Community, Creation, Rebirth: The Radical Act of Building Worlds Together

When gossip culture dismantles our connections, we're not fighting fascism — we're becoming it. Time to dream beyond destruction.

“Transnational decolonization and abolition are not about destruction, they’re about the creation and building of alternatives.”

When Dr. Mohamed Abdou said this during our February chat (we do them monthly and you should join our next one in April) it stopped me in my tracks.

Decolonization. Abolition. We use these words often — and more often than not we use them in relation to what we want to end.

“DE- [prefix for removal or reversal].”
“ABOLISH [put an end to].”

Not what we want to CREATE.
How we want to be reborn.

Dream rather than DIE.

Then I started thinking about a few things I’ve been saying on loop since co-founding Here4TheKids nearly two years ago to the day.

We haven’t lost our minds, we’ve lost our imagination.

Yes, yes of course this is true but what does it mean? And mirror mirror on the wall . . . I’d been saying these words without interrogating how I too have lost my imagination. White supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism has had me thinking small.

So much has been about what we want to end: Guns in the “United States,” genocide globally, poverty, houselessness, hunger, thirst.

Capitalism.

I’ve thought a lot about what we must end.

But what about what we begin.
What we create.
What we want in addition to what we don’t want.
And how do we get there.

Which brings me to community. Another thing I’ve been known to say: Community is the enemy of fascism.

But it begs the fundamental question: What is community?

Our latest meeting with Dr. Abdou started to produce some real answers.

Until November 2024, I’d been hosting weekly Community Chats with Here4TheKids. Sometimes we had speakers — incredible speakers. Sometimes we didn’t and we’d just hang out together, oftentimes we’d break into different zoom rooms for more intimate chats.

But then about a week before The Election — insert scary music here — a crew of Kamala Harris fans decided to publicly smear me for having stated that Kamala Harris was going to lose the election (anyone paying attention knew this) and I’d be happy when she did (anyone anti-genocide joined me in this sentiment).

Hardly radical stuff.

Yet suddenly, I was being smeared as anti-Black.

Apparently, refusing to support a Black and Indian woman who was second in command of a live streamed genocide of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian humans made me the devil.

Suddenly the “community” I’d spent more than a year and a half cultivating, growing, and nurturing didn’t feel like a community at all.

It felt dangerous. And it felt dangerous because it was dangerous.

I’ve been trying to make sense of former friends turning on me in a matter of seconds because of my take on Kamala Harris, which ps, they shared. Friends along with folks who were all too happy to join me week after week month after month for these community chats.

What is a community that turns on a dime?

I’d been thinking about this for months before Dr. Abdou dropped this wisdom during our last monthly zoom: “Gossip fosters evil.”

YES.

That’s it.

And that’s where we are now. Notice how our “progressive” spaces feel regressive. How one word, one opinion, one sentence, glance of an eye turns into a full-fledged attack. Not only have I been on the receiving end, before I shut down my IG for good, I was receiving countless direct messages from all kinds of “movement” folks asking me to join various public pile-ons of other activists that they’d suddenly decided were harmful, horrible people.

How exactly does this foster community?

It doesn’t.

It’s just more capitalism masquerading as activism — and it’s only giving us more fascism.

So back to what is community?

This is where Dr. Abdou’s recent talk hit hard. Along with Amanda Gelender and Zakaria Galehouse, Dr. Abdou explained its simplicity.

It’s just me, and you, and us.

It’s interrogating our inner fascisms (ps — we all have to battle our inner fascisms).

It’s getting to know ourselves and each other. Sharing our likes, dislikes, fears.

It’s spending real time with one another, in silence and in conversation.

It’s moving through conflict together in a way that honors our shared values

It’s BEING IN RELATIONSHIP.

It’s NOT GOSSIPING TO TAKE PEOPLE DOWN.

It sounds so simple, but is it really? All the isms have beaten actual honest relationships out of us, starting with the relationship with ourselves.

What inspires us. What terrifies us. What makes us laugh. What makes us cry. Who do you let into this internal world? Who are you learning from and investing in as the world shakes and ruptures around us?

I’m terrified for my children. I wake up at 3:04 am every night on the dot in a sweat. Part menopause, part existential terror. You get to bed at that time, you say? And sleep just for a few hours in bits and starts?

You’re scared too?

When the fear parts, I feel such profound love and hope, for me for you for us. I know the empire must fall so that humans and plants and animals can go on. But wow, it’s scary.

I’m not doing enough. I don’t know enough.

It’s not the right way. There’s no right way.

Hope, hope so much hope. You’re hopeful too!

We talk. We cry. We laugh. We keep going together.

We are vulnerable. We are imperfect. There is no such thing as perfection, white supremacy’s fictional foundation.

None of this is rocket science. Sometimes the most simple things are the most elusive.

Community IS the enemy of fascism. YES.

We haven’t lost our minds, we have lost our imaginations. YES.

So now let’s start building actual community.

Let’s start dreaming big and dangerously, imagining wide and expansively.

And let’s do it together . . . hope you’ll join us — me, Here4TheKids, Amanda Gelender, Zakaria Galehouse and Dr. Mohamed Abdou — for our next chat.

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