Refusing to Forget w/ Vicky Osterweil (03/21/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Vicky Osterweil about the events we’re encouraged to forget, repress, and reinterpret in order to abet genocide, carcerality, or abandonment to a pandemic, and the power of refusing to forget.
As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Vicky Osterweil 0:01
It is exhausting to constantly put ourselves in line with this world. It takes so much effort to not run screaming into the streets. And what is beautiful about moments of social eruption and social movement is it allows us to put that effort down, to be present with each other in whatever way that matters to us and makes sense to us, and to put down all of that cognitive load, all of that denial, and just say like, no, we don't have to live this way.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:59
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So I'm so excited to be here today with returning guest and dear friend of the panel Vicky Osterweil. Vicky is a brilliant author, worker and agitator, and I'm so glad to have her back on today. She is the author of the 2020 book, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. There's actually a great Death Panel episode where we talk about the book with Vicky.
She also writes a newsletter about revolt, history, culture, anarchy and technology, called All Cats Are Beautiful. And her next book, called The Extended Universe, is forthcoming next year from Haymarket.
Vicky, welcome back to Death Panel. It is always so nice to get a chance to think with you, and I'm so grateful you could come back on the show today.
Vicky Osterweil 2:15
Oh my god, thank you so much. It's so great to be here. And that intro was amazing. I felt so good, you know? Those big ups were so good. Thank you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:23
I aim to please [Beatrice and Vicky laughing]. No, but seriously, I am so glad that we're getting a chance to have you on to talk about this recent essay that you wrote for your newsletter. It's called Remembering As an Act of Revolt. And it's about memory, state abandonment, mass gaslighting, mass disablement, mass death, and the pressure to forget many of the things that we have just lived through, are living through, and will continue to live through. I mean, I really appreciated reading it. And I think it's a really good jumping off point, if you're trying to find that kind of moment where you can just stop, take a step back, both as a way to understand and perceive the truth and the horror around us, but also as a means of like orienting or anchoring our refusal, or finding ways to move forward, continue the work, you know, get yourself whatever fuel you need going. And those moments are important and also like rare to come by, especially recently.
Vicky Osterweil 3:23
Yeah, yeah. I'm really glad that it was that moment for y'all. And it's been like a really helpful and needful practice for me, especially since October. But you know, I mean, just in general, over the last few years, through the sort of normalizing of the pandemic, as y'all have so consistently tracked, you know, I have this experience of not like to -- with Death Panel, one of the things that I think is so valuable about the show to me is those year-end reviews, just reminding you, like this is where we've been for the last 12 months. And I've been quite frustrated with our inability to get any -- you know, to make real material change in the situation in Palestine and with Palestinians. I know that everyone has -- the people who've been out in the streets are frustrated, everyone around the world is horrified. It's not -- it's not to like sort of try and big up any one strategy. I think we're all trying really hard, and we don't know what to do. And I think one thing that I have been finding very helpful on social media or even just with friends is just like reminding ourselves about the situation. Because I think part of what inspired this, and sort of like, I think, the Death Panel project of memory, particularly around the pandemic, which has been so valuable, I think is the way that there's all this discourse happening, and honestly, the fact that we like made it to February before we started hearing it is kind of a miracle for an election year, but where we started hearing, you can't critique Biden, imagine what Trump will do in Palestine, you know? And just like, Biden is in power now though. Like that doesn't make sense as a demand. It has nothing to do with those questions. Like there's a genocide happening now. And I just remember feeling how there just have been all these moments this year where just saying what is happening, it puts you in this weird minority of resistance, you know? Anyway, and that sort of made me think about these processes that are -- that are going on right now, that I think are sort of crystallized in the Biden response to COVID, but that has become sort of a generalized tactic of the Democrats that, you know, as I'm writing about in the piece, and I can sort of do more formal overview of it, but basically that there is this practice right now, like this big part of what the Biden counterinsurgent strategy has been, counter revolutionary strategy has been, has been making us forget where we've just been, right? And not like Trump, who would just do one outrageous thing after the next. It was sort of like it was a fire hose, you know, and you just couldn't keep up, right? You couldn't keep up with the outrage. And Biden instead, it's just been like this real creeping, slow change, you know, it's like, okay, we're gonna like modify this little thing of policy. But don't worry, it won't take effect for six months. And it's just these slow goalpost moves, that I think y'all more than most other news sources unfortunately, very tragically, have really been tracking the way that that -- that is just this consistent march to the right, and away from information and remembering where we've just been. And that's been a consistent strategy, I think.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:21
Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, it's a really beautiful short essay. And I think as you just ran through, it just brings to mind so much for me. There are so many different ways that I think we're seeing the current and the recent past actions of the Biden administration rewritten in real time, as part of the sort of information context of this election, which is starting to I think coalesce and dominate in a way that also brings a lot of dread. And I know a lot of other people are kind of dreading the way that this is also going to sort of take up more room, and we're going to just see more of the "vote blue no matter who" pressure, which is a kind of complex and pervasive social pressure, right, that is a performance that many Democrats and liberals of all kinds engage in every election cycle, like the weather. I mean, the weather is not predictable anymore, but like the weather used to be when I was a child.
