Building Resiliency with Margaret Killjoy

it could happen here. Um. It's a show about the fact that the society is kind of falling apart or changing, depending on your perspective of things, and people need to prepare for what's coming, which is a world of greater instability and economic collapse and rising authoritarianism and increasing fights

in order to reverse and stymy all of those terrible things. Um. And you know, one of the things I've seen in some early feedback from um other stuff I've done on other shows, and also from earlier episodes of this is people who will go like, Hey, everything you're saying about mutual aid is rad but I live in X town and whatever state, and there's there's nothing here. There's not not an organized left. I don't I don't know of any mutual aid groups. Um, how can I get involved?

Or like, how could I start my own organization and try to get people involved? And then another thing we get asked a lot of us, like, hey, what you're saying about building resiliency and preparing for difficult times, gardening and whatnot sounds great. But I'm poor as ship and I live in a tiny apartment um or whatever. I I have no resources or no room um. Even if you're not of enough money, like I'm in the middle

of some horribly dense city. So this week we're gonna be talking around those subjects in a number of different ways. And to kind of kick us off, I've got, of course, Garrison with me. Woke come up at nine in the morning. How are you doing, Garrison, ungodly early? Yeah, it's it's it's hideous. It's hideous. Um. And then Margaret Killjoy, who's up at a much more reasonable hour because time zones are a wild ass thing. Margaret, how do you? How do we how do we introduce you? You're an author? Uh,

you're a writer of fiction. You host a podcast called Live like the World is Dying, right, and you've had me on and you talk about a lot of the same things we talked about it and it could happen here. We're actually shamelessly stealing your your your podcast in order to make it corporate and sold out. How are you doing, Margaret. I'm excited to be part of the corporate sold out my own podcast, um, and and actually very glad that you all do a wider audience thing. But um, I

think that is a decent way to introduce me. I do a lot of different things, and I've been doing also, like organizing and trying to seek radical political change for about twenty years, to degrees of success. Actually mostly not to any success, because we actually still live in maybe a worse society than we were in two years ago. I tell people that I dropped out of college to ride freight trains and overthrow the government, and I wasn't good at either of those things. I mean, you have

all your limbs, that's true. I do have all in my limbs. Yeah. And you're not in prison, um, which is really all anyone can ask of the universe. UM. So you have started a number of organizations in your career as an activist in kind of that hat. And I guess let's start with like, yes, somebody who lives in a place there's no kind of really really organized left, there's probably not in a lot of these places much

of even like a democratic party. There's certainly not mutual aid efforts UM, and I do think that there's a well, well, mutual aid as a concept is is pretty firmly rooted an anarchism. There's mutual aid kind of organizations that are are not particularly leftist or at least people doing stuff

like that. Like I think a good recent example will be the Occasion Navy, who did a lot of rescues after the most recent set of hurricanes, where certainly not a left or an anarchist organization, but a lot of what they're doing is UM is a community aiding itself. UM. So I don't where where do we Where do you want to start here? Well, I guess I mean specifically in disaster times, you don't necessarily work with the people that you would assume that you're expecting to work with.

And you know, one of the one of the stories that really sticks with me is like a friend of mine, who's this you know, UM train riding anarchist with governed

in tattoos and and all of that. And during flood relief in eastern North Carolina was like flying into storms and small planes with libertarians because the people who are willing to fly small planes into storms and own planes tend to be the more libertarian side of things, and so here's anarchists and libertarians working together to get people

what they need. And one of the things that I try, because this is one of the biggest questions I think that the left faces, and you know, people trying to make the world better faces, is how do we get people involved? And also how do people get involved if no one's helping them get involved? And UM, I don't have all the answers about it, but it's something that

