My favorite Minneapolitan, M Allen, finally wrote about the occupation, in a piece titled “conceal and carry” about “the weight of a gun in my hand.” The writing is quotable and sharp:
When I send my own dad the paper target, with a cluster of shots in the middle, he asks how it felt. Was I scared? Did I become suddenly more powerful? But it was like most heightened experiences, I watched myself less with feeling than to steady necessary breath. I watched myself divorced from myself, thinking not of a human I feared, but one I loved, and the word necessity. I think of the tools we have used to fight for each other throughout time, a stone, a guillotine, a gun.
There’s a weariness in this writing, together with a sense of resolve. M Allen writes that “The people who are dusty and bedraggled with this integrity, whose eyes are shiny with it, whose voices are hoarse, they are like beacons.”
The essay is ultimately about transformation—but not into an ice-cold shooter, rather into someone who knows that they will do what needs to be done to protect those they love. “It can’t only be me,” they write, “we looked around and saw fortitude in each other, saw strength and it awakened such a hunger to be alive, to be more than labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. To become beacons ourselves.”
Labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. What a damning survey of what our society gives us. I’m hungry to be more than that, too.
M Allen’s writing glows with the intensity and purpose of months on the ground, resisting violent fascism—not an experience one would ever ask for, but clearly an intense and meaningful and even transformative experience nonetheless.
(This piece made me think about an argument I had with a loved one after my note on “diversity of tactics”. He encouraged me to change tack and instead call out and shun any violent acts by folks I otherwise agree with. He said I should not just practice nonviolence as a tactic but actively be “anti-violence.” I see where this view is coming from and can even admire it, but by my lights, moral absolutism is no fit for our time of ascendant fascism. Just as there’s a paradox of tolerance, I see a paradox of nonviolence. If your opponent can and does murder protesters and observers in broad daylight, with impunity, it’s clear that the space for nonviolent resistance is being constrained. I’m not saying give up on nonviolence as a tactic—not at all!—but I am saying I can understand why M Allen and their friends are learning to use guns. Pacifism as a virtue above all others is a dead end.)
