- This is a very difficult horizon that we are looking at and really, we are all we have.

No one's coming to save us.

I think part of why it's so hard to take it in is that most of us are taking in all the bad news by ourselves through a screen.

That's not actually the way humans were evolved to take in bad news.

One of the best things we can do to support our own wellbeing through the overwhelm is be with others.

If we have these short lives and we don't know what's gonna happen, let's fight, let's care for each other our entire lives.

- Coming up on on "Laura Flanders & Friends," the place where the people who say it can't be done, take a back seat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Life is not about to get easier in the years to come.

The crises we're facing are real.

Climate, healthcare, human rights, work, we are looking at challenges on every front.

"And the reality is," writes our guest today, "We're gonna need each other more than ever."

That means that we had better get our interpersonal house in order.

And to that end, lifelong activist Dean Spade has written "Love in a ******-** World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together."

It's just out from Algonquin Press.

Dean Spade is a lawyer, educator, and author of "Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And The Next)," "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, And the Limits of the Law."

And he's the director of "Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!"

And in 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in New York City, a law collective that provides free legal services to trans and gender non-conforming people who are low income and, or people of color.

"The famous feminist slogan, 'The personal is political' is correct," writes Spade.

"It matters what happens in our intimate lives.

It matters for us and for the people and causes we care about."

What's love got to do with it?

A lot.

Dean Spade, welcome back to "Laura Flanders & Friends."

I'm so glad to be talking with you again.

It's been a while.

- Me too, it's wild to me that it was 10 years ago that we last had an interview.

- Well, I'm glad we're catching up.

And I have to say it did occur to me, what is a nice, radical, trans lawyer doing writing a self-help book?

Why?

- Yeah, well, you know, over all these years I have continued to be part of the struggles that I've always been part of.

You know, abolition, queer and trans liberation, work around poverty and immigration and war.

And in all those struggles, another part of the work that I've always been doing, different from the stuff we talked about last time, has been just supporting each other to keep groups together to figure out how to keep collaborations going to deal with the conflict that inevitably comes up when you do work together that you care about.

And so I've kind of had this other track of work and I've been writing this book for about 10 years actually.

And work also on myself to figure out how to show up in groups and in relationships related to organizing, without playing out the toxic stuff that we all inherit from our society and from our own experiences of difficulty and trauma in our lives.

This book is really about that.

It's about what I really see as one of the worst vulnerabilities of our movements.

It's how we treat each other.

Can we stick together enough to get things done, to take big risks together, to do difficult things, sometimes with people we don't know well or don't have a lot in common with?

And for me it's a pretty big fault line and I've seen a lot of groups and collaborations and projects that we really needed fall apart over the relational piece.

So to me it's kind of a natural extension of my other work.

You know, my work is a lot about how does social change happen?

How do we actually do it?

- And there's a lot of bumps in the road.

Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- I mean, they say, "When the times get tough, the tough get going."

But it doesn't necessarily make us better, more easy to get along with kind of people.

Is it a coincidence that this book emerged, in a way, at least sequentially, out of your mutual aid work?

Because mutual aid efforts really brought a lot of people together in difficult circumstances during the COVID epidemic and since, and I could imagine a lot of those tensions would come up.

- For most people in our movement, it's the entry point into movements, is like, I needed something and these people were giving it out after I was denied it at school or by the government or whatever.

It's really vital.

And people do mutual aid work primarily in unpaid groups, like just doing community work that needs doing.

So if we can't get along there, we leave.

You know, you're not being paid.

Right?

I've seen that definitely since 2020.

But even before, in all my years in movements, the thing that often is the biggest trouble is like the relational piece.

And some people even leave our movements because they have negative experiences of conflict in groups that are never resolved.

And I think it's just kind of this, you know, you mentioned at the opening, that "Personal is political."

Sometimes relational work is considered like women's work or it's not important.

All that matters is how many banner drops did we do or how many meals did we get out?

There's a kind of external focus that I think is actually kind of capitalist and sexist often.

And so it's really a feminist move to talk about like what's going on here in our group that can actually make us be able to keep doing this work and stay in the fight?

- How would you describe the fight that you feel is ahead of you and the people that you work with right now?

