter format is so effective. It throws readers outside their impersonal, distant relationship with the text, encouraged by most academic writing, and makes them face up to their own anger or discomfort over what they read. Your writing has this effect. Keep up the amazing work and I look forward to reading any changes or additions you make.
with love, pascal
Can You Hear Me Now?
By Colby Lenz and Dean Spade
This article originally appeared on the http://www.communitychange.org/our-projects/movementvisionlab/blog/can-you-hear-me-now-the-trouble-with-cell-phones/view website.
Many of us share a set of concerns or complaints about cell phones. You hear them all the time. Nobody makes plan anymore ahead of time. People talk on cell phones everywhere instead of looking around and being present. The constant noise of cell phone use is annoying and often rude and inappropriate. Cell phones (including those with email) encourage people to work more, losing any sense of work-life balance.
These are solid, important complaints and we have more concerns about cell phones that we want to add to the list. We hope to re-frame the conversation about this suddenly ubiquitous technology in a broader and more urgent context. Here are six problems to consider:
- Cell phones are just a new consumer luxury item masquerading as a need. A little over a decade ago we all lived life without them. We survived flat tires, street protests, non-profit jobs, family illness and our social lives without Blackberries and Razrs. Cell phones represent a new level of privatization of phone service. Along with other ways we have punished the poor, pay phones are now on the decline, making access to phones more difficult for people without cash or credit. We have moved from sharing phones (party-lines), to household lines, to individual lines. This means more money for big business. What does it mean that so many people committed to a more socialized politics are giving so much money to the telecommunications industry? What else might we do with that money if we let go of these private status symbols and shared phones like we used to?
- If everyone else held a piece of plastic filled with cancer-causing chips next to their head all day long would you? Our friends who use cell phones tell us their ears hurt. Studies worldwide suggest cell phones are linked to brain cancer, research that the phone industry works its magic to quiet or stop. We know very well that we cannot trust big business with our health and the health of our loved ones. What’s convenient now might be very painful later. We want you to live and be well.
- Cell phones don’t grow on trees. They are made of plastic, are “disposable†(meaning made to break and be lost) and millions of them are thrown into landfills every week. Coltan, a key material that makes them work, is mined in the Congo under horrendous conditions, resulting in an estimated 3.2 million deaths since 1998, deforestation of the region and birth defects from water contamination. Like all other consumer goods, the people who use and enjoy this luxury are mostly clueless about the extreme exploitation and violence required to create them.
- Bees are the key to our food and our survival. Recent studies found that commercial bee populations suddenly declined 60-70% in the US and scientists theorize cell phone signals as a very possible cause. Scientists have proven that power lines can affect bee behavior and destroy hives and the sudden increase in hive death from cell phone signals may seriously endanger plant life and food sources for bees. While mass-produced crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops rely mostly on honeybees. According to a Cornell University study, honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans.
- Cell phones are recording devices used to criminalize people. Buying and using cell phones supports surveillance culture and promotes state violence. Not only can every one of your conversations (whether your phone is next to your ear or off in your bag) be heard and recorded by the telecommunications industry and the state, it can also be used as evidence against you and anyone you speak to. And even if you personally are not targeted, your cell phone dollars support policing, surveillance and imprisonment of criminalized classes of poor people and people of color.
- Scarcity and insecurity starts at home. The emotional economy of cell phones also concerns us. Capitalism makes us feel insecure and competitive for seemingly scarce resources. The same drive to consumerism and buying cell phones is the same emotional context of fear that drives war. This national-personal insecurity matrix is visible when people buy cell phones because they’re afraid of getting in an accident or being a crime victim and needing to reach the police. It is visible when people feel they have to have a cell phone for their job, to feel professionally important. It is visible when people fear that if they don’t have one, then their friends will stop calling them and they will be disconnected from social life. It feeds capitalist imperatives: every desire must be met immediately and we must always be working and striving and climbing (socially, professionally, etc.) without rest. The mindset of the cell phone is part of our brutal economy.
