Organize or Be Organized

I spent three years as a campus tour guide in college, showing groups of prospective students around campus for the Admissions office. One of the stories I told over and over and over again went something like this:

“Knox College was founded in 1837 by radical abolitionists from upstate New York. There were several Underground Railroad stops here in town, including what’s now known as “The Old Jail” here on campus. Because the town sprang up around the college, the early townspeople were, by and large, also abolitionists. 

When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, one story goes that two bounty hunters looking for formerly enslaved people came to town one day, asking questions.

That same night, the townsfolk came together and ran them out of town with torches and pitchforks. They were warned very clearly never to return, and they didn’t.”

Whether that story was true or apocryphal is not the point - it’s that this legend was a point of pride for us. In telling it, we as current students and prospective students became part of a story in which principled people were informed of a bass-ackwards law and said “no thank you.” Then they absolutely refused to allow it to be enforced in their community.

I’ve been thinking of this story as I consider Jesus’ command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Luke 6)

Generally, torches and pitchforks are not very loving. I don’t tend to recommend that practice as an act of love for one’s enemies.

But I sometimes wonder: if a person is hell-bent on doing horrific harm to another and cannot be dissuaded by words alone - could stopping them, redirecting them, causing them to flee or leave, be considered an act of love toward them? At what point does stopping someone from doing harm, especially to innocent people, become the most loving thing you can do for them?

This is often how I approach questions of inclusion in the church with folks who have done great harm - especially when it’s argued that “they couldn’t help it, so they shouldn’t be punished or restricted.” Absolutely not. When we put strict boundaries in place, this is done out of love. The most loving thing those of us with power can do, especially for someone who “couldn’t help it”, is to never, ever place them in a situation to do that same harm again.

Part of the issue with this argument, however, is this same logic has also been used to do further harm to marginalized individuals and communities: isolating them, refusing them equal rights and opportunities, separating families, and imprisoning the innocent in the name of protecting some favored group. Unfortunately, this same logic was applied to lynchings and vigilante mob violence for much of US history.

We are not the first, and we willl not be the last, to wonder how we can stand to live with injustice and inhumanity without becoming another source of injustice and inhumanity. No one wants to normalize mob violence or vigilanteism - but in extraordinary circumstances, stories like this one can help us remember that within principled communities, we are not helpless or powerless.

By keeping these stories alive, filing them away in our minds, we can claim our places in a much longer and larger story of principled rebellion and rejection of evil. And within that story, we can find ourselves as part of a community, standing together to say “absolutely not.” 

So how do we do that?

Imagine with me:
You find yourself at some sort of cosmic arcade, and you are presented with a room containing nothing but a massive, full-wall-size game of whack-a-mole.

The rules are simple: for every mole you hit, you avoid one singular catastrophe for the world. For every mole you miss, you and your loved ones will lose a fundamental right, societal benefit, research program, government protection, or social safety net program. Because you have stepped into the room, you are required to play this game 24/7 for the next four years.

Obviously, you will lose. A lot. You will also lose your physical, mental, emotional, and social health in trying. You despair.

But then, you notice the rules do not say you have to be the only one playing. So you bring in 10 friends, learning to cooperate and take shifts. You figure out that three people each watching part of the board is more effective than one or two watching the whole thing. Someone draws up a schedule so everyone gets time to eat, sleep, read, work, watch TV, and be a functional human. 

Soon, those 10 people are also tired, nearing burnout. So you tell them to each invite 3 friends and train them in the ways of whack-a-mole. The schedule expands. Eventually, you have volunteers who reach out to game experts who predict the moles’ moves, so everyone can relax a little more. Friends of friends of friends start bringing food and treats. Someone gets everybody really comfy chairs. You still have to play the game, and there are a few surprises, but you and you alone are not literally dying trying to stay awake and on guard for four years to keep your way of life. 

This is the work of organizing. It is literally just organizing a community in order to solve a problem.

Spreadsheets and meetings and dealing with conflict amongst community members sounds like way less fun than waiting around for Captain America or Indiana Jones to show up and punch the Nazis, saving us all.

But Cap and Indy aren’t coming, and there is no ‘undo’ button. No one is going to swoop in, knock out the bad guys, and restore the country, the infrastructure, and the values we knew on January 19th, 2025.

The best we can do now is try to mitigate the damage (present and future), and work on convincing the majority that people are not parasites, caring for others is not weakness, and there really are healthy ways to invest in social welfare and global development that do not involve giving billionaires more money to play with.

This project is not a sprint. It’s not even a marathon.

It’s a relay race.

This is why organizers and activists are telling you to spend this time, while 47’s administration is tied up in legal battles over executive orders, to invest in your local community. This investment advice takes two forms: principled communities and neighborhood organizing.

Principled communities come from a wider geographic area, but they have some core principles, values, and ideas in common - and they work toward a particular goal together. These are labor unions, political parties, advocacy organizations, faith groups and churches, and activist-led groups.

Neighborhood organizing is the process of building trust and connections with your own physical neighbors. You do this by putting yourself out there - checking in on the older folks after a snow storm or shoveling their sidewalk, sharing the trial-and-error baked goods you have too many of instead of throwing them away, bringing some pasta after a birth, death, or hospital stay, sharing cleaning supplies after a flood.

Online communities are great for brainstorming, national and regional organizing, and getting specific kinds of support. But in the future, when it all well and truly hits the fan, you will need trusted contacts, supportive communities, and mutual aid networks who are physically close to you. The more energy you put into knowing and caring for your communities in these ways now, the better off you will be if and when the worst-case scenarios come to life.

Even if things don’t get that bad, there is no downside to investing in these communities. It’s difficult work - it will cost you something emotionally and mentally. But if you can manage to organize or be organized, you won’t have to ask “what do I do?!” when a crisis hits - you will already be surrounded by the people who know.