Vicky Osterweil 7:26
[laughing] Oh, yeah. We laugh because we don't want to cry on air, you know? Yeah, exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:32
Laugh now, cry later.
Vicky Osterweil 7:34
Yep, yep.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:35
But no, you know, I just thought that it would be nice to talk through some of this essay. So maybe just to sort of start us off here, I'd love to just establish some common context for listeners and maybe unpack this argument a little bit. Can you talk through the argument that you're making? Again, for folks who might want to look it up and read it themselves, the piece is called Remembering As an Act of Revolt. But Vicky, could you give folks the 10,000 foot view?
Vicky Osterweil 8:00
Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of started by thinking about how for the month of February, the electoral discourse was sort of about Biden's memory, right? His sort of age and his memory and that was sort of the big thing, you know, was Biden too old, whatever. And that sort of struck me as pretty ironic, because it was a sort of unconscious ideological echo of the Biden administration's strategy of forced forgetting, right. But what this also was reflecting to me was that going after Biden and his mental capacity was a safe way to attack, because what the Biden administration has really established over the last four years is the safety of eugenic modes of fascist critique, right? Liberals are really comfortable with a certain kind of, you know, as you talk about every week, two times a week, this sort of discourse of disposability and of, you know, some people just have to get over it, just have to get over the pandemic, whatever. You know, my husband won't get over it, that NPR piece, all this stuff. So anyway, so I was thinking about that, and about sort of like how -- how if we like look back even to 2021 or 2022 sometimes, and the way that like everyday, normal people talked about the pandemic, and how different it was, and how hard it is to remember that that was just two years ago.
And so I connect this, I think, to a sense that I've heard from a lot of folks, people on podcasts, friends, whatever, being like, people just don't know how long ago things were, right, like what year that happened. There's a real breaking point even in like the process of historicizing that has been really muddled by this very slow, creeping vibes based withdrawal of all COVID protections, and this like attempt to return to normal, that has been just this sort of just quiet forgetting, right, of everything that's going on. I think I called it the "narcotizing blanket of small lies," right? Just the sort of accumulation of not outrageous falsehoods, just slight decontextualized claims. And then some falsehoods if you look at the report, right, like but the headline is just decontextualized, not quite right, or whatever.
Then I was thinking about like how that is just reflecting, the sort of breakdown of time is a sort of effort, an active counter revolutionary, counterinsurgent effort on some level, to make us forget that, in fact, two years ago, childhood poverty dropped at the fastest rate it has ever dropped. That until last year, more people could just have health care, right, if the government decides to just do that. That evictions can just be stopped. That if we -- you know, if the government just rules it, like your landlord can't evict you. Like oh, so they want us to forget that. They don't want us to forget about the isolation and the alienation. They really want us to remember that. But they want to forget that, like, we could just get paid for unemployment, we could just get all of these things. And they want us to forget what they've recently said about Gaza. They want us to forget about 2021, when everyone quit their jobs, and that like drove wages way up suddenly. They think that they can just make us forget all this stuff.
And what I ultimately argue is that the big object of that forgetting is the George Floyd uprising, right? That they don't want us to remember that a scant four years ago, the President was hiding in a bunker underneath the White House while rioters destroyed the guard houses outside that building. They don't want us to remember that we were fighting in the streets with the police and we were winning. I was thinking, as I was prepping for the sort of -- this conversation today, like I was thinking about a talk I did recently around another project, but it had to do with looting and rioting. And it was at the end of last year. And one of the people I was working with was like, let's just ask people to think about where they were at this moment in 2020. And we did that. And the conversation that emerged from that was so powerful, you know, of just like -- just like, okay, we're talking about looting, but we're sort of -- it's theoretically this kind of like talk context, let's all just remember what it felt like, whatever your participation was like, whether it was online, or if you were like in the street fighting cops, or just on one of those marches, or doing mutual aid projects for people behind the scenes.