- Well, you know, to be honest, obviously conditions are already really dire in terms of the ecological crisis, you know, the storms and fires and floods are not gonna stop coming.

They're gonna continue coming in faster and we've seen how little support people get in the face of that.

And we're already living with a, you know, giant criminal punishment system that harms our communities and horrible border enforcement system, US imperialism all over the world and supporting genocide and Palestine and you know, so many other awful militarized fronts around the world.

So all that's been going on and now we're getting the second Trump administration, which is far more geared up, even than it was last time, and we're in worse conditions than we were last time he came into office, right?

Rents are higher, more people are unhoused, more people are in crisis.

More people are about to lose their healthcare because you know, on many fronts, both specific healthcare that's under attack, like reproductive and trans healthcare, but also the possibility of the loss of, you know, sort of any kind of affordable healthcare for lower income people.

There's gonna be attacks on all the kinds of social programs we rely on.

There's greater political repression already underway under the Biden administration, ramping up under the Trump administration.

I mean, I think it's just, we're gonna have a need to be with each other and have each other's backs more than ever, and not get lost in fights that tear us apart and make us fail to show the solidarity that is, you know, just so vital right now.

This is a very difficult horizon that we are looking at and really, we are all we have.

No one's coming to save us.

There's nothing coming from on top.

If anyone had that fantasy, it's definitely not happening.

So it really turns us towards faith in each other, faith in each other's goodness, faith in the idea of collaboration, shrugging off ideas that people are naturally greedy or selfish, and moving towards like, what happens in crisis?

How can we actually come together and back each other up and show our best selves, and be willing to be humble and look at some of the ways we may have internalized toxic stuff from the culture that impacts the organizing.

- You write in the book that "Before we can even start grappling with what's within, we have to have the courage to face what we are up against."

And the list that you just gave is exactly the kind of list that has driven a lot of people to say, "Uh-uh, uh-uh.

I am going on some kind of vacation," or "I am at least gonna absent myself for a while 'cause I can't handle how much we're up against."

- I think part of why it's so hard to take it in is that most of us are taking in all the bad news by ourselves through a screen.

That's not actually the way humans were evolved to take in bad news.

I think we're the first set of people on earth who've primarily taken in bad news alone.

Usually someone would've come and told you or you'd already be in a group.

So I think one of the best things we can do to support our own wellbeing through the overwhelm is be with others.

Like joining any kind of project in our communities, a creative project, a mutual aid project, something that connects us to others to digest what's happening and feel like we're part of anything that is pushing back and supporting care is good.

Not just for the world and the people who may get support through your project, but for you.

It's the way to make friends who care about what you care about.

It's the way to break isolation.

It's the way to not feel that you have to numb out to survive, which is a very reasonable response to this.

We need people to have our backs in our communities.

So finding those real connections is, I think, people may feel avoidant of it, like it's overwhelming to imagine joining others, but actually it's also deeply soothing and nurturing to have others with us when we are scared.

- And I'll also say that the monthly potlucks I initiated at the beginning of 2024 have been a lifesaver for me.

For what it's worth.

As to this question of your approach versus others, even in discussing the collectivity of our progress, or our condition.

You're distinguishing yourself from a lot of kind of self-help groups.

- Yeah, I think that a lot of the self-help field, the typical self-help genre is very focused on the individual.

It doesn't contextualize the kinds of suffering that everyone's going through in a broader feminist analysis, anti-capitalist analysis, anti-racist analysis.

If we understand that our individual suffering is a bunch of bigger scripts that we didn't actually write, and that those feelings and strong states aren't necessarily us, they may actually be stuff that's implanted, it can be a little bit freeing.

The other thing is I really hope people read the book and realize that the conflict they're in isn't unique.

This is common across our movements.

I think that there's a lot of liberation, even that critical inch of distance you get when you see, oh, I'm having a strong feeling right now and it's part of a pattern that's cultural, it's not all me.

And so I'm hoping that the political context helps people feel, you know, very much in the way that feminism often has offered a sense of collectivity and resistance in dealing with the interpersonal realm.

Which of course, the rest of life is only made of a bunch of relationships.

Our movements are just made of a bunch of relationships.

There isn't something beyond the interpersonal realm or that doesn't include it in some way.

