Neighbor, I have been writing this for a long time (six months, at least). I have drafts, technical blueprints, and feedback from friends. Folks kept saying: “Just share it.” And I kept worrying I wasn’t “enough” to share a plan for moving forward, because I’m “just” a community college teacher.
I think maybe I’ve been afraid to get it wrong, to miss some crucial thing.
But over and over in my head, I’ve heard Leonard Cohen remind me:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
And the thing is: he’s right. So instead of writing the thing down, I talked it out.
I’m not afraid of anyone tearing apart this plan. If there are critiques of this plan, that’s actually awesome, because it means you’re imagining how it’d work in your neighborhood, your situation. That’s the first step. Take what you can use and scrap the rest.
That’s exactly what I want: forward movement, not perfection.
I don’t personally think it’s a perfect plan. I think it can be adapted for your neighborhood.
Think of this as loose choreography or sheet music for jazz. What we need now isn’t some completely identical plan that expects exact coordination across the country. Each neighborhood, each postal code, is different. We need to adapt a loose map and tailor it to our own neighborhood.
What makes this work isn’t just that it’s rooted in life and goodness but that it’s rooted in hyper-local community knowledge. I’m not telling anyone what to do but suggesting how you might find your lane, recognize each other, assemble, and work together to fortify your neighborhood so that fascism can’t find footing.
If you’re waiting for the perfect plan or the one charismatic leader, we’ll be here forever, circling the drain. But that doesn’t have to be our fate. Stop focusing on the mountain and refocus on your neighborhood.
This is where your power lives, and that power has nothing to do with electoral politics.
Friends, we don’t need a perfect map. We need a loose map that we can tailor to our own neighborhood, knowing our neighbors across the country are moving, according to their own ecosystem, in a similar direction.
Heck, even having a “wrong" map can be the thing that gets the job done. But in this case, it doesn’t have to be “wrong,” if you adapt it and make it yours. You can (and should) adjust as you move forward and take in more data.
This is why fascists need you scared: There are, approximately, 41,704 postal codes in the United States. Each postal code is its own terrain, its own battlefield. Only you and your neighbors know its strengths, assets, and vulnerabilities. You know the resources, the connections, and the nooks and crannies. They don’t.
Imagine an untrained group of out-of-towners tries to raid your community and rip it apart from the inside. But instead of facing a people unprepared, they face a community prepared— in every zip code, every block, every county line. Imagine relentless bespoke resistance everywhere they go.
The point is to exhaust them. The point is to prevent them from stealing our neighbors, because once we clip their ability to abuse and abduct us, the regime loses its central engine of fear.
We don’t have to agree to participate according to the fascists’ terms of engagement. This is our home turf. Let’s use it to our advantage.
This is our Home Alone moment. It’s time to make like Macaulay Culkin and use every resource at our disposal.
References
* Grace Lee Bogs The Next American Revolution
* Gene Sharp From Dictatorship to Democracy
* The Duluth Model The Wheel of Power and Control
* Daniel Immelwahr “How to Hide an Empire“
* Chase Hughes Behavior Ops Manual
* Srdja Popovic, Slobodan Djinovic, Andrej Milivojevic, Hardy Merriman and Ivan Marovic A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle
* Alexis De Tocqueville Democracy in America
* Micah Lee Practical Defenses Against Technofascism
* Peter Ackerman The Checklist to End Tyranny
* Marshall Rosenberg Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
* Rev. William Barber Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation
* Gene Sharp Civilian-Based Defense
* Andrea Ritchie Practicing New Worlds: Abolition & Emergent Strategies
* Steve York Bringing Down a Dictator
* Marshall Ganz People, Power, Change
* Hardy Merriman Strategic Planning and Tactical Choices
* The National WWII Museum “Victory Gardens: Food for the Fight“
* Mahatma Gandhi Constructive Programme
* Southerners on New Ground Core Organizing Tools
* V “The forces of loneliness can cause political instability and threaten democracy“
* Tim Whitaker “This New Year, Leave Your White Evangelical Church“
* Justin Kaushall “Can Art Fight Fascism?“
* Adrienne Maree Brown Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
* Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
* George Lakey How We Win
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