Coping with perpetual crisis…
Plus my positions on Voting, Gaza, and Ecological Collapse
INSIDE:
PART 1 — a message of solidarity for those finding it hard to cope with the world right now.
PART 2 — me naming where I stand on a bunch of important issues like Gaza, voting, etc.
Since this post is long, for the TLDR crew I want to give you the…
UPCOMING MYSTERY CULT EVENT REMINDERS:
+ LIVE CHAT on Substack App. Friday, 10/11/24 12pm PST Theme: Connecting with our core and regaining our balance through witchcraft.
+ FULL MOON in Aries Ritual. Wednesday, 10/16/24 6pm PST. Theme: Cultivating authenticity.
+ READING GROUP. Wednesday, 11/6/24. 6pm PST. Text: Feminist Manifesto by Sara Ahmed.
During this time of great unraveling, I find myself inspired by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Made up of discarded Nikes, toothbrushes, 7UP bottles, and bubble wrap, the Great Pacific Garbage patch is a floating dump twice as big as Texas. Grief threatens to drown me if I think about it for too long.
The garbage isn’t what inspires me. It’s the jellyfish, the violet sea snails, the muscles, and the ragworms who’ve made their home there that give me hope.
When everything is drowning in trash, life still finds a way to thrive. I hold this knowledge close to my heart now, when day after day after day I see images of headless children covered in ash.
The creatures of the sea are turning their poison to medicine. Not just one of them, but all of them together.
Granted, many creatures of the sea are not surviving. Whole oceans are dying. Whole ecosystems are collapsing. If you’re reading this email, you already know this. Like me, you might be collapsing with the grief of it.
I bring up the death of the oceans because today is October 8th. It’s been a year and a day since the latest round of genocidal horror began in Palestine.
Another year of slaughter, white phosphorus, hostages, children’s bodies riddled with bullets, starving grandmothers, whole cities destroyed, polio and typhus, millions upon millions of people displaced.
And that’s just in Palestine, there’s also Congo, Sudan, floods wiping out entire cities across the world, fires raging in the jungles, bodies piling up on the riverbanks of North Carolina.
The time has come when the whole world is collapsing. The grief of our collective history has become too much for us to bear.
If you’re reading this, you most likely already know that our systems have failed us.
Our systems, the systems of global capitalism, military industrialism, settler colonialism, are the causes of these horrors. They will not provide us with the solutions to dismantle them. They make us complicit in their villainy.
And most of us have trouble creating peace in our own families, much less in Palestine.
The systems of global capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism are so intertwined with each other, with our governments, our families, our bank accounts, our medicines, that they’re too big to fail without taking us and the whole system down with them.
Yet they ARE failing, and they ARE taking the whole system down. And even the billionaires are starting to see that their bunkers will not protect them.
We have been trained, not just since birth, but for hundreds of generations before we were born, to look to authority figures to save us. To show us what to do.
But the authority figures we have are so completely indoctrinated in these systems, and so corrupted by them, that even if they wanted to change it, they wouldn’t be able to. And besides, they DON’T want to. They’re comfortable with things as they are.
No presidential candidate in the United States is arguing for an end to capitalism.
From my perspective, we’re past the point of no return. We’re not going to be able to keep this system from collapsing. And besides, it’s hard to rally to preserve capitalism when it’s responsible for every misery in my life and the lives of everyone I know.
So what do we do? Give up? Frolic on the beach as the bombs rain down?
During times like these, I look to the teachings of witchcraft: when you’re in the underworld, look for the light of Hecate’s torch. Follow that fire.
Hecate is the composter who turns poison to medicine. She is the anemone who lives on the garbage patch, turning plastic to smaller monomers that feed the rest of the ecosystem.
Hecate carries the torch of beauty, community, inspiration, imagination, and care. We can follow her lead, we can devote our lives to her fire.
As individuals, there is little we can do to stop the genocides, the ecocides, to stop the hurricanes from coming. Alone, we don’t have that kind of power.
But together, we CAN create refuges. Places where imagination, care, love, pleasure, beauty, and healing can survive. Let us attend to that, wherever and however we can.
Beneath the oceans of trash, there is a bottomless abyss of need. There is no end to the suffering in this world. If we only see the suffering, we might easily be consumed by it.
As for myself, I want to focus on keeping the torch lit.
I want to focus on creating communities of solidarity and mutual aid. I want to organize on behalf of the care workers who are risking their lives to rescue children from the rubble. I want to build networks of relationship that make it possible for us - those of us who are devoted to life - to build networks of relationship.
For those across the world who are tending the fires of love, I am in solidarity with you.
Cultivating community is labor. Tremendously hard work. Because the forces of the Necrostate do everything they can to prevent us from being in solidarity with each other.
The Necrostate tries to distract us. It exhausts us. It takes our money. It gets us to waste our time arguing with each other. It forces us to spend our energy resisting its constant assaults rather than on building the world we long to see together.
