“I can’t breathe” means “I am dying” when it gasps from the mouth of a person being suffocated. To not attend to that meaning, at that moment, constitutes murder.
“I can’t breathe” means “I am unfree” when it is written on a t-shirt, scrawled on sneakers, or announced in a speech. To not attend to that meaning, at that moment, is callous, cruel, arrogant, and, ultimately also constitutes murder, albeit of a more subtle type.
What demonstrators across the U.S. – Mexico, Spain, Greece, and many other places – are saying is that just as a choke hold on the throat and lungs can extinguish an individual’s life, so a choke hold on the mind and soul can diminish a people’s dignity, knowledge, and spirit.
Still, however courageous the call to act, however sincere the sentiment of solidarity, however informed the insight of injustice, however dignified the determination to dissent – we should notice that “I can’t breathe” entreats others to stop choking me, to stop constricting us.
Racism, sexism, and poverty, corporate profit seeking, witless command, and heartless control, torture, drones, war, rising tides and raging winds all choke and constrict.
It is excellent for us to say: enough, stop, I can’t breathe. Black lives matter. But – while “I can’t breathe” is reasonable, warranted, and excellent to say, it is not yet the perfect reply. Perhaps better than “I can’t breathe” is “we will breathe,” or “we breathe,” or perhaps just “breathe.”
Cops who strangle don’t listen. Commissars who crush, don’t listen. Beyond saying that we can’t breathe we must force attention to the fact or there will be no reply. We must deliver the message more forcefully than a calm and reasoned plea lest it uselessly dissipate. That is why chants echo, squares fill, traffic congests, disruptions spread.
We shouldn’t merely document, though document we should. We shouldn’t merely rage, though rage we should. We should also build our strength, because we realize that those who now have power won’t listen to reason but can be made to listen to actions.
When actions raise dangers to people in position to implement changes, and those people come to believe that only by implementing changes can they avoid the threatened dangers, then changes will come. Elites will not implement changes via their hearts or minds, but only due to social pressure.
Elites will act due to fear, not morality. That is the logic of petitions, rallies, disobedience, strikes, and disruptions of all kinds. Exert pressure. Force capitulation.
And what gives activity sufficient weight to compel authority to institute changes? The threat of continuity, growth, connection, and diversification. The threat of more threat.
If we only muster episodic action, it won’t be enough. The powerful can ride that out.
If we only muster small scale action, it won’t be enough. The powerful can ride that out.
If our energy appears to only address narrow phenomena, again, it won’t be enough. The powerful can ride that out.
What makes a rally, march, civil disobedience or other social activist effort effective, is always and only what threatens to follow the effort and not the effort itself. If our actions, accumulate in a manner revealing that they are steadily growing and becoming more interconnected, and especially if the threat we are raising seems to be morphing into an existential danger for those who have power – which is to say if our threat moves from the momentary and limited, to challenging their overall status and position – that is when, if they cannot turn us around, they will give in. That is when change will come.
What do the elites who make policy fear? Numbers. Unity. Depth of comprehension and commitment. The rabble rising. Especially the rabble increasingly wanting fundamental change. And so, to be effective, our activity must show those with power in terms that they can perceive that we have increasing numbers, growing unity, enlarging comprehension, codifying commitment, and especially emerging desires for fundamental change. This, especially all together, threatens.
When students in Berkeley, as just one example from today’s news, block the streets, manifesting intelligence, passion, desire, and commitment, it is very good. Others should emulate it. But, if the Berkeley students’ process, or the process on other campuses, or in other communities, is to simply issue a call for action and to have those who are ready to do so arrive and partake, that is vastly less good than if the process is for those who are already aroused to spread throughout the campus, the dorms, the dining rooms, and the neighborhoods or workplaces, talking, talking, talking to others, to get them more informed, more passionate, more committed, and ready to act, too.
The duty of the activist is never just to rage, just to document. The duty of the activist is always to amass more power, more commitment, more consciousness that won’t turn around. Each act’s power is not in that act itself, but in what follows. Actions that elicit more actions in turn involving more people who are better organized and more committed, have power. Actions which lay no groundwork for more action, do not have power.
Going into the streets is certainly part of sending a message that racism, torture, bombing, global warming or whatever else are provoking a response that will keep growing and become ever more threatening until the injustice is curtailed. But the harder part and an equally essential part of sending that very same message is being sure that going into the streets persists and grows. And that requires reaching out, personally, face to face, with respect and understanding, to people who don’t yet agree, engaging them, involving them. And it involves arriving at shared agendas and vision. And developing lasting organization to manifest dissent over and over, and to build, as well.
“I can’t breathe” naturally and organically leads me, myself, to scream at them. And my doing that is a good thing.
“We breathe” can lead us, naturally and organically, together, to breathe, ourselves, and to work to ensure that others are breathing too. And if to breathe comes to mean, as it should in this case, to struggle – then “we breathe” becomes a very productive sentiment.
Rebellion needs to become resistance. Contestation needs to feed construction. Upsurge needs to birth persistence.
We cannot know when a historical moment arrives that harbors sufficient potential to unleash real change, real innovation, and perhaps even real transformation. Is the current confluence of racist repression and popular resistance, of torture and hypocrisy about torture, of economic dislocation for the many to aggrandize the few, and of global climate catastrophes, such a moment?
Maybe. But we can only know if we act as though it is such a moment including helping make it such a moment, and thus – only if we give this moment every chance to breathe.
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