I I think about obsessively some a lot. And one of the things that I really try and focus on with people as people say, well, I want to be prepared, and you talk about community being a very important part of apparedness, but I don't feel like I have a community because we live in a very isolated society. And one of the main things I try and remind people though, is that in the same way that property relations break down, like someone's like, oh, I don't have any stuff and

if the apocalypse comes, what will I do? And like, well, the kind of the answer is that, like when's property relations break down, there's a lot of stuff and it's very people. There will be much stuff around, like warehouses exist full of stuff, and yeah, Amazon warehouses are going to become like fun boxes, Yeah exactly, slash fortified outposts alleged. Yeah, and community is the same way, not that you would go raid community, but instead that um some people. Yeah,

that's true. And but you can you can create community in times of crisis in a way that's actually harder

to do when the existing social order exists. And and the the thing I always say uses my my dumb example of this about how people come together during times of crisis is you know, when I'm waiting for the bus and you know, some city or something, and no one talks to each other if you don't know each other until the bus is like five minutes late, and then everyone is comparing notes about where they think they saw the bus last, and everyone's friends and sharing snacks

and things. You know. So in some ways, I'm like, be optimistic if you don't already no a community. Yeah, And I think there's also things you can do that don't necessarily cost a lot of money to both kind

of build resiliency and kind of community connections. Now, one of those things, I've had a lot of friends in different cities work for there there will be different farming co ops, right, and generally the arrangement is you volunteer some sort of time helping them with you know, there's a lot of ship work on farms and in return

you generally get some amount of produce or whatever. But really what you're getting is practical experience growing food and you're meeting the kind of people who are interested in growing their own food, and you know, those kind of

connections can be really helpful when things get worse. And so I think it doesn't necessarily it doesn't have to cost much to to try building community now, or to at least try putting yourself in some of the spaces where the kind of people you might want to be in, the kind of people you you might want to know when things get worse might be. Yeah, and there's a

lot of um, there's a lot of like opportunities. The world kind of wants you to volunteer, you know, there's there's all of these things that if you reach out to people and you're like, hey, I don't have any connections, but I'm interested in volunteering. There are types of organizations that do interesting things that are open to that. You know,

I kind of maybe it's terrible. But whenever my friends, especially my friends were in their twenties or something, who who don't really feel kind of lost and without direction for a while, I'm like, yeah, go sit in a tree, like, go join direct action environmentalist groups that are desperate for people to come live their lives in this like self sustaining community. That is incredibly traumatic and hard to do.

And I don't necessarily recommend this to everybody, but you know, it's a thing that you can do, is that you can go participate in in different movements, some of which do want strangers, you know, some of which don't write. Um, you can't show up to everything and be like, why aren't you including me? You're a bunch of assholes. Yeah, and UM, I don't know. So when when it comes to actually like trying to start something, um like like like going out and accepting, Okay, there's not Maybe I can't.

I can't leave my family behind and go to a tree set, but I would like to, you know, start a community engaging in something direct Maybe that's not illegal direct action, maybe it is. It's none of my business. Um, how do you recommend people just kind of start organizations? Find people avoid pitfalls, like, you know, if you've got to make your own mutual aid group because there's not one in your town and you you wanna. I mean, people have expressed a desire to understand how to do that.

So I'm you know, I've never I'm not an organizer. I'm barely a journalist. I am curious for your thoughts on that. Well, okay, so as my own caveat is, I'm no longer an organizer. I spent much of my twenties being part of organizations and then I finally um realize that I can just kind of do whatever I want and then figure out how to plug that into

other people's things. But I will say the the main way I've heard this expressed and I believe in is that we should do if you want to start getting involved, is you think about what you're good at, and or you think about what you want to be good at, and then you think about the problems that you're facing, and then you think about how to apply what you're

good at to the problems that you're facing. So if you're sitting there and you're like, well, I'm a I'm a really good illustrator, right, I'm not I'm a terrible illustrator. But let's say you're a good illustrator, and then you you could basically reach out to organizations that maybe you aren't even close and be like, hey, I'm an illustra rader. Is there anything I can do for you? All? Um, But if what you want to do is start an organization locally, it's okay to start small and build up.