And yet, despite all the horror patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy have wrought on this beautiful green earth… despite the fact that humans massacre mystics, artists, children, grandmothers, ancient trees, baby seals…
… mystics, artists, children, grandmothers, ancient trees, and baby seals still exist.
And they still exist because of the beings out there who nurtured and cared for them, and stood in solidarity with them even as the storms raged all around.
Witches, it is our turn now to ensure life continues to thrive. It is our honor and our duty to pledge our lives and actions to creating and reweaving webs of solidarity.
May we stitch our grief into blankets of care in which we can cradle the world and sing it back to life.
In solidarity,
Amanda
You don’t have to read all of the below. I just wrote it in case you were wondering (though I don’t know how you could be wondering at this point, but just for the record) where I stand on a few of the major issues of this moment.
I write all of this to and with you as family. If you’re reading this, I see us on the same side. Even if we don’t agree exactly on tactics, I believe we share the same values:
We want peace, we want justice, we want life on earth to thrive.
I know many of you come to Mystery Cult as a refuge from the pain and upheaval that you’re experiencing in your own lives right now, others might be here simply for witchy tips, and others are here because of my passion for addressing the political in my work.
Regardless of what drew you here in the first place, for transparency’s sake, I feel it’s important to clarify my positionality amidst all the horror and upheaval we’re seeing around the world today.
In the future, I want people to be able to look back at my work and say that I stood up for what I believed in.
My positions:
What’s going on right now in Palestine is a genocide. Nothing can justify it. Nothing justifies genocide. The United States and other Western countries need to issue an arms embargo right now. The murder and displacement of the people of Palestine (and now Lebanon) needs to stop immediately. It never should have started.
No country on earth should be an apartheid state where some people have rights and others do not. Israel is an apartheid state. If allowing equal rights for everyone in Israel means that Israel as we know it ceases to exist, so be it. (That should be true of any state, including the United States.) Besides, states as we know them have only existed since the first World War. Before that it was empires and kingdoms. Did Tzarist Russia or the the Reign of King George the III have a right to exist? No. States are just kinds of governments (monarchies, constitutional monarchies, republics). Humans have rights, states don’t. Either we all get equal rights or none of us do. Equal rights should not be controversial.
Antisemitism is real and is unacceptable. I’ve seen it myself. Comments in instagram posts saying things like, “Hitler was right.” Jewish people have real and justifiable reasons to fear persecution/annihilation. The events of October 7th were horrific and I grieve with the people whose loved ones were killed or abducted. I can only imagine how triggering and terrifying it must have been for people whose families survived the holocaust to go through an horrific event like October 7. All hostages should be returned (both Israeli and Palestinian). I also do not believe that destroying Palestine is the best way to free hostages, nor is war the best way to create safety for the Jewish people. Jewish people have a right to exist free from persecution and fear; genocide will never bring that reality into being. Many of the people leading the movement for a free Palestine are Jewish. I admire them tremendously and will always stand by them.
October 7th was NOT the beginning of the genocide, the Nakba was. During the Nakba in 1948 Zionist militias displaced over half of the Palestinian people from their homes, destroying over 500 Palestinian villages, poisoning wells, committing dozens of massacres, maiming people, and sending the majority of the population to refugee camps. The very camps that the Zionist regime are now bombing. All set in motion due to British colonialism.
We could also say WWII was the beginning of the current conflict, or the holocaust, or the persecution of Jews throughout the middle ages, or Roman conquest of the British Isles, or the crusades, or... All the wars, violence, and displacement throughout history. The seeds for the horrors we see today were planted thousands of years ago. Trauma after trauma after trauma. Victims become perpetrators who become victims… one thing I know for sure, we cannot bomb our way out of this cycle. We have to imagine and then create another way. I’m grateful to the Palestinians, non-Zionist Jewish folk, and the Black and Indigenous people of color who are leading the way in creating a new vision for the world.
We should all vote for Harris, but we should not delude ourselves that she will do anything more than perpetuate the horror that is industrial capitalism. I will vote for Harris, just because I know that Trump would be worse. We on the left can barely cope with all the atrocity conducted under democratic administrations; if Trump gets elected it will cause exponentially more chaos and misery. When I think of the cops shooting journalists during the George Floyd uprisings, the daily announcements of sales of public lands to large corporations, the children in cages at the border, the persecution of trans children, the constant attack on abortion rights, it’s clear to me that if Trump gets elected we will lose ground on multiple fronts, it could set us back generations… and given the climate crisis, we don’t have generations to lose. We need to keep moving forward, and Harris will be bad enough. So everyone please vote for Harris, especially if you’re in a swing state — I know you will anyway and this is preaching to the choir. But I know many of you have been worried I am not going to vote because I keep making angry comments about how this entire system is a horrific farce drenched in the blood of children and that it deserves to fall. All of that is true, but I will still vote. So now you know.