Like whether and how we can show up to our movements depends on how we're doing, and what's happening relationally.

- I really appreciate some of the very practical tools in the book, and one of them that lingers with me is the "What Else is True" Tool?

Can you talk about that?

- I'm so glad to hear you say that.

Yeah.

One thing I've noticed a lot is that whenever we're having a very strong feeling, like, "I'm so angry at the people in this group I'm in," or "I'm so mad at a person I'm in a dating relationship with," or whatever the case may be, "I'm so jealous," the world kind of narrows.

It's like all I see is how angry I am at Laura and I'm up at night thinking about it, and I kind of lose track of the broader context.

The tool is designed to help you think through.

"I'm so mad at Laura about our disagreement in the group.

What else is true?

What else is true about Laura?"

"Oh, I remember Laura cares a lot about migrant justice like I do.

I remember, oh, actually Laura's caring for someone ill right now.

Oh, I may not exactly know why Laura said that, or what she was thinking, 'cause I haven't asked," you know, you're just kind of giving ourselves some context around the way that a conflict or a disappointment can give you tunnel vision.

So yeah, that tool I have found incredibly useful.

A lot of things in the book are about supporting a friend.

So not just for ourselves, but you know, we're supporting people who are in conflict and crisis.

What are the ways to help a friend whose world has narrowed down to, you know, they're on a war path against somebody else in our group that's gonna destroy our group, or they are very vengeful towards their ex lover in a way that's actually dysregulating our community.

How can I support my friend to see some more context and feel that they are supported and cared for?

And remember that that person is actually a whole person, not just the thing they did that they didn't like.

The tool is really about that.

- How do you recognize conflicts that are worth engaging in, if you know what I mean?

I remember Sarah Schulman wrote a book about "Conflict is not Abuse," which looked into this in some of the same ways that you are, years ago, and tried to make the point that some conflict we really do need to have.

- It's actually really useful that I give you feedback about what we disagree on, or that I think we should take a different political position, all of that.

Being more able to have conflict requires realizing that conflict is normal, instead of thinking that if there's any conflict between us, one of us should leave the group, or somebody's gotta be bad or wrong.

We live in a society centered around imprisonment, right?

We're the most imprisoning society in the history of the world.

We think conflict means someone has to go and we really are afraid it's gonna be us.

So we're afraid to give feedback, we're defensive when we receive feedback.

I think one of the questions though that I would ask, I think sometimes what's happening in organizing is that people are feeling, you know, feelings that come from other parts of their lives, from historical experiences in their families, or at school, or in organizing or cultural stories about who's valuable, not valuable.

So I've got those feelings going, and I tell you it's a political difference.

How can I know when I'm having strong feelings so that I can be a little more careful about whether I'm going after you in the meeting about something, but really it's 'cause I felt left out when you all went and had drinks and I wasn't invited.

Or when you, you know, are now dating my ex or whatever, how can I have a little bit of emotional awareness that'll let me not act out certain emotional things as if they are political things.

- Can you elaborate on the point that you just made about there's a relationship between our kind of carceral approaches to things, and our relationship to dealing with conflict?

'Cause that's fascinating.

- Yeah, I would say that one of the most common patterns I see in groups and in relationships of all kinds is people just don't give each other feedback.

I don't tell you that I'm frustrated about you not doing the dishes for two months and then I blow up and say you have to move out, or- - You mean just leaving them to pile up doesn't send the message?

- It doesn't.

Right?

All of the things that we do that are involved, being so afraid to give each other feedback, that by the time we give it, I've created a elaborate story, maybe I've told all of our friends how bad you are.

And of course we're all doing racist, and ableist and sexist things all the time that we can't take in, or give small amounts of feedback because it feels so high stakes.

And most of us are only getting feedback in hierarchical environments like in the family or at jobs or at school where it is very high stakes.

We haven't had like peer feedback, you know, that's worked.

And if we have, some of us have had it in friendships, I think that's the place to kind of model.

We do trainings on giving small amounts of feedback so people can like work the muscle, and know that the group values giving and receiving feedback and acknowledge that it's hard and most of us have never tried.

And so that the group becomes a healing space.

