This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ismatu.substack.com [The Preview]: Oh, then in regards to mutual aid, I keep faltering with this series because I can't, like… I think I need to find a balance between what I wanna talk about and what I feel like the public needs. Because I keep curriculum planning and then realizing we are way behind as a public where I thought we were when it comes to understanding the importance of mutual aid and what it does. I really wanted to jump into the how-to, which is the mutual aid by Dean Spade is just a book of how-to. And then I realized we were missing a lot of the why. We are doing all of this work and being in community with one another because we are designed to be compelled by community, not because we are trying to win a battle. Yeah, like the winning the battle stuff is important. That's cute and that's... It's not insignificant. It's just that if our goal is to win, my question is win what? Win against tyranny, win against oppression, win against all these things. Do we see how that still centers the oppressor in the first place? We're not actually thinking about like, what is it that you want to win? Past beating them. You want, you know, OK, I understand we want the satisfaction of victory. What is victory? What does it actually look like to win? What does the world look like? What do people's day to day look like? What does it look like for the most vulnerable in our societies when we win? Because then we have to start thinking about building. That's a, it harkens a bit to what I said earlier about when I ask my groups, okay, so like what does community look like? What do you want community to look like? And I get a lot of, “well, I don't want this. I don't want to feel this. I don't want that.” You haven't actually told me what it is that you wanna build. You've told me what it is that you wanna avoid. And that is, it can be helpful, but you don't lay a foundation with negative space. We lay a foundation packed solid on what it is that we do want.