renegade reverie, idle idealism. well-meaning but useless, i’m sorry.

“When we make revolution a job, the day will come when we want to quit, to opt out, to secede or fall away: We saw this happen to the Boomers all too clearly. Why repeat the old mistakes? The least we can do is make new ones.”

Pretty good piece, but I disagree with the characterization of union actions as "a drag". At risk of romanticizing collective action, my experience with unionization efforts is that when people are pushed to do the hard work of consistently "showing up" they usually find it affirming and vivifying. To characterize a picket as "pacing slowly in a circle outside our workplace" is a bad faith reading of a moment that, for a lot of otherwise apolitical/discourse-adjacent people, connects them to their labor and to their coworkers in a positive and powerful way.

“But my life improved—as did, I imagine, the quality of the protests I did not attend—when I learned to recognize the difference between that real desire to be in one of those demos and attending on the basis of guilt or identity-defining necessity. People doing something guiltily, unwillingly, or resentfully are incredibly good at producing profit, but they can never produce the revolution.”

Can anyone find anything else she's written?