But why single out cell phones for these concerns? Many other products harm the environment and mobilize our minds, bodies and social connections in the interest capital. So many products have negative health impacts and so many can be used as tools of state terror. Cell phones are not unique these ways. But what concerns us is the uncritical embrace of cell phones, especially by people on the left and self-proclaimed anti-capitalist activists. While we have an ongoing critique of cars and real estate and sweatshop-produced clothing and many other things, this gigantic, new and extremely pervasive shift in consumption goes almost un-critiqued in terms of these ramifications.
This is a call for an analysis of the operation of this technology and the telecommunications market, using all the critical skills that radical activists have developed. This is an invitation to join us and get rid of your cell phone — or don’t get one in the first place. Help us resist the allures of this technology and support each other in remembering other ways to communicate, organize and connect with one another. Like all of our other endeavors to create a better world, this is not about perfection. We are all caught in this economy, engaging in consumer practices that are harmful, but we can still identify and act on the concentrations. It is more than possible to live without a cell phone – some of us find life way better without them.
Poor Magazine Facing Eviction
Thanks to Sailor for forwarding the news that Poor Magazine is facing eviction. You can hear all about it, and “Poor’s offensive strategy on how to deal with this eviction and the planned gentrification/displacement/colonization of the whole of Market Street and beyond” by listening to the Morning Show for July 28, 2008 on kpfa.org. Also, for those of you in the Bay Area, join Poor in protesting these events on August 7 at 8 am at 1095 Market Street (at 7th).And thanks to everyone who has been sending feedback about the site. We are happy to hear that people are eager for the conversations this site aims to spark!
Critical Desire
by dean spade
I went to D.C. for a job interview last week.Riding in the airport van in the rain from Dulles surrounded by the familiar climate and landscape brought back the feeling of Albemarle County, Virginia, where I grew up.Out the window through the rain I saw an SUV and was instantly transported back in time to 8th grade when my best friend Phoebe’s dad got a new jeep with Eddie Bauer leather interior and picked us up from school in it.I was flooded with the feeling of safety I had whenever I was doing something mundane like grocery shopping with Phoebe’s family.They were my escape from my chaotic, dirty, small, sad stressful house where that whole year my mom lay dying of cancer.Our fragile little family held together sloppily by a single mom on welfare and burdened by shame and struggle was its final decline.Being the youngest I was the one sitting at home all the time trying to fill my mom’s shoes as the caretaker, trying to get her to eat, trying not to run away when she coughed and vomited and struggled to stand up and walk naked, skin hanging from bones, to the bathroom.At Phoebe’s house there were two parents, meals at a table, rules, no cursing, no drunkenness, clean sheets, the feeling of being taken care of, restrained and guided.
It is not surprising, in some ways, that an SUV can evoke all that.It is marketed, like so many things, to promise safety while reminding us of our insecurity and fear.These forces underscore capitalism—structured insecurity—the requirement that there always be a pool of unemployed laborers keeps us all in line, fearing poverty even when we’re the least vulnerable to it and craving ever more security—personal, national, economic—even when that quest for security (in the form of accumulation) ever-broadens the domestic and global wealth gap that makes everyone less safe and secure.
How do we manage desire in this emotional/political context?I think most people have some critique of their desire, some limits at which they become concerned about its impact.Whether it is concern about the environmental impact of big cars, or the labor practices supported by buying sweatshop made clothing, or the local business- and culture-killing effects of frequenting starbucks, I hear a lot of people across class making decisions about what to consume that recognize the impact of their desire and consumption on others and the principle of interconnectedness that such a recognition requires.
I am interested in how that impulse could expand, building on the analysis people have when they “vote with their dollars†by boycotting something or supporting something else, to encompass a broader understanding of the connection of our personal economic choices to the well being of others and the world we want to live in.In other words, how can we build a broader politics of redistribution that expands the critical perspectives many of us already have about consuming some goods?
