activist relationships

Hello, reader.  How are you?  Are you curious about activist relationships?  I define activist as anyone who has a vision for a better world and works toward it.

ask Ming

“How would you define activist?” I asked Ming.

“Motivated by a cause,” said Ming.  “Someone who takes action, for a cause?  I dunno–seems like there are a lot of armchair activists.”

I want to write about activist relationships because my friend asked me how Ming and I make it work.

how Ming and I make it work

So many potential relationship problems.

• money
• sex
• whether you want kids
• then how to raise them, if you do
• what commitment and loyalty mean
• religion / spirituality
• how much space we need
• all kinds of space–physical, mental, around family, travel, possessions
• substance use
• addictions
• porn
• where to live
• who does what chores
• trauma of our youth informing the problems of today
• epigenetics, for that matter
• imbalances of privilege

Ming and I have done so well.  Our values are mostly the same, which helps.  He’s not carrying standard misogyny–he’s not a man.  He’s smarter than swallowing the nonsense that the world tried to feed him about gender, power, and so many things.  Anything he did accidentally swallow, he’s open to feedback about.  If I tell him he’s wrong about something, he cares and listens.

We have skills in common, and somewhat opposite skills also, which compliment each other.  Our disabilities go together.  I’m patient with Ming falling asleep with narcolepsy, and he’s patient with me being autistic and crazy.  He comforts me endlessly, supports me in good choices, lets me make mistakes, and cares for me when I’m incapacitated.  This marriage wouldn’t work otherwise.

Sometimes it hurts my feelings when Ming falls asleep and I want attention.  I try not to take it personally, but it’s sad to feel boring.  It’s been 12 years or so, we’ve been together, and we change a lot.  But I can lament he’s used to me, so the novelty factor is low.

activist relationships

Ming and I were Catholic Workers for seven years in Las Vegas.  That’s religious anarchists who do Works of Mercy, like feeding people.  But also we risk arrest sometimes.  Yep, I enjoyed that.

I was arrested seven or eight times at the Nevada Test Site.  We were protesting nuclearism, and protesting how the US government doesn’t honor the treaty of Ruby Valley and holds the test site land illegally.  I get permission from a chief, so I’m free to walk on that land according to the Western Shoshone people whose land it actually is.  But the US government thinks it’s theirs and has the weaponry to defend that.

Violence is harmful power.  Weapons make them dangerous, but don’t make them right.  So it’s a beautiful practice, to walk to the line and cross it, with ceremony.  We’re saying that the US government has stolen something sacred, and that’s not ok.

getting arrested is a sacrament

Sometimes I feel like I can do so little.  But getting arrested is a sacrament, in my religion of love.  When I can risk that, I’m glad.  When I can’t, I want to support and protect others who can.  I’ll sing to them, give them water, feed them lentil soup, jail support, and aftercare.

The guards and test site workers aren’t people to hate.  They’re also victims.

Where is the power?  Harm comes from big forces of entitledness, including a fuckton of money from the US defense budget, the Department of Energy, and all the taxes and infrastructure that support the state.

The guards and workers are tools, whether they feel that or not.  They get paid, but their earnings could never be enough money to compensate for the violence they’re doing.  They are violencing big time.

• people
• water
• air
• plants
• animals
• mushroom life
• spirit
• relationships
• the future
• Parent Earth

Receiving violence hurts, but perpetrating violence hurts also, in a creepy, less clear way.

context

Well, that was more than I planned to say about why I got arrested and did that peace work for ten years, seven of those years full time as a non-Catholic Catholic Worker.

But I want to explain that me and Ming are aligned about this entirely.  I mean aligned about the Test Site, peace work, the state, what happened to us as Catholic Workers as we gave our lives to peace work, and seeing the guards and workers and even cops at Creech Air Force Base as victims.  Ming and I support one another in working toward a better world.

We have friends who do this work, and friends who don’t.  Ming and I read essays and books about this work, listen to music about it, pray our own prayers.  We hold the perspectives of newcomers, oldcomers, the Indigenous people in Nevada as far as we understand, context of other nuclear-harmed places…  Ming and I have shared conversations about all of these factors for more than a decade.

Here’s one of my favorite songs about resisting nuclearism with queer love energy by our beloved Eileen and the In-Betweens.

beloved community

In some ways, Ming and I are an echo chamber, which is a risk in intimate relationship.  We reinforce one another’s “fringe values” every day.

But it’s not just us.  We have radical mental health and street medics community, religious orgs we ally with like the quiet Quakers these days, blood family who would never do activism work and might not understand, and a whole world trying to tell us to hand over our lives to paid work, then comfort ourselves by buying things.  There are many opinions.

I think we do a good mix of echo chamber vs considering input.  We’re curious people, always looking for more info and excited about nuance.

what were you worried about

Dear one, were you worried about the possibility of being an echo chamber and making weird choices in this tight, close relationship?  Like going off the deep end together, too extreme?  I see you sink into someone and wonder if that’s a danger you predicted.

Or were you afraid of taking huge risks, and how to stay in love when one of you is in prison for a long time?

A story I carry about that: Ming and I were friends with a married couple who were considering having a baby.  They delayed having a baby because they were planning actions that could have resulted in significant jail time; they didn’t want one of them raising the kid alone.  Then they broke up anyway.

Were you afraid of having different values, or being two very different kinds of activists and losing one another with difference?

Or were you afraid one of you would be deep in it, and the only just for show?  Yes, big imbalances in relationship can be destructive, including that one.

tell the truth

I would say the remedy to all of those is to tell the truth.  A big imbalance of values or needs might be ok, if you can talk honestly.  In any relationship where the truth slips because difficult conversations are hard, or one of the people gets violent and you can’t be real with them–that’s always going to be a bad scene.

Staying honest even when it’s hard is Work.  But having close relationships, honesty is what we signed up for.  I’m showing up as who I really am.  Otherwise, what’s the point of showing up at all?

healing culture

Activist relationships are the best relationships because you deeply care about one another, but you also deeply care about big ideas and helping the world.  You’re gazing into one another’s eyes.  But you’re also gazing out into the world to see what needs to be done, and what work is most suited to your values and skills.

There’s always work to do, and it’s sweet to share that work with your dearest persons.

Activism is always about relationship because we can’t heal culture alone.  We need to heal culture in culture.  We need a group of people for any of this.

So we need to be real about how we were harmed socially, heal it as we can, and not harm others socially, doing activism.  Just like in relationship.  I need to address what bad happened to me when I was young.  Then I have a chance to be kind to Ming and not reenact pain with him.

I believe in you

I believe in you.  You can do greatness, in activist relationships.  How could we see the problems of the world and look away, uncaring?

Of course we care.  So activist relationships are the only relationships I want to have.