[Note: I wrote this regarding the liberal college town that I call home. I am confident that the subject matter applies to any American city that brands itself progressive.]
Lawrence, Kansas has historically been and remains a haven for progressives in the Midwest. we pride ourselves for having an open community. We have one of the most educated populations relative to population density in the country. When it comes to any of the things that you associate with activist communities, if you are going to find it in Kansas, you are probably going to find it here, culturally speaking. It is also a soft place. Which is, in my mind, a good thing. Problem is, if the larger problems of poverty, institutional racism, mental health issues, mass incarceration etc. are among your concerns; most of the people who are most severely impacted by these issues are not used to soft places. The world has not been soft to them. Even here, they often do not have access to the softness that most Lawrencians are used to.
I work at the Lawrence Community Shelter. We care for a population that has largely been victimized by the inequities that are the substance of Leftists causes. They have done prison sentences for non-violent crimes. They suffer from traumas which led to addiction and mental illness. They grew up in urban poverty and are attempting to escape gang culture. They went to war and came back broken. They are used to hard places. They are used to a world characterized by constant threat. Then they wash up in a soft place full of soft people and are expected to function in an environment in which they are treated as the threat.
I'm writing this because, as someone with activist convictions, I want to appeal to those who wish for similar priorities to prevail. One of the biggest challenges working with this population is helping people who are habituated to surviving constant threat come to a place where they can begin to feel safe. For them, safety is something usually won by manipulation and aggression. Assuming level of social trust that a supportive community entails, in the environments they are used to would amount to opening themselves up to life threatening risk.
Many in the radical community end up working in social work. The combination of wanting to help mend the harm societies injustices and reluctance to earn our rent by lending our labor to the class structures that perpetuate those injustices make working in the non-profit sector appealing, despite the compassion fatigue and comparatively lower wages that go along with it. We need the support of the community at large. We need for the idealism of our sentimental liberal college town to extend beyond opinions and party affiliation. Specifically we need the community at large to take up some of the burden of making this a safe place for those who don't know how to handle a soft place.
This means tolerance, community support, affordable housing, employment opportunities for a graded scale of functionality, crisis care for mental health issues, advocacy, volunteering. But, more to the point, it involves building a community of support beyond the institutional setting that is safe for people who don't know how to be safe. It means providing a margin in which it is ok to be broken, despite the fact that, in the world at large, you have to money or parents with money to have that privilege. It means taking on the burden of earning their trust rather regarding them with suspicion and advocating for a social awareness that they have more to fear from you than you do from them.
Even in Lawrence getting out of the homeless shelter usually involves working for predatory employers who hire in batches for temp positions to live in slum housing, because most landlords need good credit and a good rental history and most employers outside of factories and call centers want well adjusted people with middle class social skills and their own transportation. They certainly don't want to employ people who are struggling with multiple levels of internalize social stigma or rent to people who have no experience keeping up an apartment. This is hardly conducive to learning how to stop living constantly in a mode of survival.
My point, if I have to narrow down to one point, is that, for those who embrace progressive politics, if you want to create a progressive polity, then we need to begin by embracing progressive community practices. That has to go beyond ideology and extend to working to create a community where hard people can learn how to be soft, and addressing the fact that, in many ways, we fail to do so. We create social environments where we expect people to be safe, but we don't create environments where people can learn how to be safe. We hold social expectations they don't understand as the key to access and then get surprised or indignant when they either bullshit us or act out antisocial behavior.
Without the support of the community. The activists in our social services are Quixotically burning ourselves out to no end. Without a community that makes good on the promises we make when we encourage people who are used to abuse, that unlearning their survival tactics and learning to trust will provide more choices for them, we are setting them up to fail, and our progressive politics are words.