Mx Aria Stewart @aredridel@anarchism.space

And of course when I say 'you' I mean 'us'. 'cause they're the same damn thing.

And if you missed 'how to make friends' in kindergarten, which I'm sure a lot of you did because your parents were authoritarian fuckos and twisted all the lessons, come see me and we'll talk.

Basically go make some friends without sticking to your own gender & race, you fools. And question your goddamn motives. Geezus. It's not that hard but you might have to dust off the skills you learned in kindergarten instead of resting on your laurels.

This means justice, solidarity, attempts to understand _and_ space to participate even when not understood.

Don't just make hypothetical people feel welcome.

Make the real people around you part of the crew.

If you say your workplace is disability-friendly, but what that means is "ADA compliant and has a wheelchair ramp", you're trying to serve an other, possibly unwillingly, instead of seeing who among you needs support now, in the specific ways they do, and working to build for them.

If the people you are claiming to support are "honored guests" and "outsiders to be made welcome", you're perpetuating the problem.

When you keep reinforcing the 'us' and 'them' instead of seeing and honoring the variety of 'us' there is, you're perpetuating the problem.

If you say you support LGBT folks but all your events are centered around gay men doing drag,

...you might be a bit ciscentric and misogynist

If you have posters for almost entirely white musicians and artists and businesses, and your only mention of black folks is anti-racism posters...

you might be a little bit racist.

Might have seen evidence of my people...

The concept of stewardship of land does not exist—sure, there's nonprofits with specific goals, some of which are aligned, but the idea that one can be a steward outside of that isn't here. There's no collective attitude toward land here outside of the people managing it, sometimes for profit.

The long and short of it is that I miss the West, and the attitudes toward land and development in the West are something I think people in the East and Midwest just don't understand and I wish they would. The attitude to land is so utterly different here on the East coast.

And if it's too much, you buy a bigger piece of land if you can, so you don't have to be so neighborly. You withdraw into your family and its petty estate. You fuss about the property values. You choose your town based on its schools, you don't help develop the school because it's your town.

And nature is a thing you do on weekends, when you're not mowing the lawn. You drive to visit it, little contained patches of land we imagine to be pristine. A refuge from this world we've co-created.

You control your patch of land as absolutely as you can, and resent neighbors being busybodies. And so does everyone else.

Or you become a busybody, the impulse to think larger than oneself turned dark and controlling, rather than nurturing community.

To me, the suburbs aren't just a problem, they're a manifestation of _the_ problem. They are alienating. Low density. Destructive to community, replacing community with a weaker network of family friendships that never coalesce into the durable relations that make true community.

You don't know your neighbors, not all of them. You don't _want_ to in the suburbs. You don't work in the burbs, not usually. You drive to school, you drive to work, or a train you drive to friends, you drive.

My hometown has no great record on native rights, but one can at least imagine the world as it is giving the Ute tribes a place to return to in their land without upending it all. It's in the realm of possibility. The world as it was taken from them is still there, if changed.

The Massachuset and Pequot and Cohasset and Nipmuc and Abenaki? Four hundred years of colonizing, privatizing and annexing land has left it utterly changed.

There are public paths and right of ways here. There's a few great meadows and sanctuaries, a recreation area here and there, but by and by large, the land is divided up into parcels held privately. Not fenced, but obvious demarcations between lawns. Large houses sprawled out for miles, farms are some of the largest open spaces, and those are in towns.

Towns are space-filling here, and since they have less structure inside than counties in Colorado, they don't cause clustering.