What that energy felt like, what it felt like when that third precinct went down, or when like it seemed like maybe Seattle had been entirely taken over by the movement, or when Minneapolis announced they were going to end their police department, right? What did it feel like when you and your friends were doing what you were doing, were like facing this down? And getting in that space, getting in that mental space of just remembering, changed the feelings in that room so intensely in terms of what felt possible, that it really like -- it affected something deep in me, you know? It really -- it was really instructive.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:41
Yeah, and I actually -- in reading your piece, I was reminded back to summer 2020. I mean, I often am when I read your work or think about you, because that's when your book came out, which you had been working on for a long time, which is kind of ironic is that, you know, it had taken so long to actually get to the point of being published because of controversy or whatever.
Vicky Osterweil 13:07
Yep, yep [small laugh].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:08
And so but then when it was published, it was like, oh, well, this is quite the right moment when it's very needed. And in the book, and in all of the conversations you had with people in the book, you know, you held this really firm line, just pushing against the "non, non, nons," right, the frame that we talk about in abolition work of like tinkering around the edges, and you came out and you really used that sort of moment in order to really sort of push back against these sloganeering declarations that you hear whenever there's civil unrest, like the only good protest is nonviolent protest, and like these violent rioters, I condemn the rioting, you know, and how these moments of like attention, where the media steps in and begins to cover something, right, that has this huge impact on the way that it's framed in terms of time, right, of having a beginning and ending that's decided upon by your enemies and opponents that you're protesting, particularly when we're talking about like anti-police actions. But it was also something that like folks on the left had to deal with, and it became a moment to really see people for who they are. And I think COVID has sort of operated in a similar way, though the engagement with time is different, right? We're talking about all these kind of ways of forgetting, right, and the way that forgetting benefits the state especially, and the maintenance of very specific power relations. And so I -- in reading this piece, I was actually thinking back to some of the original conversations that we were having in the summer of 2020, really actually about how to approach covering COVID, because we were starting to notice that there were arbitrary sundown dates being attached to these policies, right? Phil was looking at things like well, they've just decided that this is -- you know, that this program is going to end with that quarter of the business cycle in this year, right. And then when we got forward to that point in time and the sundown periods began approaching, some of the programs were renewed, some of them ended when they were sort of decided upon. So I think it's just so fitting that this essay in a really nice way just sort of calls people back to sit with their experiences of the pandemic in a way that you are rarely given the chance to, because anyone that is still protecting themselves from COVID has been put in the cognitive position of all day long having to justify that decision, right, that "choice," having to advocate to retain access to that choice, right? Maybe having to deal with the fact that that choice has been taken away from you by your employer, who's pressuring you not to mask or something. And so you're dealing with the dissonance of knowing how unsafe you are being forced to be and stuff like that. And so, I think it's just really important to like, as you're saying, sort of give ourselves the space and time if we can, when we can, to just sit with how much things have changed, and what was possible needs to still feel real. And one of the ways to do that is through remembrance.
Vicky Osterweil 16:18
Exactly. No, exactly. And I think what's been healing for me about this, to the extent that it has been, because things are just so hard right now, I mean, just miserable, is that like I think I've had a lot of conversations with people -- with people, you know, like myself, who are still protecting ourselves from COVID and not doing things very often and feeling very anxious about the fact that everyone else feels pretty comfortable with it. I mean, obviously, this is the podcast for that obviously, like I understand, but like, you know, a lot of people, myself included, feel very, very betrayed by people who we didn't think -- we thought we were comrades, right. I mean, you said, people showed where they stood, you know, and it's been really hard. And what I've been trying to -- you know, not to exculpate myself, but like to think about how this is working is that like for most of us, for most of the people who did the forgetting, they were forced to by their bosses, right.
And there was this like real material, like, you have to get back to work now. Like even folks who had slightly better, more sort of privileged jobs or whatever, where they could work from home, a lot of those people are being forced back into the office. And that has a lot to do with the collapsing commercial real estate market. You know, like, there's just these huge impersonal forces that end with your manager being like, no, you can't do this data entry job from home anymore, right, which is like wild and doesn't make any sense and is totally pointless, and endangering. And so I think when you combine the extreme force of losing the safety net, being pushed back to work, being pushed back to normal life, and the desire to return to normal, which I think is understandable, right?
Like obviously, like I would also love to want to go to a concert again, that was one of my favorite things to do. I would love to have -- I would love to experience that desire again. So I understand wanting to keep that desire at the expense of forgetting, at the expense of the sort of cognitive -- you know, like you mentioned the really untenable cognitive dissonance you have to hold to go to work every day, right, if you have to do that, as many of us do. And so it makes sense to want to give in to that, right. And I find that very easy to say in the abstract.