It's okay to you know, it's kind of a if you build it, they will come kind of thing in general, like if you start, if you figure out what you need to do, you know, we want to distribute supplies, right, then you just do it like you just um, even if you start by yourself or ideally you kind of start with yourself and a couple of friends that you drag into it, and then you see what gets inertia like rather than like forcing, rather than starting off, don't

start off by writing your by laws. Um, you know, maybe start with an idea of like if you have a cool name that you want to use, Like sometimes that's great to start with, like a hook, and like starting a band or something, you know, you start with like the thing that brings everyone together, which is sometimes

a clever name. But but mostly you just start by doing it, and um, you know, one of the one of the ways that's longest standing that people can get involved with low really or start locally, and there's a lot of resources about how to do it is is Food Not Bombs. Food Not Bombs is a a mutual aid project that's existed and I wish I knew off the top of my head since when I want to say, the late seventies, but I really couldn't tell you. And it's just food. It's just organizing food to give to

people in public. And it's actually wild how illegal it is in some places, Like people get arrested for food nut bombs all the time in Florida, in a couple of other places. But yeah, we talked about them in the first part of the season because there have been a couple of point. I don't think nationally the FBI is talked about them as a terror threat, but like in the Austin Field office, and I think one or two other places they've been like discussed as a terrorist

threat for handing out food. I've had like helicopters flying overhead and like riot around the corner and stuffed for for handing out food with food nut bombs. Yeah, it's a they missed the second half of the name. I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I think maybe if we were to create bombs not food, we we might not get as much police attention. But that's just a sory. Yeah. Well, what everyone says is that we need food, and no one says. No one would ever say this, no one

would ever believe this. But we need food and bombs. Um, food and bombs, bombs for some food for others. We don't judge. We provide explosives and we provide food. Yeah, okay, So if you can, I think, if you can, you start by working. You figure out what you're good at.

You find a group of people that are interested in accomplishing the same thing, who maybe have such similar skill sets or different skill sets, and you figure out what you can do, and you start doing it, and you organize calling people and being like, hey, well you donate to us, or getting all your friends together to give you stuff to to redistribute or whatever, right, putting out

calls on social media for things to redistribute. You know, most structures start grassroots, and most of the time they kind of tend to do best when they're grassroots instead of becoming a little more codified. So if possible, do that. But if you're just you, um, sometimes tying into existing organizations is a thing worth doing. And if there's nothing locally, you can look at things a little further away, or you can look at things that are on maybe on

a national level. But there's a lot of dangers in joining existing organizations and structures, and I guess, I guess I would say there's like three types of danger, and one is that you talked about all the time. And thanks for bringing into the leftist vocabulary of the word grifter. I never heard anyone use the word grifter until your podcasts. It's the most important word in the American English for sure.

We live in a fucking grifter republic. It's incredible and we always have This isn't new, Yeah, but we need more words because we also need the word for people who are looking for useful idiots. And there's a lot of social movements and not to be like I, I support the left. I think that what we're attempting to do is very worthwhile, and I like us more than

the other side by a fair amount. But there's a lot of things that there's a lot of problems with the left, and one of them is that people are looking either to just have you as a body with no decision making power and no autonomy, which doesn't actually build a better world because you're just stop being a cog in their machine and become a cog in our machine. Right.

And then there's also people who are kind of um looking for useful idiots, canon fodder, like people to hang around while they while they do stuff, or you know, and I don't want to go to hot bodies to stand out in front of cop shops sometimes, yeah, and even like you know, even like movements that I really care about that might do a lot of like non violence of this obedience, although I don't I'm not particularly I'm not passist personally, but you know, it's a very

useful strategy, non violence of disobedience. But sometimes they're like, oh, you're young and new, lock yourself to this thing. Get arrested. And I would definitely say to people, don't get arrested on purpose at your first actions, like don't be anyone else's cannon fodder. And so you feel like you are part of the decision making and part of like like you really matter and like then then don't um do

dangerous things for other people? Those projects like the ship that states do that's so messed up is is turn human bodies into resources that then get sacrificed for unclear ends.

Um And unless you feel like you have some sort of like there are times we're being arrested is necessary and helpful, but unless unless you feel you fully understand not just why you're doing it, but also that like you you you're not being told to do it, you have autonomy and like I'm going to do this thing that I know will end in my arrest because I like,

