body and mind and resistance

“Change is slow.” That’s what they tell you to squander any sense of radical, embodied resistance. You’re expected to bring a sign to a gunfight; to march peacefully, still in line; to sit and watch, to rely on words on paper to do the work for you while it all crumples to dust. Lasting progress takes time and thought, but “change,” meaning survival and self-defense, doesn’t have to be this slow—but it has to have foundation. Rapid mobilizations of white supremacists and forced regime changes have demonstrated that.

They say the ruling class has class solidarity while the working class does not. They also have two things the American public seems to be lacking: the consciousness that human will and bodies transcend written laws, and a deep understanding of how everything is connected. They sure do understand how to use Israeli soldiers and AI to train ICE and make people stupid, complicit, and reliant on automation while climate-accelerated food insecurity worsens.

Change is slow because we can’t seem to break out of the habit of forgetting our existence. We forget that we have bodies that can be mobilized, break and build things, defend each other, fight back. We forget that laws only exist to benefit our existence in societies, not the other way around. We forget that lines drawn on maps to keep power in and people out have no relevance on the real Earth, where forests and rivers stretch beyond and so do languages, cultures, and movement.

It’s important to have rules, sure. But our insistence on following the arbitrary rules made to fit human life in industry boxes and prevent resistance causes us to continuously violate the most important, universal rule of all: the rule of taking care of each other, and of letting life breathe.

In a survival situation, all bets are off. Social conventions tend to break down, and there is opportunity for unconventional action. By instinct or deliberation, we do what is necessary. So why not act similarly? Why not see threats of climate change and targeted systemic violence as a threat to our very existence?

This is the reality of a severed existence. We are convinced that everything that happens is elsewhere, while our lives are devoid of relationships and responsibilities to each other and the land with which we live (or occupy). We don’t know where our food comes from, where our bombs go, or how (or on whose lands) our electricity is generated. So why would we ever make that connection? If we never acknowledge how much we owe our lives to the land and to other people, why would we recognize a threat to them as a threat to ourselves? Our disconnection is so deep that even when drowning, or watching others drown, the meager instincts we feel aren’t enough to overpower our conformity and act.

We’ve heard so much of, “We’re trying to do something, but we can’t legally do [x].”What would it be like to remember that a whole is more or less the sum of its parts? That change only ever comes from doing things differently, where it wasn’t possible before? That we as animals have bodies and mouths that we can choose to move and use to resist?

We have to stop worrying about looking crazy. The time for crazy has long passed. We’ve started feeling crazy because we’ve been sitting at home scrolling, worrying alone instead of putting that rage to good use. We have to embody our rage. We have to remember our power. We have to remember our primal sense of survival, the feeling of digging our nails in the soil and ripping things apart, of weaving and building and planting with our own hands.

It seems we would rather cling to this false sense of “civility” until the day we die than remember we are animals—a fragmented colonial mindset of human exceptionalism and superiority. It seems we would rather wait for our neighbors to die quietly, because our separation is such that we feel far removed from the real physical impacts of colonial capitalism’s war on life.

We can break the red tape with our hands. Literally. It won’t be easy, but I believe it starts with remembering that we (the ones who are still sleeping— many have had no choice but to physically resist for a long time) are made of body and mind. That one is not more important than the other. That we can go outside and create something different. That we have the sheer physical power to dismantle these systems if only we have the will to do it.