But when I think about my particular friends who have done it, I feel so angry that it doesn't quite work. It doesn't quite get me there, you know? I can't forgive them, really. But I think like the reason I introduce all of this complicating stuff is because I think if we can get some of those people to remember that, in fact, what we wanted to do in 2020 and 2021 was take care of each other. What we wanted to do was to stop working. What we wanted to do was to have things for free and to demand that everyone gets health care.
And like, yeah, like the liberals banging their pots for healthcare workers was corny as hell, but that was also like a spontaneous desire to like show appreciation for each other, right? That is real, that's still within us. And it's only three years removed. It's not dead. It's not gone, that possibility. And the last three years, I think, have been so brutal in terms of just the march of fascism. And I think that the Biden administration, in particular, has found a lot of cover behind the incredibly loud culture war stuff, right, that has taken up all the headlines, understandably, as a trans person, has taken up a lot of my emotional energy, has changed the focus of my organizing.
Like I totally get it. It matters. But it's not to say it's -- I really don't like when people say it's a distraction. It's not a distraction. They're taking territory, please, for the love of God. It's not a distraction. But as a result, the equally right-lurching Biden administration has been a able to sort of get away with quietly, as y'all have alluded, talked about on the show, creating the largest dismissal of people's healthcare in American history, right? The greatest single year spike in child poverty, since it's been recorded.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:16
And child hunger.
Vicky Osterweil 20:17
And child hunger. And, of course, the genocide, right, in Gaza. And that's the first time that the Biden administration's really getting called on it. And I mean, thank God, they're getting called on it by a movement. You know, I mean, I don't know where I would be mentally if that wasn't happening. But I think it's so easy to feel really, really doomed right now. Because, of course Trump being the dictator of this country would be such a nightmare, like an un-utterable nightmare here. And the idea of like affirming the Biden administration right now is so disgusting. And the fact that the system has put us in this position where those are our options is so horrifying. And it's easy to feel real deep despair, and I do a lot of the time. But I think like if we -- if we take the sort of like, okay, but only four years ago, everyone was really focused on mutual aid and taking care of each other, people have changed, but not that much. Like that energy is still there, it's still possible, it's still a horizon. And if we can remember and hold on to that, and that space, it -- because like, you know, I think -- I think the march into fascism wins when it feels inevitable, because they're actually quite weak in many ways. And it is assenting to it that ultimately is required, for a long period of time, over a long period of time.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:39
No, I think what -- what actually this brings to mind in some ways is that memory itself, within the context of the election, is not only a discourse in terms of like the direct discourse that we've been hearing, around Biden, but even just the assertion that, for example, the critiques that you and I have, liberals would assert that our critiques are merely happening because we are misremembering the Trump administration, right?
Vicky Osterweil 22:09
Yep, yep. Mhm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 22:10
And it's incredibly frustrating when you sort of hold that up against the lack of remembrance that has gone into every victim of the genocidal COVID policies in the United States, and every victim of the genocide in Gaza, and every victim of capitalist imperialism in general, right. In so many ways, is as sort of insulting as it is hypocritical, right, to be told, oh, you're merely misremembering how bad something was because too much time has passed. And thinking about that response too, and that sort of reaction that is, again, like so common, really had me sort of thinking about also how we really take for granted what memory is, because every act of memory has to do with remembering some kind of content. I'm not -- I know content has a whole vernacular meaning now, but that is literally the term of art that is used in the study of memory, and they're kind of right to use it, right? Because we are remembering specific things, whether you're remembering a movie, your thoughts about a movie, right? These are all sort of different content, right? It's gonna take a bunch of different forms, we're talking about objects, subjects, conversations, impressions, right, recollections, all of these things, right? But each of them, right, it is something that is a remembered piece of content, right? And that kind of has these two factors that differentiate it, right, they can exist simultaneously, or can be one or the other.
But it's either something that's been perceived, like remembering a movie or a conversation, or it's like associative bonds, right? The kind of ways that we like connect things to one another, the analysis and synthesis that we do. And so when we sort of think about, in particular, the one where we're talking about memory as connections between different things that you remember, right, that's consciousness, right? Like, that's what we're describing, like we're just describing consciousness also, one aspect of it barely. And so I think in that sense, there really is some power to the fact that remembering requires a literal sort of re-embodiment of some of those pieces of content, right. And I think to your point, you know, when -- I thought it was so interesting that you brought up like the end of year -- the COVID year episodes that we've done, because that is the thing that everyone says to us is like as they're listening, you know, the most common piece of feedback we hear is as I was listening to COVID year whatever, I like remembered where I was back when that change happened.