I don't know. That's probably like I think most people in that position know this, But I definitely have encountered some uncomfortable situations in the past, I'm sure similar to once you have, where it did seem like people were kind of being pushed to take that risk for reasons they didn't fully understand or in a situation they didn't fully grock you know, yeah, which which it's at one of the things that when I talk about how I think this is the biggest problem, not not the cannon

fodder issue, but the getting people involved is the biggest issue I think we currently face because there's so many people who want to be involved right now because the world is even worse than usual and um, and it's hitting groups of people who haven't been hit by before. And people are often also looking for a sense of community. And there's a thing that people we don't talk about

enough when people are getting involved. There's two different reasons people get involved, and both are entirely valid, and one is to fix things and another is to find to break out of the isolation that they live in their daily lives. Um. And we need to be aware of that when we talk about how to onboard people, and we need to be aware about that. If you are getting involved, you should think about your own desires. Are you looking for community and if so, you can find

it within radical action right um. But you are doing that, then you especially need to be on guard against peer pressure because it's a really easy way to feel like you're involved with things is to go hang out with people who are all doing a release scary thing and and that's beautiful. And I absolutely did that when I when I first got involved in anarchism and politics in general, I i joined in head first, and you know, spend a night in jail within the first couple of months,

and I don't have any particular regrets about that. And I found community in a way that I had never had in my life because of how isolated our society is. But that's not the only reason to go do these and that is I mean, I think a lot of people experienced that last year during the George Floyd protests. It's the kind of I mean, it's the thing we've talked about on in the first season. If it could happen here that times like that this war does this too,

can actually provide meaning that that people have lacked. And a lot of it is that community that like community of suffer, is the trauma bonding UM that feels like the most important thing, even because maybe it is the most important thing you've ever done. I think in a lot of cases it is UM. But that's also mind altering and it um it can lead to situations that are not entirely dissimilar to cults. UM. I'm not saying

that they are cults, because cults are number one. With a cult, there's generally going to be like a leader and a in such but like there are things that happened that that draw people into cults that are just human things, their aspects in some cases, as I've said before, of like a good party. Um, but there are cults like aspects to the kind of groups that form in these traumatic situations that can lead people to start making

really poor decisions. Um. And and so you have to really you always have to be kind of analyzing not just what you're doing, but what's going on in your own head, in the head of the heads of the people around you. UM. That's that's just always important. But I think particularly when you're when you're trying to do something new and different in a lot of ways, bigger than anything you've done before. R. Do you have any specific advice for like kind of avoiding the cults of

personality that sometimes form in new organizations. Yeah, so you have both informal and formal structures can both cause problems with cult of personality. There are these brilliant essays that I haven't read in like twenty years that come from the feminist movement, and one of them is called the Tyranny of structural Lessness. And as best as I remember,

these are very short essays as best. I remember at the Tyranny of Structurallessness says, if you don't have a formal structure in your organization, you're going to have this informal leader who basically tells everyone wants to do. And that's a problem and and as a very important piece, and I believe it comes from a Marxist feminist perspective,

but I'm not certain. And then there was an anarchist femin response around the same time, maybe I'm not sure, called the tyranny of tyranny that was like, yes, that's true. And also when you have a formal structure and put someone in charge there in charge, and that has other problems too, And I think that it's just we we have to be aware of both of these things that Um, you know, the fact that most movements are very decentralized in grassroots as as huge advantages, right, but it does

have problems of causing informal cults of personality. UM. Podcasting is a big part of this problem. UM. And actually, I really appreciate that you're not an organizer like Frankly, And it's part of why I'm not an organizer on some level is because when people read the books that someone writes or listen to someone's voice all the time. It is very influential, right, and being aware of that and therefore not exerting that power is a very good thing.

Um And but there's okay, So the other thing, like when I worry about like people getting involved with like don't get peer pressured into stuff when you first join. There's also this thing that is needs to be talked about. And maybe I'll have talked about this some previously, but entrapment.

