Status Updates From Let This Radicalize You: Or...

“Our work is set against all probability — and it is in that space of cherished improbability where our art will be made, where our joy will be found, and where our ingenuity will fashion ways of living and caring for each other, even as the ground shifts beneath our feet. Life will be a scramble, but we will not scramble alone.

“We talk a lot about possibility and hope in this book, and we are by no means attempting to minimize the stakes or the obstacles you will face in your work. I know these are frightening and even soul-shaking times. I cannot tell you that the tumult will relent, because it will not. But I can tell you that here, on the edge of everything, we are each other's best hope.”

“We know what you are up against, in the form of state repression, and that you have inherited a world on fire. We share your fears and your fury, and we trust your creativity.”

“I came to think of those conversations as rides home, too, even if they did not take place in a vehicle, because there was something about that descriptor that I liked — the idea of an important conversation that helped bring me home.”

“As organizers, we extend many invitations, and we hope that people will join us in the streets, on the picket line, at a meeting, or to learn together and share ideas. We invite, we hope, and we try to extend something worthwhile. This is true whether we are planning a protest, holding a meeting or teach-in, or writing a book.”

“In many ways, this book is an invitation. An invitation to dream, an invitation to consider, an invitation to build, to experiment, and to act.”

“Organizers are aspiring authors and artists, creating elements of stories, in constellations we are often unaware of, with pockets of unseen work happening far and wide. Creating connection, potential, and possibility is creative work. We are in a moment when we must hold prediction and possibility all at once. It is a time to act together, with vision and with hope.”

“Possibility is the hope we wear when we charge into battle. It is stronger than assumption or reaction because it is intentional. It is an awareness that cannot be snatched away. The knowledge that there is always another ending in play, even if we don't know what it is. So we charge into the breach if that is the only way forward, because possibility is worth it.”

“The restoration of possibility amid despair is an act of destruction paired with a call to imagine—which is a call to arms.”

“I believe we write the meaning of life as we live it. I believe it is up to us to write a story worth living. I do not believe in the surrender of hope or imagination any more than I believe it is acceptable to give up on the survival of others, or of all life on Earth.”

“It's important to both ground ourselves in the here and now and also remember that the world is much bigger than this moment, bigger than us and our experience of it, and much bigger than we imagine when we are afraid.”

“How did people survive desolate times? How did they find the joy and humor that sustained them in long stretches of siege and survival? How did they build relationships that allowed people who disagreed to collaborate and achieve convergence? What did those uneasy alliances look like? What helped them succeed, and what caused them to fail?”

“To understand the past, we must investigate the stories we were not told, because those stories were withheld for a reason. We must search out all the pieces we weren't meant to find, the things that disrupt the narratives we've been given.”

“Our mental maps of the world, and of history itself, are the products of our own world-building process. We fill in the empty spaces with theory, prediction, and possibility. Sometimes the filler is gray, pessimistic and cynical, and we assume the worst of every detail. This does not demand much of us, in terms of learning or creativity.”

“The war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it."

“After all, these days, becoming radical isn't an impulsive dalliance. It's a leap toward allowing yourself to believe in the possibility of our collective survival — and to believe that even if we don't make it, we are all still worth fighting for, to the last breath.”

“Then let yourself be lifted by the stories of the organizers that fill these pages — people who are stubbornly practicing hope each day and taking imaginative action, in spite of doubts, losses, and heartbreak.”

"Hope and grief can coexist, Kelly and Mariame remind us, amid millions lost to the pandemic, amid rising fascism, amid many-sided attacks on our most basic bodily autonomies — and if we wish to transform the world, we must learn to hold both simultaneously."

“By reading it, you will come to know in your marrow that every day, everywhere, people are striving to make change in their communities, and that where there is profound injustice, there is always also creative struggle.”