And I remember how I thought it was the worst that pandemic policy was ever going to get. And then, you know, the thing that happened two weeks later, when I realized it was only two weeks between that change, and then what became the new next worse change, it really struck me and I had to pause the episode and wait a day and then pick it back up, because I needed to just sit with that memory, and sort of recontextualize my current existence and understanding of the pandemic from hindsight, right. And it's so rare that we're allowed to do that with regard to the pandemic, in particular, because to do that would be incredibly advantageous towards reinstating protections, right, towards sort of making these arguments back to comrades who are now convinced that masking is bourgeois ideology, right, and individualism gone wild, and faux-left, you know, whatever.
Vicky Osterweil 26:17
Yeah, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:19
[sighs] But it is interesting to think about the way that memory is weaponized, but that also the way that it's like almost overcomplicated, right? And that ultimately what we're talking about when we're talking about memory is just the states of being and the ways our brain works and consciousness, right, like the constellations and connections between different memories is what thinking is, right. And so ultimately, the more I think that we can remember these things, the more that that can help inform and literally fuel, in the sense that those become things that are top of mind, right. And that is important. It does influence the ways that you move in the world, right? Like what you're thinking about will influence your actions and the way you approach things and how you interpret things. It's really -- it's not like you can just like separate the two out, right, and say, here's my brain, and here's my body, and here's politics, and here's science and never the twain shall meet, right?
Vicky Osterweil 27:21
Yeah, no, exactly. That was really -- I really, I really liked that, the way that what you just described, which I think is so important and so worth really just like hammering home is that remembering is an active process, and forgetting is also an active process. I think we tend to think of these two processes as sort of being automatic, right? Maybe we think about it in a sort of Proustian sense, right, where like it's sort of buried somewhere deep in your unconscious, and you just need the right sort of sensation to bring it all flooding back, right. I think that's often how we think about memory, I think, which is a lens that -- that does exist, like there is this sort of, you know, sensorial memory, but it's also a very nostalgic lens. It's also a very literary lens. I love those books, by the way, but [laughing] to be clear --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:14
Hard same. Yeah.
Vicky Osterweil 28:15
Yeah, yeah, but it's a very particular thing he's doing that doesn't -- has less to do with memory and more to do with literary experience. And that's cool. Okay. But I think like, I remember how in 2020, I think like even early, maybe even before the uprising, I started talking on social media about how we need to think about how we're gonna mourn for people lost during COVID.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:39
Mhm, I remember that.
Vicky Osterweil 28:39
And how we have to have this sort of mass mourning, and we have never had a moment. And then we sort of forgot we needed to grieve, right? And like one of the things that not mourning has done and not grieving has done has made the process of forgetting the pandemic easier. One of the reasons we haven't been allowed to grieve and to mourn, is because it makes it easier for us to forget, right. And like one of the things I was thinking about, because, you know, like, listening to the podcast, and you know, thinking about these issues, once policies are in place for like a few -- I don't -- I'm sure Phil would know the actual sort of like terminology and poli sci ideas for this, but like once certain policies are in place for a while, they get really hard to remove, right? It gets really hard to like take -- like Social Security, right? If it was proposed today, and it didn't exist, like it would never pass. Or libraries, right? Like there are these ideas, but once they get normalized, they get really, really hard to pull out. So I think there was a real urgency on the part of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration to get rid of that stuff as fast as possible. It was really important because you know, if it stayed too long, we'd get used to it. And you know -- anyway, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:51
Oh, no, no, no, I mean, just, you know, to the point about Social Security or Medicare, for example, in particular, or even Social Security Disability Insurance. It's really interesting to use that as an example especially because there is this whole context around those policies that we have forgotten, right. And this is something that we write about in Health Communism and, you know, this is something we've talked about in multiple episodes. There's a great one, a Death Panel classic, a Death Panel History of Medicare. And we talk about the story of Medicare's passage and the legislative record, and really how it was -- it was sort of slapped together, it was literally slapped together. And the kind of intentionality that's ascribed to these and the kind of society that passed them, that's projected onto these policies, is a great example of what we're talking about.