Entrapment is a huge problem, and specifically the FEDS tend to look for young idealist activists who can be peer pressured into actions that they may or may not have otherwise ideologically agreed with, like hey, let's go blow up a bridge or let's go blow up a damn And and this doesn't just happen to the left. It happens m oh, yeah, it's all around, yeah for sure. Like there's that case of the guys who are trying to

kidnap the governor of was it Michigan. A lot of that was informants who were there's a lot of there's you can debate heavily whether or not it was entrapment. Obviously, what we we might consider entrapment morally often isn't entrapment legally because the FBI doesn't know where the lines are legally, But that doesn't mean it isn't morally entrapment, right, And

they do that a lot, and they usually succeed. Um well, they may not usually succeed it, though they usually succeeded the case and entrapment defenses are hard to succeed with. And so really, just like and thinking about it, I think developing your own moral compass and sticking to it is one of the single most important things that a new activist can can do. And not to be afraid of radical action necessarily like militant action, but but be

wary of it um. But then again, I mean in terms of like being wary of what the other thing to avoid doing is like accusing each other, like fed jacketing, like being like, oh, well, that person is doing the same thing a FED might do, like wink wink. You know. Um, it's a really complicated an annoying game to play, and if you're just getting involved, you're gonna have to learn how to get it play this game of not fed

jacketing and also not um falling. Into stuff, and it's annoying because you probably have to kind of learn some of the stuff, even if all you want to do is give away blankets. You know, if you want to tie what you're doing to a larger ideological structure, then it's going to come up that you need to be

aware of how repression applies to that larger ideological structure. Yeah, like all this is very useful specifically if you're trying to find something kind of pre existing um or you know, looking you know, or you know, starting something in the bigger city where you have like connections can be made to other existing organizations. And I'm trying to think, you know, there's a lot of people who live in more like rural areas. It's not much like a liberal or like

you know, especially left is kind of subculture. How would how would you recommend people who live in those kind of scenarios try to start building this can really wouldn't say like they only have a few friends, Um what what steps do you think people can take if they have more, you know, a secluded set up, so it

is harder. And I live in a red area close to a blue area, right, and I do most of my organizing and as much as I do organizing within the the nearby small hippie city, even though theoretically the thing that I care the most about is connections to my immediate neighbors. Right, Um, that is harder, and it is harder for a lot of different reasons, especially if you have cultural differences between you and the people that

you're around. Right Like, I'm a trans woman and I've live around a lot of like farms and stuff, right And and previously this wasn't a problem before Trump. This what just wasn't a problem after Trump. Now all of a sudden, the fact that I'm trans as like an attack against people in a way that it never used to be. And and so now they all have an opinion about the fact that we're in address. But it still at the end of the day, I would say that most of the people that I'm around are actually

totally chill. Like there's a vocal minority of really horrid people, right um. But even the people who might be and might have even voted for Trump or whatever, um, are not necessarily at least along my own identity lines. And also white are not necessarily going to give me ship. And you know, I can go talk to them and address and they might be sort of confused, and they

might not be. But if you have more culturally in common with the people around you, then there is a lot of room that you can start working on from there. And this actually ties into something that I think applies to people across the board, which is we have this especially new activists, but also including people who've been in it for a long time, have this like real arrogance about the fact that we're like right, And when you want to change the world, you need a certain amount

of arrogance. You need a certain amount of like I mean, I literally believe we need to not have a government or capitalism, and these are very major changes to our existing structures, a huge amount of arrogance to that. Although not having a guft amen a slightly less of a major change now than it was a couple of years ago,

it's true. And also like something like sometimes, actually, it's funny I used that it more in common with these neighbors, but then all the libertarians when goddamn authoritarian That bummed the funk out of me. Yeah, there's there's some good ones still, There's like again, there's the there's the there's the taking your private plane and do a disaster area libertarians, and God bless him totally. And you know, they're like,

they just don't want them. You know. It's like, my dad is sort of on the libertarian side of things and keeps twenty dollar bills in the visor of his truck to give to people flying signs, and he just doesn't want the government redistributing his money. He doesn't mind redistributing his money. Yeah, And I'm like, all right, I don't have any real objection to that. He's also no

longer anyway. If you come at people with this attitude of like I'm right and you're wrong, the kind of people that you can get to join your side by saying I'm right and you're wrong are not the people you want. You want people who challenge authority, including the authority of people who claim there should be authority, and and so just actually listening to people and like hearing people out and um when possible. Avoiding drawing lines between people is one of the main ways to connect with

people across either cultural divides or especially political divides. And this this can't always happen, right, Like I walked down the street and address and someone like calls me a bad word, like I'm not going to be like, I understand why you think to call me that, and I understand how like me dressed this way kind of challenges your sense of masculinity that you've been brought up into. Is the only way that you can hold yourself strong in a very hard world. No, I don't do that.