I see an example of a community ethic of critical desire emerging in some aspect of the “green business†conversation.That dialogue has invited people to shift norms of desire by understanding the impact of their desire and consumption on others and understanding the desires they have inherited from culture as products of damaging political conditions (like SUV’s in an oil war).So, when people in the local foods movement write and talk about the value of building desire for fresh local fruits and vegetables in season, they are also encouraging us to question our desire for peaches in January and acknowledge the conditions that produced massive agricultural reforms that changed how food gets to our tables and the impact on local farms and on the environment of food traveling thousands of miles to our plates.
I am interested in how we could build a shared conversation that engages desire critically about money and consumption more broadly.I want to be involved in conversations with people who are joining me in acknowledging the maldistribution of wealth that permeates our world and thinking creatively about how we can be agents of redistribution in our personal lives.In other words, I want to start talking to people I know about how we can all give more money away.What is hard about this conversation is that there is an enormous taboo about talking about money in our culture, and there is an enormous feeling of scarcity and financial insecurity that everyone seems to experience in capitalism.These problems are compounded by guilt—people often feel judged about what they consume and are afraid of opening the topic about what is in their bank accounts and what kinds of electronics they are buying, even with their intimate friends, for fear of being judged.This fear is not unreasonable because often the way we all deal with our insecurity about how we’re living our lives is to judge others, so judgment is definitely a danger.To me that whole picture of fear, judgment, secrecy, and insecurity is extremely convenient for maintaining the status quo of maldistribution and preventing meaningful conversations about developing an ethical relationship to desire and consumerism in community with others.
Maybe I am naïve, but I see signs of hope for this conversation everywhere.I think many people are already engaging in some kind of critical thinking about some of their consumer desires, whether it is based on environmental concern, labor practices, or small business support. I want us to take that conversation to the next level.I want to see people talking to each other about the politics of where their money goes—what it means to “save,†what it means to buy real estate, what it means to own ipods and cell phones, what it means to give money to homeless people, what it means to give money to non-profits, what it means to share money with friends. I want us to talk about the politics of inheritance and retirement and have some thoughts about these things instead of just working on auto-pilot (aka reproducing capitalism, the ever-growing wealth gap, poverty for most of the world).I want us to think about how we could shift our desires for security in interesting ways—maybe SUV’s look safe but what is really safe is reducing our oil dependency.Maybe retirement accounts feel safe but what is really safe is saving Social Security from being privatized by Republicans.Maybe owning property feels safe but what is really safe is working toward a world in which homelessness is inconceivable.
I just heard this radio program about how during the recent wildfires in San Diego, people with extremely expensive insurance had the benefit of private firefighters coming and defending their houses, while neighbors without it had their houses burn.The fires caused a lot more damage than they might have if we didn’t live in a country that is defunding emergency services and sending our National Guard to Iraq.The message that came through to many who lost their houses is, “the government can’t protect you, you have to buy more expensive private insurance that comes with private firefighters.â€As we continue in that direction, we see the costs of safety go up and the penalties of poverty increase. I am hoping for a different conversation where we might take our fierce desires for safety and security and invest them in collective well-being that is a much more sustainable kind of protection.
Part of what I like so much about some of the environmentalism conversations is that they are not (sometimes) competitive or judgmental. People share their ideas and practices without demanding that one another do the exact same thing.Maybe you compost and your friend drives a veggie diesel car, and you tell each other about your practices and get inspired by each other, but there is not the sense of harsh judgment that might keep you from talking at all.I want the same thing in conversations about wealth redistribution.People’s lives are different, our needs and experiences are different, and we each need to navigate these difficult questions in our own ways.We might find that communities or groups of friends share absolute limits about some things—a rejection of a certain consumer good that all agree is appallingly wasteful or luxurious, or we might find that there are no shared absolutes.Ideally, what would be shared is a practice of inquiry about desire that helps us move toward more mutually beneficial ways of addressing our shared insecurities and fear.Maybe groups of friends make an agreement about caring for each other during illness or emergency rather than hoarding resources privately in fear of facing those circumstances alone.Maybe people agree on a major common fear and figure out how they can pool resources to support community organizing work aimed at alleviating that particular vulnerability.I think the answer to capitalist alienation, insecurity and fear is not private consumption, which only adds fuel to the fire, but connection and commitment to recognizing how our fates are tied.