Vicky Osterweil 30:51
Right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:51
Yes, it's romanticization of like an America that was benevolent enough to pass a policy like Social Security or Medicare to take care of the aged and destitute and the disabled, right. And these replaced these other policies that pre-existed, that offered less generous versions, like assistance for the aged and blind. And there's all these other programs that come out of civil war pensions. This is a whole area of disability history. But the point I'm trying to make is that the political climate that led to the passage of Social Security and Medicare, you know, we're talking about 100 years of social unrest that states attempt to solve by leveraging health care, right. And the debate around socialized medicine and national health care has been raging for a while and you have unions dealing with pension insolvency and nobody can take care of people who are getting older. And it's really amazing too, if you look back at the record, you know, no one talks about Medicaid when it was passed, everyone talks about Medicare in all the speeches that they're doing, right, and Medicaid's just sort of like not mentioned by all of these people in all of these speeches celebrating the passage of both, right? And there's a lot about those policies that we ascribe intent to, right, and then we're like, well, if that was how it was supposed to be, then that's gonna inform the way we approach it, right? And ultimately, you know, that intent too is in and of itself a fiction, right? So there is this kind of really interesting moment where again, just like the point you sort of make -- the point that you make in In Defense of Looting around the ways that for example, mass movements are sort of hidden behind like the moments of visible protest, right? And how that sort of makes it seem like it is all very spontaneous. Again, it makes it seem like there once was an America that took care of people, and that is the country that many people still think that we live in, right. But what if that never existed? What if that is not really what happened, right? Because it's not.
Vicky Osterweil 31:33
Yep. [laughing]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:27
And that America did not exist and does not still exist. And yeah, you know, like the fiction of a benevolent state that's there to take care of you. This is exactly sort of the point of what we think of and the ways we talk about these policies, right, it shapes the ways that we think about what is politically possible, and what we owe each other, and what dependence and independence and interdependence mean, right. And so ultimately, you know, we've seen the pandemic filtered through this lens, right, which is not unique to the United States, but certainly has a lot to do with these imperial powers that have for a long time been dealing with social unrest by playing around with policies that look a lot like things like Social Security and Medicare. I mean, one of the examples we use in Health Communism that blew my mind and it took me weeks to convince myself I wasn't making it up, no matter how many times I confirmed it with other sources and other sources and triple confirmed, which was that like in the poor laws in England, that 65 is like the cutoff for when someone is too old to work, right? Like in the 1300s. And it still is. And now one of the big debates that we're engaging in is, do we need to raise the retirement age? Like woof, like where does 65 come from, right? Like, wow, why has it been around for this long? And part of that is this is what states do. States control the way that we think about them through memory, right, through the manipulation of history, but also, yes, mourning is an important aspect of this, right, but I think what's like a very important aspect is actually denial.
Vicky Osterweil 35:03
Yes. Absolutely. And I think that fits in really well, I think, with another thing I've been thinking about which is that, again, understandably, people have been very upset and talking a lot about the far right book bans, right. And it's quite clear that the right wing wants us to not know history, right? Like, that's the whole Ruffo project, right, is like don't -- you know, don't read any history. This is what's scary. Literature is bad. History is bad. Don't read it. It's the Silicon Valley goons who talk about STEM are like soft fascists almost, you know, compared to those guys, but they all don't -- no one wants us to like study that history. And I think there is this liberal -- you know, the liberal conception is like, well, we don't ban books, right? We don't -- we believe in history. You know, we respect science. In this household, science is real, you know, or whatever [laughing]. Unless it affects us personally, in which case, we do want to go out to dinner. But like I think there's this way in which liberals really don't want us to remember, especially right now, our immediate history, right? They're really comfortable talking about the far history. Like, I remember thinking, I remember hearing one time, I was sort of talking with a sort of non violence person and -- or I heard them talking in an interview or something. And I think -- I think it was me having this conversation, sorry, it's been a long year. And you know, sort of saying, like, at what point do you think violent uprising is justified, right? And they said, the Warsaw Ghetto. And it's like, oh, okay, at the point at which like -- at which it is almost impossible to win, at the point in which you have definitely lost, at that point, you're willing to take up arms? Not that the Warsaw Ghetto was destined to lose. But that is, that's the point at which you are sort of like willing, you think it's moral when like your entire people is being genocided, has been for years now, and you know you're next on the cattle train. That's when you're ready to pick up arms? It's not acceptable. It's not acceptable.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:01
Well, and I'm sure, I'd be curious if they felt that resistance in Gaza is justified.
