Disunited States: Government Failure to Address Coronavirus is Sparking a Mutual Aid Revolution
Posted by Collectivist
"I'm not from DC, but I live here. I’m now a part of this living, breathing being that is a city. This city. It help
helps me to think of cities that way, even ones that I don’t fully feel at home in – like a body. And I’m like a blood transfusion. I know this isn’t my city, my body, but it’s where my life flows now, and so I best flow with it. This body holds me – it is my literal and figurative structure. I am one of the millions of cells rushing through the veins of this place, and although I’m a relative newcomer, I can feel that this body is not well. I can feel that familiar illness – it’s the same as any city I’ve ever lived in..
Every body is weakened and bowed under the weight of capitalism. Yet, there is a new illness – one that found a foothold in our immunocompromised bones and at the same time exposes the severity of that underlying sickness so old it’s etched in our souls.
Now, with the renewed vigor of a body on high alert, cells rush in symbiotic aid to save each other. A new fever awakens dormant fighters and engages new ones. The city pulses with ancient knowledge and emergent ideas.
As I steer my bike through a quiet street, I smile at the seemingly cliché and trite synchronicity of it all: all systems go, all working together for the common good. This city and I can now claim each other. The fight, the solidarity, we share it. We can beat this, and we can beat the underlying cancer. For a body is not its sickness. A city is not its oppression.
I park my bike outside a nondescript brick building. Earlier, our Mutual Aid team established some new protocols on how to address emergency requests for food, between our scheduled delivery days. I make a call to the number listed and a man comes down to collect the bags of sanitized groceries I’ve left by the front door. I wave my gloved hand and we get to chatting – at more than a six foot distance. He says he’s tried calling several places around DC that had previously offered boxes of food but weren’t anymore. He heard about us from one of those organizations. He says we’re the only people he called that sounded like real people. We talk a bit longer – about his kids, about my house plants, about these bizarre times. He offers me advice on how to keep my bike chain from slipping. I remind him of our DC Mutual Aid number and he reminds me of his, in case the bike acts up again.
Mutual aid is built on reciprocal exchanges like this one. Small and personal, it represents the antithesis and the answer to top-down, whitewashed charity schemes that treat aid work as school credit, or karma crystals, or what have you.
Mutual aid is the medicine that bodies respond well to, the antidote to capitalism, and the salve for those basic elements of humanity so ruthlessly shanked by our system: solidarity, community, sharing, and supporting. It’s not about charity. Charity pities. Mutual aid understands. Charity distances. Mutual aid connects.
As Dezeray Lyn, member of the Tampa, FL Mutual Aid Response to COVID-19 puts it, “Charity is transactional, hierarchical.” Mutual aid is about “sharing with your community because they are us, we are them.” Josiah king Harris-Ramos and Brianna lee Marie Coleman, co-directors of Black Trans Blessings in NYC echo that sentiment in saying, “Our people need us. We are passionate and driven to do this work, because our community is us, and we are our community.”
This symbiosis is powerful. It is also, unfortunately, an excuse – for the powers-that-be to do nothing, or worse, to obstruct. Mutual aid is often used as a dumping site where the ruling class throws their gross missteps, their corrupt dealings, and botched bungles. It’s where they seek to distance themselves from the poverty and oppression their policies have made, hoping we’ll all be too busy trying to take care of each other to notice that absolute moral bankruptcy of the rich and powerful.
A volunteer delivers tents and meals to the homeless during the coronavirus pandemic in Miami, Florida, April 3, 2020. Lynne Sladky | AP
If we bothered to keep track, the list of referrals from bankrolled NGOs and government institutions would read like a guest list at a royal wedding. Most recently, we got a mutual aid request from one of our neighbors who said the DC Mayor’s Office of Veteran Affairs referred him to us. In other words, Washington DC, the city with not only a full “rainy day fund,” but money to spare, is offloading those in need to an anarchistic mutual aid network with little to no budget. It certainly begs the question of what kind of rainy day DC Mayor Bowser & co. are waiting for.
The need for everything from basic hygiene products for the unhoused to food for the unemployed is skyrocketing. Jails remain full. Bail remains high. Food banks are closing and bills are still due. DC Metropolitan Police continue to be an occupying force in predominantly black and brown neighborhoods, harassing people at close range as if their goal were to infect and unnerve. As Maurice Cook, director of Serve Your City and member of DC Mutual Aid said: “The Bowser Administration has been woefully inadequate in addressing the immediate needs of the people including a lack of testing, an inability to address the food and supply shortage for the most marginalized and an escalating Public Health disaster in our homeless shelters, halfway houses and our local jail.”
The so-called “United” States
DC is hardly alone in its deep deficiencies. The entire so-called “United” States is but a collection of deficient governments failing to work with and for the people, lorded over by the ultimate breakdown of common sense and care: the federal government.
As politicians around the country blab about free testing for COVID-19, tests remain absurdly scarce and treatment is prohibitively expensive. One woman racked up an almost $35k medical bill for her Coronavirus treatment. Undocumented folks know their names aren’t on any role to get a government check. Many don’t want to take the risk of reaching out to any official support hotlines, and even if they did, many official hotlines lack services in Spanish. Meanwhile, ICE raids continue during the pandemic, risking the lives of thousands while simultaneously using precious N95 face masks to perform Gestapo duties as frontline medical workers wrap themselves in trash bags.
Needless to say, in a vehemently unequal society, disaster does not hit evenly. “Right now in our community, we are seeing a need for housing and all-around physical and spiritual support for TGNC (Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming) folks in order to sustain themselves, and keep themselves healthy by providing other options besides survival sex,” say Harris-Ramos and Coleman. Alex Cohen, member of the STL Covid Mutual Aid in St. Louis explains that “the need for literally every basic resource for the unhoused community has doubled during this time, with an urgency similar to doing outreach on a cold winter night, but with no end in sight.” On April 9, that urgency peaked when St. Louis police and City Parks and Recreation raided and attempted to clear an encampment in the downtown area at four in the morning. This assault came a mere two weeks after Police Chief John Hayden sent an email to the entire department saying that “According to CDC recommendations, officers should refrain from clearing encampments during the spread of COVID-19.”
Without a doubt, when we get to the other side, it won’t be thanks to our government or those tasked with cleaning up the messes of their own oppression. It’ll be thanks to mutual aid. It’ll be because folks like Black Trans Blessings are working with, protecting and providing for black and brown TGNC folks in NYC. It’ll be because STL Covid Mutual Aid are making their own hand-washing stations, taping information pamphlets to them and sourcing tents and no-contact thermometers. It’ll be because folks in Florida, DC, LA and elsewhere are taking on the requests from closed-down food banks. It’ll be because our networks are building relationships with local organizations – from farmers to faith-based groups – in order to address the changing and growing needs of our communities. It will be because we do what our system has never done and will never do: work with and for people. . ."
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