I um scream funck you and chase them. Um, I would ever chase anyone with a knife. I think that's not legal, So I wouldn't do that, but um, you know that might work. And you know, like, funk those people. I don't care what they have to say. No, of

course not. And it when I think one of the things that I don't know Twitter brain has done is that like when you when you talk about reaching out and talking to people who you know don't agree with you, aren't aren't on your side ideologically, there's folks who will kind of assume, like, oh, so you're saying I should like try to be friendly with people who would have

murder me. Like, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that, Like, as a trans person or black person, you should go talk to um a militant anti LGBT activist or a fucking klansman or something. I'm saying that, like, that's not within the broad I'm saying what what you need to recognize, But what I think is important to recognize, especially if you're when we talk about like post you know,

collapse or whatever, is that within broad political tendency. So I'm not talking about like fascist or whatever, but I'm talking about like liberal, conservative, progressive, very broad political tendencies. You have roughly the same percentage of people who are ship. So in an anarchist group, the amount of people who are shitty is to be similar to the amount of the general population that are shitty. It's the same with

every political tendency. But the corollary to that is, again, within broad tendencies, you'll find roughly the same amount of people who are basically rad And maybe yeah, there's some they have their brain got poisoned with dis info and they believe some stupid shit and they vote like an asshole.

But you know they'll stop their car if they see someone in an accident, and they keep a fucking medical kit in their bag, and you know there that it's the it's the it's the ship that you know, I talk a lot about this, the stabbing on the Portland Max train. Well, the two people who who died confronting that asshole. Um, we're a republican retired veteran and a far left social justice activist, and they both you know,

put their bodies on the lines. I think that, like when we talk about like being willing to kind of talk with people who are who are not on the same ideological boat as you, that's that's what I mean. Not you should make nice with the people who want to w terminate you, Like fuck those people. Yeah, because the thing you're looking for, the thing I'm looking for is the Republican who's going to, hopefully, instead of dying to saw alongside me, successfully defeat the you know, actual

far right person. But yeah, yeah, totally, And and I think that that actually is part of the It's not always the answer for every person who's isolated, right, everyone who's socially isolated, but it is part of it. If you're trying to organize with people where you say you're the only leftist or the only anarchist in your area, then maybe you don't start. And this is actually funny. I'm very into being very public about my political ideology so that people know what bias is UM coming into

things with. But but maybe you don't start your rural mutual Aid project calling it the rural Mutual Aid project, or maybe you do, and maybe you you just start doing it and you find people who are willing to have the same goals and means as you, and and I think you can do alongside of that, you can

also just be really public about what you believe. I mean, you know, UM Again, as an anarchist, I end up working with like church groups and things that I don't necessarily agree with on a lot of a lot of things. But they're not mad when I'm like, oh, I'm an anarchist. They're just like, huh, okay, I'm a church person or what you know, and like, okay, I'm not. I don't expect different of them, and they don't expect different of me.

And we we know what we have in common and what we don't to a certain degree, and then we work on what we have in common and so airing and so this is both true if you're within the movement and you're hoping to try and solve this problem

for other people. But I also think it's going to be true for people who are trying to build things in areas where they don't have, where they don't feel like the part of something larger is airing on the side of inclusion versus exclusion and not And like you're talking about, it's about airing on the side of not always include everyone, not always committing to a hard and fast rule. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, be be open to the fact that people can surprise you in ways that

aren't terrifying. Yeah. Also, because you get terrified enough by an of like people who you think are on your side that you're like, oh, yeah, I'm sad. You all donto the ad pivots in this show because you can do it. We can do it, we can we can cut it in during one of the long awkward pauses. Go for it, and we'll keep all this up to it in, but we'll actually cut the actual so you'll

hear it. It's like Finnigan's Wake. You're going to hear it out of order, Okay, And I hopefully you all be able to figure out the second half of it. But the first the first half is anyone who claims to have all the answers. Is selling you something? Oh uh huh yeah, oh oh you know who else is selling you something? Is it the ads? Go listen to the Guico Geico or or Jesus. We've had some bad ones lately. Um, there's that s os Cuba show that