Vicky Osterweil 37:07
Yes. I would -- no. But anyway, exactly [Beatrice sighs]. So anyway. So I think like that, all of that, to say that there is there is a really important value to this sort of historical relativist way of thinking about when things are justified, when we have to trust the state. But there's another thing going on. And this is like very, this is like maybe almost frivolous in comparison to the sort of deep conversation about the value of history and revolt that we're talking about, but like, there's also this really scary thing going on right now is that the Biden administration strategy has kind of worked. And that means that a lot of people have forgotten what January 6 was, like people are scared at how chill a lot of people are with January 6, and it's like, well, you've spent the last three years telling us to forget everything that just happened. And now it's happened and people don't see Trump -- you know, like I think like that liberal sort of panic, you don't remember what the Trump years are like, is actually one of the sort of projective admissions, right, of oh, god, we like actually have not taken the consequences of what we've just been through seriously, you know, and you critiquing Biden for some reason is the problem. You know, it makes me think about that, and I have to repress it. I can't stand it, you know, the way that it hasn't been taken seriously, it has been allowed -- you know, let the process work. Let the state do its thing. Let the Justice Department work. Don't worry, the Supreme Court will handle this. Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, just let the process do it slow. Oh, by the way, sorry, we're living under a fascist dictatorship under Trump, like sorry about that, our bad, you know? Like that's the trajectory. That's the historical trajectory. But it's built on this, this forgetting. It's built on this act of forgetting. And this as you were putting it, I think, very importantly, this not remembering. They need us not to remember. When we talk about uprisings, and you can see it happen with peopl -- if you talk to people who were in the freedom struggle in the 60s, even people who were only like slightly attached to it, if you talk to them, these elders, when they talk about it, you see the energy comes back into your body. When you inhabit the person and the space you were through memory, it's magic. Like it's a powerful magic, you know? And I think when we understandably focus on all of the horrible march into fascism and this horrifying genocide, which makes a lot of sense, it can be really easy to forget, to want to forget, to want the cognitive dissonance to go away, to want to feel sort of safe and like things are normal and like this is okay. But actually that makes you feel worse in the long run. Because when you remember the moments we fight, and when you remember the moments we're together, and when you remember the moments we take care of one another, and if you remember the moments we were so close, and when you remember that stuff, it gives us that power back. Not in the same way, not in a lasting way. It's not perfect. It's not, you know, but if we let those memories fade, they will eventually leave us, and it will be very hard to access them. And we will be a long way to defeat, if we -- if we let that happen.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:07
Yeah, absolutely. I wonder you expand on -- you know, one of the things you say in the essay and that you mentioned earlier, was that you feel that sort of like what is at the core, what the true core object of forgetting is, in some ways, you know, not just like the forgetting of the Biden administration and the pandemic, but the forgetting of the George Floyd uprising. And I think as you're saying, there's obviously a lot of difficult dynamics at play when you talk about this stuff, right? Because a lot of what we think about memory and denial and certain types of emotions is influenced by all sorts of stuff from like the casual meaning of these things, the slippage of psychodynamic language and psychoanalysis into pop culture. It's influenced by things like eugenics and ideas about intelligence, right, you know. One of the reasons why it can sort of feel so difficult, I think, to sort of grapple with how to find a way to talk about this that doesn't like feel gross or ablest in certain ways, right, is that ultimately, like a lot of the ideas we have about like how the brain works and how memory works relate to this idea of like being able to prove accuracy of memory, right, which is --
Vicky Osterweil 41:19
Right. Wow.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 41:24
Kind of ridiculous, if you think about it, because like, how could you ever verify that. And I think that lack of ability to really do comprehensive diagnostics, like we're a car or something, I think that really scares people, to be honest. And, you know, I think when we start talking about sort of what is at the kind of core here of the forgetting, right, we're talking about the aspect of this that has been made the most invisible, though I'm maybe misreading what you were trying to get at there. But that's sort of what I thought that maybe you were going for, which is that like that part of this, the George Floyd uprising, the resistance of the police, the burning of the precinct, that these are the sort of aspects of the pandemic years so far that has been like the most invisiblized and the most disconnected from the temporality of the pandemic itself. And so I'd just love to sort of like hear you expand on that a little bit, because it's just this tiny reference in the essay, and I'm just very curious to hear you speak on that some more.
Vicky Osterweil 43:05
Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. That's sort of exactly what I was thinking. And I think, like, one of the great weapons that the state has in defeating the possibility of change is time, right? They have time. If they can wait out most uprisings, if they can wait out movements often, you know, and one of the ways they can -- they can make this time work is by forcing us to work, or maiming or disabling us in various ways, as you know, Jasbir Puar talks about, or like there's all these different ways that they can create a cushion of time for themselves, in which we can then be brought to forget, I think, right? That's what that time gives them. And there's lots of other things going on. It's not quite -- it's never simple like that. It's never one thing. But I think, like, part of what's been so hard about pandemic time, and the last four years is that like, actually from 2011 until 2020, in the US, which is like sort of -- you know, I was -- when I was like, you know, I was in my early 20s, in 2011, during Occupy. By dumb luck, I happened to be in in Barcelona for the Movement of the Squares. Like, just totally by coincidence, I got involved in that. That was really how I got activated. I was on the ground in New York City, during Occupy, like right away, like first thing, like I -- there was -- there were these peaks and valleys, but it never went as long as it has been since 2020, you know? Between 2020 and the Palestinian solidarity movement, like that gap felt really, really long. And it was the longest that we've actually gone without a big upsurge. And I think like that feeling that like, okay, it's been a few years, like we're gonna fight back, like this movement is happening, we're in this space. I had this impulse, Bea, and like I'm gonna ask if that seems weird, my impulse is just to sort of like talk about it, about the movement in 2020, rather than sort of talk about the meta talking about it, you know? And like my impulse is to just sort of say, like, in 2020, we saw the culmination of all of these strategies that we had seen, right. So we had Occupy in 2011, okay. There were the CHAZ in Seattle, and there were other occupations in Minneapolis and all over the city, right? We had -- all over the country rather. We had prison strikes broke out in 2020, right. Just like 2016.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:31
There have been a lot of of prison strikes since 2020, too.
