Trans Migrations & Monday Meditation
Electoral Politics is Not Our Salvation, Community is!
Dear Becoming Ones: On the night of the election, I sat on the back porch of my host house in Oaxaca, Mexico, and we glanced at the reports that were coming in. It was evident that Democrats were winning, and thus a blue wave was upon us. Many people sent me congratulations for the big win, but I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I am a liberationist that opts out of 19th-century liberalism and a toxic two-party system.
There were many people working tirelessly to elect Democrats during the mid-term elections. It was a valant effort on behalf of those seeking change; yet, the one thing I wonder is: how do we tackle a 7-headed hydra, which is our current reality? Simply electing Democrats doesn’t exactly change anything. Oppositional politics and logics of oppositionality will not steward liberation. It never has.
It was James Baldwin who said that nothing can be changed, unless we first face what needs to be changed, and even then, we may not be able to change what we are facing.
Have we faced the thing that needs to be changed?
It is not the president, necessarily, that needs to shift. It is the entire system that is predicated on logics of white supremacy that are rooted in a settler-colonial memory. We have inherited a system that is embedded in dark energy.
The soul of our shared humanity is suffocating beneath logics of the imperial West.
How do we steward freedom and liberation in a system that doesn’t embody a historical memory?
I don’t think electoral politics will save us. I think our salvation is found in nurturing right relationship and building community; yet, we can only begin to do this kind of work in material ways when we confront the toxicity of the system in which we are imbedded and the ways in which we are both complicit in this very system and tethered to it. And, many of us don’t know how to do this, because the fractures and dislocatedness is so profound societally.
Yet, another possible work is among us, already.
I didn’t vote in this mid-term cycle, largely becasue I was gone for an extended period of time, and secondarily, I wasn’t compelled by the Democrats who were running for office. I don’t find progressives compelling for change. I find them in lockstep with a big tent organziation called the Democrats that try to appeal to the masses and end up compromising the least of these. James Talerico did it, along with countless others.
I’m neither on the Left nor the Right; I’m a liberationist who believes in a horizon of transformation and systemic change. I find our structures deeply compromised by logics that support unending violence and genocide. I am unraveling from these logics and the logics that have conditioned me to think in a register that is unintelligible to the people. I am suturing myself and re-mem-ber-ing myself as an imperative for the sake of liberation.
I am turning to story and myth as a way to undermine our current malestrom of toxic politics. I’m turning to food, art, and ritual as a way to nurture another possible world. I am turning to right relationship and cultrual metanoia as a way to unhinge from the politics of representationalism, which fails us every time and taking steps to(ward) a liberatory horizon of difference.
I am on a journey, similar to many of you, finding my way, poco a poco, and nurturing relationships that endeavor to suture social trust and the deep wounds that we have each inherited and have comprimised us. I am trying to face the thing that needs changing, and I find that what needs changing is on a soul level.
The dark energy that abounds is what needs to be composted into truth, beauty, and goodness; yet, how do we manage that kind of transformation within systems and logics that betray us?
The assault on the poor continues to trouble me.
The expansionism of the Imperial West further troubles me.
Capitalism and the interlocking systems of power that accelerates globalized racialized capitlaism haunts me every day. I cannot unsee this.
It’s why I am returning to the first things, the Source, and nurtruing liberation in all I do.
When I was in Santa Fe, I asked my research question to a Land Dyke over really delicious red chile enchiladas. The reply to my question, which is: how do we turn to(ward) one another? was “donkeys!” This Land Dyke said Donkeys can help us, so we headed to Abiqui, NM to visit donkeys. She was right! A visit with donkeys helped and it was, once again, nature that spoke.
Nature can teach us so much! I remember sitting in London with my good friend Jacky Power who told me to pay attention to nature to learn about belonging and freedom. And, subsequently, this new dance I am tracing with a new dance partner has also urged me to pay attention to nature. So, I am! Both of these humans have been right about how nature can teach us how to be with one another and steward a politics of difference amid the hegemony of empire.
The natural world can teach us so much about how to encourge difference in a world of hegemonic norms and homogenity that stifles us into a lockstep regime of supremacy culture.
Difference philosophically suggests that there is no norm. Complexity and difference is the current in which we are swimming; yet, the systems that are in place are tethered to hegemonic norms that dangerously threaten the current stream of difference and complexity and the flourishing of us all.
In my doctoral program, I spent time reading continental philosophy and became a scholar of the system of ideas. Trained in both philosophy and theology, I have come to see the failure of modernity and thus wish to hospice modernity. That is what I am trying to do. Hospice modernity and engage in a generative process of suturing social trust.
I believe it is relationships all the way down.
The expansionism of the Imperial West threatens the livelihood and the flourishing of the least of these, and also impacts the dominant culture. Power, access, and privilege continue to flow in such a manner that the least of these are left bereft and without possibility. Which is why I don’t think electoral politics will save us.
Take James Talerico for example. When he was asked about me, he told the press he missed the mark. He first outed himself as a fanboy of my work, but then when pressed about appearing on my podcast years ago during the pandemic, he appealed to dominant culture and threw me under the bus. Many Democrats did the very same thing when asked about Transn people.
James Talerico is just as compromised as Donald Trump. There is fascism on both sides. Neither the Right nor the Left will save us, and choosing the lesser of two evils will entangle us in a tussle that cannot and will not save us.
The only other option is to nurture right relationship and build community.
The only option is to cultivate a cultural metanoia, a cultural turning to(ward) one another.
How do we do that?
I think it starts with getting right with ourselves and naming the ways our comfort keeps us complicit in logics of supremacy culture. This work is an inside job. Life’s work.
When will we commit to the work of liberation from within the imperial core?
My teacher reminds me that there is no pure place from which to do theology and ethics. I have to remember this.
As I read the Baldwin biography, which I try to do as often as I am able, I am reminded that he, too, longed for love and companionship; he longed for community and he searched for it in lovers and through writing.
What I have discovered is that the work to be faithful in the small things is where it’s at.
Fidelity.
Our world lacks fidelity to tradition, culture, and the people.
We’ve become so dislocated from our traditions and culture as the West conitnues to expand in Imperial ways that we no longer know how to practice right relationship with one another.
We depend on systems like electoral politcs and yet can’t see clearly or discern another way forward. This terrifies me!
So, if electoral politics will not save us, what might?
This is where I think nurutring community and right relationship is the better route. There are many ways to make and cultivtate community. The Spirit cultivates multiple paths; there is no one way to make community.
Community is relational and when we lean into a generative relationality, we often find our way. We need more of this and less logics of oppositionality.
We need each other more and more as the days linger and as fascism shows itself on both sides.
Liberation is a horizon that we may never touch; yet, the yearing for another possible world is not in vain.
This yearing is similiar to what my teacher writes about making “little moves against destructiveness.”
Hoping against hopelessness is a way through. Hope is one of the most beautiful things I know. It is the greater ecstasy for which I long.
Another possible world is among us; we just have to know where to look for it.
Yours, in search for another possible world. ¡Un otro mundo!
Paz, —RCE+
