Work Will Set You Free

The genocide meant that the world should stop, everything should stop, we went into the streets, we screamed and wept, held vigils and wrote screeds, the bravest lit themselves on fire, students occupied, windows were broken and cop cars destroyed, boycotts and call-ins and direct actions and takeovers, but through it all we still had to go to work, and as actions ebbed, as police defeated us and politicians lied to us and organizers deescalated us, as seasons changed and new crises loomed and new outrages emerged, every day we still had to go to work, and on and on the murder and genocide and horror continued and we could not bear the load the cognitive dissonance, no matter how often we wondered before "how did people just let genocides occur?" we learned the answer, needing to work and pay rent and live in a world that does not stop for something so basic and central to it as a settler-colonial genocide.

And when the fascist coup revealed its plans to end elections, unions and non-profits, to end corporate regulation and weather forecasts and to hold millions in deportation camps and to make divorce illegal and abortion a capital offense and the media and the democrats revealed they would do less than nothing to stop it they would accelerate it by bemoaning fascism's victory as inevitable, foretold, and through that all we had to go to work, had to pay our rent and our bills, and no matter how often we wondered before "how did people just let Hitler come to power?" we learned the answer, by having to work for the people who want him to, by having to pay rent to the people who want him to, by spending our waking lives making profits for and paying the very people who plan to destroy us, by not having the time or the energy to fight something so banal to this world as a fascist takeover.

And when the summer heat wave proved so brutal and murderous and it stretched across the whole continent and when a Category 5 hurricane devastated the Caribbean in June and we recorded the 13th month in a row of record temperatures and the charts all pointed exponentially beyond the most dismal predictions and whole cities in Brazil went underwater in flooding still we had to go to work, and no matter how often future generations ask "how did people just let climate change happen?" we will have to say "we went to work" and we did, we had to, to maintain the system that was killing the earth, even if on the way to the store or the office or the warehouse or the factory we could barely stand to be outside, even if we kept collapsing in the kitchen where we chopped carrots or swooned on scaffoldings we raised to build their condos no matter what we still had to go to work.

And once the owners and bosses and politicians were convinced they'd survived the pandemic, they focused on one thing: back to work, back to work, back to work, because without work we became not only unprofitable but unruly, with material support and with reason to fight we quit our jobs en masse and we rioted in the streets and we stopped paying rent and they were suddenly facing a world where they couldn't live off our backs and sweat where we would fight back against their police and spit in the eye of their landlords, much better that millions of us die of plague and tens of millions be maimed and disabled then even one of us begin to imagine such a world, so we had to get back to work.

And when we organize and struggle we make demands of our bosses, we imagine being in the same workplace for as long as we can but better paid and more respected, we want more say and more control and we go on strike and when we go on strike we make sure to keep picketing keep fundraising, you wake up earlier in fact to get to the gates before the bosses and deliveries and all the while our money runs out and the bosses wait and bide their time, and even when we win which we often do, we win because we are stronger than them, because we have each other and that's more than they'll ever have and what does it mean to win it means we get to get back to work.

And when we dream about our freedom we say we're doing "the work" and organize like our bosses would with spreadsheets and meetings and action items and we build organizations like our bosses would bureaucracy and hierarchy and we spend time scheduling giving out roles and tasks and when people ask us why we do it this way we say with all honesty everything we know how to do we learned through work, all we know is work, but this work, this work undermines work, this work is for a good cause so we better get back to it back to work.

And the world burns and the genocide rages and the fascists grow in their terrible weakness and the slag runs into the ocean and the prisons boil and the husbands beat and the fathers diddle and the cops murder and the border guards murder and the white men murder and the drillers dig and the VCs disrupt and the moguls deal and the bankers speculate, and against all of it you use every stolen hour or at least those you don't need for rest and recuperation and beauty and life and anything worth doing at all but it's never enough never enough time in the end you have to get back to work.

I've stolen as much time as I could and now I've got to get back to work.

Back to work.