If you’re new to actions with an arrest risk and you don’t have experienced protestors with you, there’s stuff you can find online about having a legal team, writing the name of a lawyer on your body, saying NOTHING to the cops except the name of your lawyer, etc. That’s all good advice.
But let me give you a bit of advice that is just as essential as all that:
If one of your comrades gets arrested, and you know they can be held for 6, 9, 12 hours, depending on where you are, you get a group of people together and you wait outside the police station.
You may be tired, you may be stressed, it may be freezing, you may need to take turns, but you take whoever can still physically and mentally bear it and you go to that police station and you wait for your comrade. You can spend the time taking care of each other, drinking hot drinks, doing whatever gets you through, but you wait.
And when your comrade gets out, you make sure they do not walk home alone in the dark thinking about the fucked up experience they just had, you make sure there’s a big fucking crowd of their comrades there to greet them with hugs and hot drinks and a cigarette if they smoke.
And whether the arrested comrade that just got out is happy or sad or pissed off, you take that for what it is and give that space and you support that. And you get them a hot meal and you hang out with them and you offer to let them stay at your place or you stay with them so they don’t have to spend that night alone with their thoughts.
You do this every damn time, regardless of whether you really like that comrade and regardless of how you feel about the thing your comrade got arrested for, regardless of how often they’ve been arrested. Because you never know how shitty their experience is going to be in there this time.
Trust me. This is absolutely essential. Once you’ve been arrested and have felt the difference between walking home alone or having your friends waiting for you, you’ll understand.
Be good comrades
If you can always be at Jail Support. It’s honestly a Great time, it’s a nice show of solidarity, and like one of the last time I did. I got to smoke a blunt with a Black Panther, and we had a good half hour or so of just chatting with em about like American history and it was great!
So like do it! You never know what comrades you’ll meet
True, these really are the moments where you meet the best comrades. The ones that know what it’s really about. The colder and longer the wait, the more it says about the comrades you’ll find there.
(Without ignoring that sitting in the cold is not something everyone can do. I see you awesome comrades with chronic illness and other health stuff. I know how dedicated you are just being in these actions at all.)
((and its also ok if you cant do this all the time, even without having health problem. thats why a group is useful ; when youre too tired, someone else can take your place))
Absolutely.
But to those people that will hitchhike for 16 hours in december yet are always too tired and too cold when a comrade is in jail: I see you too.
I’ve got you on the same mental list as people who only show up for an action if they know it’s going to be big and newsworthy. Fucking useless.
True. Ultimately i trust people to know when their tiredness is feigned and when resting means they wont burn themselves : your conscience will catch you up lmao
Well, I’ll be honest, I do watch how people behave in these situations to decide who I want to spend more time with as an activist or a friend. Because with this sort of high-stress and dangerous activism, we all need far more support than just the team that welcomes us outside the police station. And I wish I could trust my comrades to provide that but often they don’t.
Anarchists and antifascists have a massive burn-out rate because the shit we do is dangerous and stressful and we keep doing it beyond our limits because it matters so much.
So as a matter of sustainable activism and my own personal health, I work with activists that care for each other, that prioritize helping each other through shit. Whether someone is willing to help me through a 4 AM breakdown when they’re not really in the mood is a way more important fact about them than whether they’ve got the best radical politics or the coolest action record.
Of course it is not in the simple ‘whoever has the most energy is the most committed’ sort of way, that would be totally ableist and wouldn’t reach my actual goals of finding the people that give a shit.
But I do look at ‘how much energy someone puts into the cool, the flashy, the fun, the things that get them scene creds’, versus ‘how much energy someone puts into care, fixing shit, activist space clean up and boring work that they’ll never get credits for.
(While absolutely avoiding those people who think doing care as activism makes them morally superior to ‘violent’ activists. I don’t fuck with non-violence-preaching shits that aren’t going to have my back when something that is destroying us needs to be destroyed).
I don’t think it’s a matter of conscience either. I think most of us learn at some point inn our activism that helping each other through the hard times matters. And we don’t learn it through guilt, we learn it through break downs, or through the times we lost friends because we never had time for their break downs.
And if someone wants to learn how to stop burning themselves out and losing their friends? Hey, I’m here to help. But until then, I’m not gonna put my energy and emotions into close friendships or affinity groups with people who are not gonna be there for me when I need it the most because there is a cool action or a concert somewhere that they’re rather be at.
QueerAnarchism 