Mutual aid

We go house by house through the U.S. Sibley chart, first and seventh house alliances and enemies, the Pluto transit bearing down on the nation's south node and what Chiron and Taurus means for the economy over these next two years.

We talk about military spending, the cost of groceries, labor and stagnant wages and how mutual aid is stepping in where broken systems are falling short.

It's not an easy read of the country right now.

Tara's right.

There's also a lot to me about, yes, the existing systems in place were not necessarily at their best, or maybe we could have offered more funding and they were not perfect, but right now to completely dismantle everything also is setting the community or society up for failure on some level.

You're not protecting your people.

The other thing that I'm thinking about is as you bring up the Red Cross, the rise of mutual aid and the idea that like if you think about the conversation that we just had, right, that this is a country that is trying to be an adult and move away from its past.

But as we all know, it's very complicated when you get cut off.

Most of them are started by young anarchists.

And so it's a different kind of view of what mainstream society thinks of as anarchism, because really we're about mutual aid and helping each other.

And we probably feel like anarchists.

billions of bellies over over the years and uh and that also we're the biggest solution to ending hunger and poverty is not just making more food uh and feeding more people but changing society so one of our uh we have three principles that the food is always vegan and vegetarian and free to anyone rich or poor drunk or sober that there's no presidents, headquarters, or leaders, that each chapter is autonomous and makes decisions using consensus.

Why can't we understand we as adults have transformed ourselves, allowed ourselves to be conditioned to hate? and we shouldn't.

The Russian naturalist Peter Kropotkin made this argument in 1902 in a book called Mutual Aid, responding to those who used Darwin to justify cutthroat competition.

Darwin was a functional idiot, in my opinion.

He spent years observing animals and human communities and concluded that cooperation was every bit as important as survival, as competition, and often more so.

You know, they both got sacked or replaced or, you know, transferred by a somewhat scaling down of that specific operation.

And also they won by just creating this or, or, If you're making more robust this long standing practice of mutual aid, of community support, which has been happening in that area for a long time.

So

I count those two things certainly as wins.

And just yesterday, 20 people were abducted yesterday.

Not... within the boundaries of the Twin Cities, but just north of here.

And so what we're dealing with now is like, you know, the visibility has gone away, but the mutual aid hasn't, the community defense hasn't.

And, you know, folks in the Twin Cities are collaborating with people all over the state, trying to further distribute mutual aid efforts outside of the boundaries of the Twin Cities to support folks in more rural areas who... are being mass abducted at a kind of scale that we were actually able to really interrupt here in the Twin Cities, right? Like Metro Surge lasted, the height of Metro Surge like lasted 74 days and there were more than 4,000 federal agents who were tasked with kidnapping our neighbors during that period, right? Like some of the best counts that we have of like how many people were abducted was like around 4,000 people.

I'm Palestinian from Gaza.

And very early on in the genocide, around December 2023, I started to work in mutual aid with some relatives and friends on the ground.

I was doing it informally, raising funds from friends and family.

And I was based in London at the time, so I had a community that I would tap into.

May God have mercy on him.

Thank you.

And we just started it as a very small kind of mutual aid, Palestinian-led.

All three of us are Palestinians.