let this radicalise us
we have work to do
Hi and welcome to Another World is Possible! I’m Annette, mother, writer, and self-confessed selkie, living and swimming on the east coast of Ireland, and writing my way through the chaotic times we live in, towards a future more beautiful.
On the morning of the US election results, I went swimming. I had heard about the first returns, all red, on the radio, and a cold panic had immediately started seeping through to my bones.
And swim I did in these grey waters under a skyful of low mist, and it felt like swimming with a stone in my chest – the crushing weight of shattered hope. I so desperately wanted for the good things to happen. Or at least for a slight shift in the direction of travel. I swam, earnestly, stubbornly, staying afloat even as the world conspired to make me feel powerless and defeated. I swam, and it felt like solace.
On the morning of the US election results, the first thing I read on Substack was this poem by Mary Oliver (shared by
) –
We have work to do.
As it turns out, the work is the same now as it was before the US election results. The only difference is the terrifying realisation that nobody is coming to save us. The last of the wool over our eyes was ripped off. What is left is glaring clarity, for the world as it truly is, in all its ugly cruelty and dystopian devastation. May these feelings of rage and panic and grief be our wake-up call.
Three days later, Ireland called a general election. The country will go to the polls as COP29 wraps up in Baku, Azerbaijan – another climate conference in another oil producing state. Call me cynical, but I’m not holding my breath for any groundbreaking agreement, or even significant progress.
We have work to do indeed.
“When so many people around the world pay more attention to the U.S. Presidential Election than to elections in their own country, it is imperative that we pledge allegiance to fighting fascism wherever we are.”
In Ireland, the far right remains small. But it’s a growing threat, and a very vocal one at that, fuelled by a worsening housing crisis, cost of living crisis and migration crisis. With bulging state coffers and a booming economy, Ireland has never been better off. Or so we are told. Everyday life doesn’t feel plentiful though, not for us or anyone I know.
Come November 29, I will vote still, because I know better than forgoing this crucial right. Yet I have little faith left in electoral politics to effectively address, let alone redress, the issues we face. Whatever the result of this general election, homelessness will worsen, hospital waiting lists will lengthen, and nature will keep taking a beating. Why? Because this system, built for accumulation instead of redistribution, does not care about our wellbeing. When politicians only want our vote to implement their own flavour of the status quo, is it any surprise that a growing number of people get disillusioned and restless?
“Combatting the far right requires us to invest in the everyday economy, i.e. the physical and social infrastructure – in the transport and energy networks, and the health and education systems – that people rely on to live decent lives.”
When this investment in the “everyday economy” doesn’t happen, as in Ireland, or when the social safety net is stripped back to its bare bones, as has been the case in France under Macron, people will look for alternatives – and find far-right groups that paint the most vulnerable as the enemy, rather than a system designed to serve the very few at the expense of everyone and everything else. Hence anti-immigration protests, violent riots and uprisings such as the gilets jaunes in 2018. And of course, the reelection of a convicted felon and rapist to the White House.
How do we make our voices heard, when our votes are used to perpetuate business-as-usual, in all its imperial and oppressive cruelty? How, when all that’s on offer is more of the same? How do we convey what we stand for when voting doesn’t – and hasn’t for a long time.
Which is to say – how do we reclaim our power, in a system that insists we have none?
And what might this look like for me, for you, for all of us?
It looks like cancelling a podcast interview, in order to stay true to my fierce feminism. Never mind the lost opportunity: the activist in me is waking up, and this was my first act of resistance.
It looks like a double dip in November – just because. I was to meet my Substack friend
at 9.30 for a swim. But when I pulled open the curtains and saw the band of pink orange light behind the bare trees, I knew I would go with Brian for a morning swim. By the time we got to the beach, the sun had already risen above the horizon: a big golden orb hanging over the light blue sea. All around, soft pink light and mist. We had to swim out a bit to see the sun peek behind the rocks, behind the rolling tide. I felt like I haven’t in a long time: excited and energised by my own daring. Alive. Two hours later, I was swimming in the sunny sea again, this time with Layla. Take that, doom-and-gloom!It looks like going to the trees, to the river, to seek counsel. And it is hearing, in the faint crinkle of falling leaves, whispers of withstanding, of togetherness and nurturance, of seeds sprouting in the cracks and roots threading through the fractures of this breaking, broken world. And I remembered – Is crann darach mé. I am oak tree.
It looks like aliveness, and it looks like gratitude.
This is not to say that it doesn’t hurt. This is not to say that we are not afraid. This is only to say: we are here, and this is what it means to be alive.
It looks like swimming in the tide and walking the earth. Because “to move your body is freedom”, as Ruth Allen writes here. She goes on to say, “Truth isn’t only scribed. It howls. Grunts. Chirrups. These are fundamental ways to be free, to object, to say what needs to be said without words.” The truth swims too. Let’s get feral with it.
Of course, it looks like writing, stubbornly, truthfully.
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work... not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Toni Morrison
I recall an episode of Star Trek: Discovery in which Captain Saru talks about Giotto, the first Italian master who, in the 14th century, ushered in the Renaissance. He broke free of the stale Byzantine school of painting, by bringing vivid colours but also empathy and humanity to his art, and in doing so, he created a whole new way of seeing.
Now, more than ever, is a time for artists and writers and visionaries of all stripes, a time for fierce imagination and radical storytelling and “visionary organising”1. For we need to bring about the next Renaissance.
And this looks like being willing to author together the future we ache for.
It looks like being willing – my word for the year.
It looks like letting this, all of it, radicalise us.
“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I.”
Rebecca Solnit
Now is a time for ‘fuck no’ and ‘holy yes!’
Now is a time for righteous rage and subversive joy, for wild imagination and unrelenting courage.
Now is a time for defiant clarity and integrity; for unapologetic feminism, and for a new, radical kind of care and kindness.
Now is a time of fierce solidarity, of relentless hope and love for the world
– because
(say it with me… louder at the back…)
Another world is possible.
Thank you for joining me here and reading my words – it truly means the world!
Much love,
Annette
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Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015): “Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.”
This is better than any political manifesto I can think of. I wish the whole world could read it!
Holy yes