sounds we're rough. Uh. There was that one that was just like God, it was just like this is we are sponsored by God. Yeah. I think I've gotten like Walmart and McDonald's on your show before. Remember that's the people's food. Oh yeah, organized actually try to organize around the Walmart. That could be very so. Anyway, here's ads. If someone is trying to start something new inside one of these more secluded areas and like they have decided like yeah, I'm willing to do something. I'm willing to

actually just like start it. How how would you recommend they try to figure out what some of the like biggest needs of the community are that they can actually tackle. Like how how does someone find out what to do with their mutual aid because they can like commit like yeah, I can do something around supply, something around this, you know whatever. Like how does one try to actually gauge

what is important to tackle? I guess It depends on whether you feel like you're totally Like if in my head, if I'm totally inside Annissie community, but an area, right, I probably kind of know because I'm also experiencing whatever the thing is. But if I'm if I'm a little bit detached from it, then I do need to like do kind of you know, the sort of traditional methods. I think it's called listening projects. I've never actually personally

done a listening project. I've been around many people who do, where you basically like sometimes you go door to door and you're like, hey, what's up, Like what do you need?

Like what's going on? You know? Um, But like say, for example, in the area that I live, there is a a rural organizing It's not the actual Rural Organizing project, which is a specific structure, but there is a rural mutual aid group in the largely red area that I live in that's run by by leftists, and they I think that largely they did a lot of like firewood delivery, for example, because a lot of the areas around here are heated by wood stoves, and you have a lot

of poverty in rural areas, and of course poverty looks very different in rural areas versus urban areas. And you know, one of the advantages of being rural poor. There's many disadvantages, like lack of access to certain types of services, right, Um, But one of the sometimes advantages of rural poverty, as I understand it, I'm not specifically an expert, um, is

do you have space? Right, you just don't have stuff for money, and so you can have stuff if people give you stuff, so you can like story your firewood and so. And then also because it's this very specific tangible thing, people can get really excited about, like, oh, I can chop firewood, or maybe even I can't chop firewood because my legs busted because I work in the paper mill or whatever, but I can. But I got a trailer on my truck, you know, Um, and I

can haul that. And people get really excited when there's like things that they specifically are good at, especially things that I kind of have alienated them from other people that they're that they're good at that they can then participate in. And O. Which isn't totally answer your question, but I would say if anyone specifically is in a rural situation, I was looking to start a mutual a group.

Look at the Rural Organizing Project. Yes, I don't believe that they specifically do rural mutual aid organizing, but they talk a lot about what it means to be an organizer within areas that are largely controlled by the far right, but are not. It's not like the people are all far right, they're just controlled by the far right, you know. Yeah, the people actually there, once you talk to them, might actually be a lot more reasonable than like the media

influencers who are part of this you know, same thing. Yeah, and it is. It is one of those things. This is a topic we're drifting too, but it's when we

drift too regularly on this show. We're like, when I talk with conservatives, it's it's not uncommon that I can without especially if I don't start by mentioning anarchy, I can get them to agree to a lot of the things I believe, which is like, yeah, maybe people don't need to be governed, Maybe that doesn't work out good, Maybe politicians are corrupt and should have less power, And like that doesn't mean that you're gonna you're gonna get

them on the barricades with you. Um, because any productive kind of relationship starts from like a base of shared interests, and it's not a useless endeavor to engage in kind of trying to subtly, you know, if you if you feel out people around you who are ideologically not particularly similar to you, but also decent people, um, you can kind of try and work in some some something you've not not just some common ground, but you can try and get them to see that they agree with you

one more than they think, um, and that that has an effect of changing the way people think about the world. It really does. Yeah, and you but you also have to go into it open to yes. Maybe maybe it's not going to change your opinion about the way the economy should be structured or the way that sure works, right, but you know, you definitely have to go into it with a I can now understand why you drive a big pickup truck that burns a lot of gas or

whatever whatever thing. You might be coming into it thinking, yeah, or at least it might help you understand why they believe or do certain things outside of you know, Dave Reuben broke their brain because they got on YouTube at the wrong time. I don't know, Margaret, did you have

anything else you wanted to really get into. I guess to one of the other questions that you all brought up was about preparedness, like maybe kind of almost in the inverse situation where let's say that you live in a small apartment and you want to be prepared and in which case maybe you have better access to community.

