Hit and runs and other capitalist collateral damage
And the reparative work we do to keep one another safe
Dear Soulful Revolutionary,
My dad taught me a crucial question to ask after a disappointing, challenging, or otherwise disruptive experience in life:
“Is everyone safe?”
If the answer is “no,” then we go on to address questions of how to attend to safety and well-being.
If the answer is “yes” — if all the people involved are safe, even if stuff was damaged or broken — there’s reason to pause amidst the hassle and give thanks.
“Stuff can be replaced,” he’d say. “People can’t.”
Earlier this week I had a disruptive experience, which precluded my sending this essay out in my typical Wednesday rhythm. My daughters and I went into the grocery store for 30 minutes. When we came out, someone had sideswiped the passenger side of our car, leaving a serious dent in the passenger door and paint damage all the way across.
Oh, and they didn’t leave a note.
Buoyed by my dad’s advice, I felt grateful that my daughters hadn’t been in the car when it was hit. And (thanks in large part to having good insurance — no small privilege, I know), I didn’t lose sleep over the damage, though taking the car to the shop and figuring out a rental took the greater part of the next day.
Still, having stuff damaged in this really depersonalized way did give me cause for reflection. I was taught that you find a scrap of paper and a pen and leave a note on the person’s windshield, you know? It’s the courteous thing, the neighborly thing, to take responsibility for your actions and work to make things right. The guy who helped me at the car rental place said that hit and runs seem to be increasingly common.
I have been pondering this experience as a symptom of capitalism run amuck — the natural progression of a culture of rugged individualism. Call it what you like — the “Each One Out for Themselves Effect” or the “Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps Effect,” perhaps. This is where racial capitalism — a system predicated on rigid hierarchies of human worth, propelled by greed, and preserved by violence — leads us.
Where taking responsibility for messing up other humans’ stuff is seen as an inconvenience, it’s not a big leap to make from thinking of someone else’s stuff as unimportant, to thinking about other people as unimportant. Whether that be the other’s feelings, their well-being, or their very survival.
White supremacist capitalism teaches us to think of “my stuff” as the most important thing in life. We consume stuff, hoard stuff, and a lot of us in the US will die with a whole lot of stuff. (It’s worth noting that the very notion of “mine” — e.g. “my car” — is itself a capitalistic construct). If we want to have the kind of communities that will help us survive the crises of our time, and maybe even find joy and flourishing in their midst, we will have to change our minds. We will have to pivot to thinking of ourselves as responsible to and for one another.
Writer and movement doula adrienne maree brown teaches that change is fractal. That is to say, that what happens at the smallest level impacts every subsequent level of relationship. Think of the concentric circles produced by dropping a stone into a pond. Or consider the words of Dr. King from his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail:"
“We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Engaging in work to repair the breaches in our local communities will have ripple effects on our global relations. The inverse is also true: our work to see justice realized for Palestine, or Indigenous Amazonian communities, or Sudan, or Congo, will impact our most immediate relationships with our neighbors.
I wonder if this is why Jesus was so insistent with his friends that, “The kingdom of God is within you.” The world that we long for is not some far off, distant reality, but a reality we choose to embrace right here, right now. It is a way of seeing ourselves, others and the whole world: full of life wanting to live.
Collective care: unearned and hard won
Where the fabric of collective care exists today, it is either unmerited — a gift from generations past who tended to community like their lives depended on it (because they did) — or hard won — through the often thankless, and generally unpaid labor of getting to know our neighbors so we can care for them in the ways they would actually like to be cared for.
Fragmented communities lead to a fragmented world. How we can expect people to care about people around the world if they don’t care about their own neighbors? But collective care of our communities contributes to the upbuilding of a collectively cared-for global community.
How can you care for your community today? Are there ways you can go out of your way, even be inconvenienced, to be in solidarity with your neighbor? Is there an act of global solidarity that you can engage in today that may have local impact in our interconnected world?