People learn a skillset we're not supposed to have in a carceral society that we really need.

- Now, the idea behind all this work, to take us back to where you began, Dean, is not so that we can sit in our groups and have beautifully, you know, engaged and calm meetings, but so that we can actually get stuff done and get changes made that we need to be making in this time.

We started with a big list of what we're facing and you build to the point that we need to be in better shape so that we can take risks.

And I guess my question to you then is, what risks would you be seeing us take right now if we were skilled up in all the ways you describe?

- People are gonna need to break a lot of rules and laws to survive this period, already we do.

We're gonna need to hide people from the police and from immigration enforcement.

We are going to need to disrupt the ecocidal industries and war industries that are destroying the planet and killing people.

We're going to need to get each other medicines and procedures that have become illegal under this new administration.

I mean, people already do a lot of this, but we're about to need so much more of it because there's gonna be more political oppression, more criminalization of basic survival for people in our communities.

We're gonna need to defend each other from eviction.

We're gonna need to stand up to cops and stop them from sweeping areas where unhoused people are.

I mean all of this stuff we have to turn up a lot to survive and it requires trusting others and learning how to be trustworthy, which I don't think we necessarily have in place right now.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot is that we need to do more underground work.

Right now we're oriented towards being seen doing good and posting on social media and a lot of it is about people's brands.

We're gonna need to do secret, useful, law-breaking and rule-breaking work to survive.

And so these are different emotional skills to want to do work without getting public credit.

Even that is a distinction from what the social media companies have trained us for.

- Now, far be it for me, here on public television, to be advocating that people do any of the kind of law breaking you've just described.

But I hear you, and I hear from activists that we talk to on this program about the urgency of this moment.

And we have, as journalists, also become very careful about what strategies and tactics do we actually ask people to talk about in public.

So there is that question of how do we share information in the climate that you're describing?

Are there examples?

I think of the early part of the Trump administration, the first few days after the Muslim ban came down, and about how people on their own initiative went to airports across this country to welcome in people who were arriving in a country with reason to be very scared.

That's one form of resistance and action that stands out very clearly in my memory from the last Trump term.

Are there other stories that you tell, that you cling to, that you see as models, or give you hope?

- Absolutely.

One of the stories that moves me so much I learned from a wonderful book by Vicki Osterweil, called "In Defense of Looting."

She talks about how in the 1930s there were these eviction defenses where people would just walk through the streets and gather people, and they'd go to where someone was being evicted in New York City and stop the eviction because they just had so many people.

And they defended tens of thousands of people from eviction, 1/3 of evictions in New York City in the early '30s, during a period of extreme economic crisis.

Right now we don't have that level of people power and that's the level we need because nothing else is gonna work.

The courts don't work.

There's no legislation against evictions, right?

The levels of crisis that require, you're describing like airport shutdowns, like the kinds of work that can only be done with a lot of people putting themselves on the line together.

It's also much safer to take those risks when there's tons of you than when there's just a small group.

So we need a lot of people to get really brave.

That's not everybody's first step in their organizing career.

Many people start out being like, "I'm gonna make food for folks," "I'm gonna do childcare."

All of that is vital and essential.

But ideally, a lot of people become brave enough and driven enough towards justice to take big risks together.

- Our culture leads us to be constantly expecting instant gratification, and therefore sometimes when our protest efforts don't pay off, we feel like we failed and we might as well give up.

I look at the year plus of people protesting the genocidal assault on Palestinian life and culture that followed and preceded, but followed the Hamas attacks on October 7th.

And I think of the feeling of failure that so many people have expressed.

How do we sit with that?

How do we process that?

Having been unable, with all of these efforts, and all of this risk taking to stop a genocide that we're funding.

- There is so much to grieve in our culture generally.

I don't think we've properly grieved COVID deaths.

There's all the police violence in people's lives.

Like everyone's affected by so much and then also witnessing so much.

And if we can't grieve, we get kinda numbed out and it becomes harder to really act together.

It becomes harder to be trusting of others.

It becomes harder to feel your full emotional range if you shut down that part.

But a lot of people lose joy, there's a lot of depression, and kind of numbness happening in our society and then that can lead to a lot of avoidance.

"I don't wanna do anything.

