We Lived Happily During the War

Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

These days, I am somehow finding it both easier and harder to tune out our current decline into fascist authoritarianism.  It is impossible to ignore the extralegal and inhumane deportations, extreme corruption and insider dealing at all levels of the federal government, devastating rollbacks of regulations and protections for people and the environment.  And at the same time, I often feel powerless to resist it at the scale the devastation demands — the damage is happening in such massive proportions and on so many dimensions that no political formation I am in relationship to has any convincing strategies to counteract it [1].  So I often look away, focus on my immediate spheres of influence: my family, friends, and community.  I am, in many ways, living happily during the war.

In early 2024, when it appeared to me that the election was likely to return the federal branch to a reinvigorated Trump administration, I began asking myself what my work — the work of supporting “small d” democracy in workplaces and organizations —had to offer to this political moment.  Why would it matter if small groups of people could exercise their collective power within their organizations if that power was simultaneously being vastly eroded and undermined?

Does the work of practicing participatory decision making and building shared leadership matter in the face of fascism? I’ve come to believe that perhaps few things matter more.

[Image ID: A close up image of the backs of four women dressed in pink, orange, and purple coats as they embrace each other. Shot by Vonecia Carswell]

At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we often describe the work of collective governance of our organization as exercise — working out muscles we may not even know we have, muscles that empower us to claim agency over our futures, meet our shared needs together, and engage in good faith and collaborative discussion, debate, and collective solution-finding.  This is not easy work.  We could all use more practice.

Anyone who has been part of a collectively run project —an activist group, an organizing project, a worker self-directed nonprofit, a cooperative, an intentional living community — knows that the work of deciding together is rife with disagreement and conflict.  Even when the intention is to be collaborative and share leadership, differences in power, rank, role, identity, personality and lived experience make it exceedingly challenging to create cultures and structures that truly allow everyone to contribute fully and fairly.  These differences often lead to breakdown — relational disruptions, system failures, stuff not getting done.  When stuff breaks down, and there is no boss to call the shots, we have to rely on each other to find the pathway out of the mess.

But finding a pathway out of the mess means you have to share a baseline understanding of your situation - a baseline that is non-existing in our post-truth moment.  Increasingly, we live in different worlds.  A look at just one of the many specious claims Trump made in his 2026 State Of The Union address is revealing.  In the world of Trump and his supporters, prescription drugs are affordable:

CLAIM: “I took prescription drugs, a very big part of health care, from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest. That’s a big achievement. The result is price differences of 300, 400, 500, 600% and more.”

In the world I and many of my neighbors, friends, family, and community live in, health care has never been more expensive and lower quality. 

THE FACTS: This is impossible. Although the Trump administration has taken steps to lower drug prices, cutting them by more than 100% would theoretically mean that people are being paid to take medications.

So how do we square these two “realities”?

Anyone who’s navigated a collectively run project is familiar with some version of this:  An important deadline is missed or a task is left unfinished and people in need are negatively impacted.  In trying to understand this breakdown in accountability and follow through, some people believe the responsibility lies in one place, others believe someone else is to blame.  Still others hold a complicated view and can see the ways that multiple failed systems contributed to the situation.  It could be argued that, within this scenario, folks are living in different worlds.  Even the basic “facts” of a scenario can often be contested.

I don’t mean to draw equivalencies between the abuses of power of an unhinged, authoritarian, and corrupt leader with the conflicts that arise within collectively run organizations.  The consequences of these two scenarios are incomparable.  And still, those of us with practice in cooperative structures have some precedent for navigating the tensions of two or more people living in different “realities”. 

One of the big differences between these two examples, however, is the way we hold the other.  Cooperatively run projects are founded on a shared understanding that we all need each other.  When disagreements arise, we know we must reach toward each other and find some common ground.  We get into the practice of validating each other’s experiences, even if they feel like unfamiliar or incomplete depictions of our “reality”, because we acknowledge we cannot hold the only, completely true reality.  We strive to acknowledge our own distortions, and the ways our stories have their own inaccuracies, perceptions, or judgments included.  We even accept that there may be times when we cannot fully align on a shared narrative of a particular situation, but that we can still strive to acknowledge at least part of our role and responsibility in the dynamic, and commit to learning, growing, and changing.  Without this humility, our cooperative projects would fail. Working in collectively run projects transforms us.  It helps us build the capacity to affirm that we all hold situated knowledges [2], and yet we are not absolved of the responsibility to create a world in which we all belong. 

I have no idea how we bridge to a world of shared belonging beyond this post-truth moment, but I do know we are going to need all the practice we can get.  May our pockets of “small d” democracy be like nurseries, tenderly sheltering us as we grow our ability to reach toward each other. 

Satisfaction

Otto Rene Castillo

The most beautiful thing
for those who have fought a whole life
is to come to the end and say;
we believed in people and life,
and life and the people
never let us down.

Only in this way do men become men,
women become women,
fighting day and night
for people and for life.

And when these lives come to an end
the people open their deepest rivers
and they enter those waters forever.
And so they become, distant fires, living,
creating the heart of example

The most beautiful thing
for those who have fought a whole life
is to come to the end and say;
we believed in people and life,
and life and the people
never let us down.

Footnotes:

[1][^Jump back]Lest this be confused with fatalism, I want to acknowledge that there are strategies: from mass noncooperation to general strikes to mutual aid, and that many of these efforts are the guiding lights in otherwise confusing and disorienting times.

[2][^Jump back] A concept developed by Donna Haraway to describe embodied, accountable, and context specific knowledge that is aware of its own limits and power dynamics.