Maybe you don't write A lot of people who live in the city are just as isolated socially as people elsewhere, But at least you kind of have, like there's a little bit more easy access to ways to break out of certain types of isolation if you put work into it, because there's more likely to be groups around that are

that are public that you can go interface with. UM. But in terms of like actual preparedness, you have the inverse problem, right of if you live rural you might have room to store beans and rice, and if you live in the city, you might not write UM. But I I will say, it's the other thing that I find people The two things that people talk to me about I think you all run into also is that people are either I don't have any community or I don't have any money in space. Yeah, and so if

you don't have any money in space. I mean, I mean in some ways, it's like, well, maybe your focus isn't like stockpiling stuff. Stockpiling and stuff is like the single most overrated part of individual community preparedness. Um. I mean I do it, but you know it's because I

M my brain works that way. Um. But also the level of like stuff that you might be looking for might be a lot less than like, like you know, it's like prepper media is filled with like here's how to build a bunk or under your pool, and I'm like, what, Yeah, there's there's so many levels I mean, somebody, somebody other things that you should be doing before you go to

that stitch. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, don't get me wrong, if I had a pool, I'd be stoked, And if I have absolutely under it, I'd be even more stoked. I'd be so happy. Yeah. But but you know what it's like, it's the first five gallon bucket of like dried food you store is far and away more important than the tent, right, and like so just having a five gallon Jerry canful of water so that you're like, you know, what if the water turns off or we

have a boil advisory, which happens all the time. I'm good for a couple of days, right, because most of the time people think about preparedness as like I'm preparing for the end times, and usually what it is is the end times are real slow and chunky and crumbles, that's the word, um. And so you're just really looking to like smooth out interruptions, and a lot of that can be done very cheaply and honestly. When when you start storing your fifth five gallon jerry can of water,

you're not storing for you anymore. You're starting for your neighbor. Yea, yeah, And that's good, but not exactly not the first step,

you know. Yeah, it's better to prepare for if you have like a week's worth of power outages or a week's worth of the water not working right, And those are more incremental steps because we're not just gonna drop off and have no water forever starting in a month, right, probably not, but we mean very like there's gonna be there's enough remaining systems that that they want to fix it.

You know, it's more likely that some some disasters gonna happen that we're gonna have, you know, a week worth of stuff gone, you know, and that's the thing that's actually more more reasonable to prep for. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, well, Margaret, where can Where can the good people and hopefully not the bad people, but statistically some of them will suck find you? Um, the good people can find me on.

I have a podcast called Like the World Is Dying, which they can listen to you on if they would like. It's about individual community preparedness. I also am on Twitter way too much, at Magpie kill Joy, Instagram, at Margaret Killjoy my websites Birds Before the Storm dot net or Margaret Killjoy dot com. And that has like a list of all the books that I have out. And I have a new book, an old book being reissued that

is coming out in November from a K Press. The book is called A Country of Ghosts and it's an anarchist utopian book because I was sick of people being like but how would an anarchist society work? And I was like, you know what, I wrote a book, damn straight. Um. It also has a plot, so it's not fancy get kind of bougie with yours. If you write a plot, you get the wall. Plots allowed only post structural literature well, okay, so this has actually happened to anarchist fiction writers before

Buds of Mara was this anarchist fiction writer. Um oh, I can't remember where from I'm gonna this is terribly embarrassing. But he moved to England from a colonized African country. Um, yeah, what did Rhodesia become? This is the most embarrassing. So it became a Zimbabwe, right, okay? Yeah, so yeah, so he was from there and then everyone and he moved to London until he realized that they're a bunch of racists and he would like breaksh it at awards ceremonies

and then go back home. But he was a squatter for a while in the eighties. But he wasn't writing in the proper post colonial like Marxist realist tradition, because instead he was writing postmodern fiction, which is duckett and terrible. So he just like was like, I don't care, and so he's great. That is that is anyway. I love to see it. Um, that's the episode. That's the episode. Go out and right, postmodern jump on a train. But

to yeah, probably also a bad idea. I talked to somebody who lost their legs doing that once anyway, Episodes over