Everything sounds bad."

I think that's like lack of grieving.

So figuring out how to grieve together, I really think like gathering together to do any kind of grieving ritual is so useful or make space in our friendships and in our groups to grieve is vital.

And I think the truth about it is, we have to get comfortable with uncertainty.

I think liberalism wants us to believe that if you just make enough noise, your government will listen to you.

That's never been true in the United States.

This is an imperial project that has got, you know, ecocidal and genocidal drives from day one.

So letting go, grieving even the fantasy that we can be heard that way and that elites will save us, and instead shifting our faith and hope into each other who we've been told not to trust.

That's very healing and also very empowering.

Oh my god, it actually is just up to us to figure out how to resist and to have solidarity with people resisting all over the world, and how to do things in our immediate local communities and collaborate across space.

And we don't actually know what's gonna happen.

None of us actually knows exactly how to resolve issues that are so overwhelming and that's not a reason not to act.

It's a reason to study political action that others are doing and have done and to try stuff with other people you know.

That's the way to live.

If we have these short lives and we don't know what's gonna happen, let's fight, let's care for each other our entire lives.

- Do you have to be an activist to enjoy this book?

Who's your desired audience?

- I think this book is full of very practical tools for anyone who wants to clean up the relational areas of their life and support friends who are trying to do so.

And I hope that it helps people bridge into movement work.

And for people who are already in movement work, I hope it's like a sigh of relief.

Like, "Oh yeah, that is happening in all the groups I've ever been in.

What a relief to have an account of that and some practical tools for addressing it."

- What do you think is the story the future will tell of this moment?

- You know, I've heard a lot of people talk about this time as an unraveling.

And I think that it's useful to ask ourselves, what's it like to live during the unraveling to live during a time when a lot of systems we've relied on have been eroding in lots of ways, where we know that the systems we rely on are bad for the planet and bad for us, where there's a lot of chaotic action happening in the weather, and politically, and everywhere.

And to ask ourselves like, who do I wanna be in that?

Who will I wish I had been having been someone alive during such a profound unraveling?

Really unlike anything else in the history of humanity.

And just to think about orienting ourselves towards values of resistance and care and love, even though it's really scary because there's no getting away from it.

It's everywhere.

There's no geographical solution.

It's on.

And it asks a lot of us.

And I think we get to choose to meet that.

- And to meet with each other.

We don't have to do this alone.

Such valuable work, Dean, for as long as I've known you and again in this book, really valuable.

Thank you so much for everything you're doing for all of us, and I look forward to speaking to you again at some point.

Keep it up.

- Yeah.

Thank you for doing this beautiful show.

It's such a great service to our communities to have this kind of information.

(bright music) - I was talking with Dean Spade just as the gravity of the fires in Los Angeles was becoming clear.

And like many people since then, I've learned a lot about Los Angeles and fire.

I've learned about the topography of the place and its canyons which direct the hot Santa Ana winds over dry brush in a way that has caused fires for millennia.

And I've learned about the early colonizers who called the place "The Bay of Smoke," and no one settled there year round for 100 years.

I've learned about the role of capitalism and speculation and subdivision about the selling of properties as "Exclusive," and "Secluded," in a way that led to sprawl on the one hand and the crowding of housing on the other.

I've heard talk about how we might build our cities differently and much of which centers on the idea that we must build up, not out, and learn to live together more closely in less secluded ways.

That will require us getting along better, which makes Dean Spade's work all the more important.

Getting along together, working together, helping one another is something that Los Angelinos right now are learning a lot about.

Can we learn more?

Well, if you want to hear my full uncut conversation with Dean Spade, you can through a subscription to our free podcast.

He has a bit to say about romance and Valentine's Day too.

And in the meantime, we will keep reporting and keep connecting, and I hope we connect with you.

If you want to write to me, you can.

The information's at the website.

In the meantime, stay kind, stay curious, stay connected.

For "Laura Flanders & Friends," I'm Laura.

Thanks for joining me.

For more on this episode and other forward-thinking content, subscribe to our free newsletter for updates, my commentaries, and our full uncut conversations.

We also have a podcast.

It's all at LauraFlanders.org.

(bright upbeat music) (bright music)