On our way with the necessary equipment

March 27, 2024

Sometimes small stories just capture your imagination.

Recently there was a wonderful post that went viral on social media. A cygnet was trapped in a frozen lake near Reykjavik. Someone shared the problem online and after a lot of community angst, a conservationist replied saying, “I am on my way with the necessary equipment”. Together with her best friend, a thermos of hot water and her knowledge of wildlife, she rescued the cygnet.

We love this story for its humanity and its simplicity.

Imagine being able to respond confidently to the challenges of these times, with a calm “I’m on my way with the necessary equipment”.

Anna and I have been talking a lot about the overwhelming feelings that arise when we think about the scale of the interconnected crises. Sometimes, like the cygnet, we feel trapped. Frozen in by fear or the enormity and complexity of the work that needs to be done.

With an election coming up we’re seeing the obscenely wealthy using their power to not only buy advertisements and attention, but also to hobble any kind of meaningful action on climate and wealth distribution.

The times we find ourselves in are far from ‘normal’. We can look to the US and see the complete and utter havoc being wrought through what Rebecca Solnit calls “the stupid coup”. But we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought that the systems we have in place here are working.

Our governments and our systems are failing us, even when they look like they are not.

And in the face of all this, I think some of us, sometimes, freeze.

It goes without saying that in an election year in a democratic country, one small piece of necessary equipment is your thoughtful vote. And of course you can extend this to volunteering for a candidate whose values you share, donating to a campaign, talking politics with your neighbours or even running as a candidate yourself.

We’ve been thinking about democracy not as the end game, but as the vehicle or the engine that we are currently using to help us get where we want to go. Like any vehicle it requires ongoing maintenance.

Erica Benner (author of Adventures in Democracy), argues that while democracy is important we have to be very careful not to idolise it lest we “swing from being too complacent about its health (and doing too little to keep it up) to panicking and feeling helpless when it starts to fray”. She suggests we’re better off thinking of democracy as a “flawed, very fragile thing that we’re all responsible for maintaining. It needs constant health checks to keep anyone (including our side) from taking more than our fair share of power…”.

Creating the world we want is bigger than elections.

What we love about Benner’s approach is that she expands the boundaries of what democratic behaviour is. It becomes not just the static response to set institutions and processes, but also about how we engage and behave as citizens. She writes:

“[W]henever democracies need repairing, institutional reforms are seldom enough. To re-set them and shore up democracy’s credibility as an option for people who hope to create new ones, we also need to take an honest look at ourselves, and re-set how we think and behave.”

Erica Benner, Adventures in Democracy

This approach sits well with a lot of the other reading we’ve been doing around the importance of not only maintaining institutions, but building, growing and maintaining an active citizenry.

History Professor and policy analyst Daniel Wortel-London has written a fascinating essay about the lessons that can be learned from the struggles against the Soviet Empire during the 1980s. He specifically draws on the work of Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, explaining that Havel and others recognised that “their political task was not of reforming the state, but of rebuilding society”.

And so perhaps a question that we can ask ourselves is, what necessary equipment, what power, do we have to begin re-energising society, to ‘re-set how we think and behave’?

This re-setting of course does not have to be dismal, or always earnest, or somehow ‘weighty’. It can be a resetting with joy, connection and a building of the world we dream is possible.

The necessary equipment does not always look like we expect it to.

Anand Giridharadas (follow him over at The Ink), recently wrote a beautiful piece called ‘The Opposite of Facism’. He writes, “It’s tempting to think that the opposite of authoritarianism, of this nightmare we are living through, is an opposite politics.” And while he emphasises the importance of a “ferocious political response”, Giridharadas also argues that joyful, welcoming and outward looking lives are also a part of the necessary equipment, otherwise we risk allowing forces of fascism to enable “politics to eat your dreams”. 

Giridharadas urges us to:

“Be what scares them. Live in colours their eyes can’t even see. Cook food they want to deport. Test the fire code with your parties. Form a scene that meets every Wednesday. Call someone you haven’t in a while. Fight with a smile. Fail and come back. Be weird. Be welcoming. Kiss converts. Refuse despair. Be disobedient. Laugh loudly. Hide someone. Call out. Root down.

They are waging a war on living. The more fully you live, the harder their job will be.”

Anand Giridharadas, The Opposite of Facism

This is not about pleasures shut off from the reality of the world, it is about embracing the complex messiness of human love and our role in creating cultures and practices that make it hard for fascism to take root. It is about refusing to be divided and instead doing all we can to help one another feel secure and connected.

And it is about claiming these acts of connection and community building as a part of the real work. As a part of the necessary work. And all of us have the necessary equipment to contribute here.

Let’s go back to us being cygnets trapped in ice. As we’ve written about before, those with money and power work deliberately to freeze us, to cause us to panic and to become trapped in inactive isolation.

So perhaps step one is understanding that the toolkit the conservationist used to free the bird is applicable elsewhere. Perhaps turning up with our best friends and a thermos of something hot is exactly the type of necessary equipment we need to unfreeze each other and spring into action.

Meaningful connection, community building activities, educating ourselves, sharing our resources and our wealth are all things that we know are democratic infrastructure (may we remind you of the research we’ve done on this around the public good and care through disaster). On its own it is far from enough, but enough will not be possible without these foundations for an active citizenry.

Coming together is also what makes thinking about the future possible, enabling us to not only reject the options in front of us, but to build whole new worlds together.