Vicky Osterweil 45:34
Exactly. And there have been a lot since. We had indigenous blockades, right? Remember when they stopped the Trump -- Trump going to Mount Rushmore, on July 4, or whatever. Like all of these tactics in this one upsurge, and we pushed them as far as they could go, kind of, it felt like, you know, and it wasn't quite far enough. We couldn't quite do it. But there was a moment -- like I say in the piece, there was a moment in July 2020 when burning down the third precinct was more popular in polling than either Biden or Trump. And someone sort of tweeted that quote, and was like, it's true, and found the studies, you know? Like that really happened.Like we were there. That was where we were. It happened, it really happened. And I think this is a good point, like Bea, you were saying that the thing that we're worried about is having -- being able to produce this sort of accurate accounting, right, which is obviously -- which is a legalistic thing, right? It's about being able to offer evidence, it's about being able to offer testimony that can be legally actionable by the state. And so I think it's very telling that whenever we talk about memory, all of this ableist language comes in, because I think the way that we think about memory, and intellect, you know, and the way that remembering and forgetting works, is so carceral already, right? It's so defined already by, like, if not the state, then the medical apparatus as it connects to the state, you know? I think there's this way in which like those moments, those feelings that we have, like I can -- maybe this is, whatever, I don't know, old lady nostalgically waxing. But like, I can remember the moment during Occupy, October 1st, 2011, when we took the Brooklyn Bridge, I remember exactly how I was feeling. I remember exactly who I was standing next to when that happened. I can see it right now in my mind's eye, if I think about it. And I don't know that I could tell you what I had for lunch three days ago, like with 100% accuracy. And what that is about is about, on the one hand, part of the reason I can do that is because I started thinking about that six months after Occupy. So I started just remembering that moment over and over again. And so that memory has stayed very fresh, because I've remembered it actively, but also those moments of intensity and solidarity and power, and like overcoming limits that we thought were not -- like that is the -- that's the really dangerous thing to state, I think, and to the system, that when we realize that we can take care of each other, and we can beat them in the street, and we can have what we want, and we can like -- we can take care of one another, and we can force them to give us medicine and we can stop evictions, and we can, we can just have anything we need, and we can all be together. And if everyone does it at once, we can just move together in a sort of direction. And that's enough, you know? All of those feelings, and in the way that it feels to be in the street during that -- you know, one of the things that's really, really interesting about reading a lot of accounts of riots in the 60s, because we really don't hear about those on the ground accounts, very rarely. But as the like, one thing that's really consistent is people talk about how happy everyone is. And that's throughout history. Throughout the history of capitalism, the thing that has scared police chiefs and politicians the most when they enter a riot zone is not their personal safety. It's seeing their constituents happy. That scares them because like they -- it's consistent. They talk about like, it's so deranged, they're so sick, they're happy, look at them smiling while the city burns, you know, like they -- they obviously pathologize it, right? They turn it into this -- you know, a form of violence. But that happiness, that possibility, that like liberation that we feel in these glimpses, in these moments of collective action, whether they're in the street or whether it's sort of less dramatic, you know, but is based in sort of mutual aid and care --those feelings are what they need us to forget. Because if we forget those feelings, then we won't -- we won't remember, we won't really be able to conceptualize what it is we're fighting for. And slowly that will slip away. And the everyday concerns -- gotta pay the bills, which right now is really hard, you know, gotta -- gotta do all these things. You know, gotta stay safe, gotta protect myself. All of those feelings, which are real and true and daily and constant, they will grind that -- that piece of you out, you know, that holds on to that possibility of something better. And if we just remember the feeling that we had, in those moments, when everything seems possible, it doesn't make that moment happen faster. But it makes us more capable, more creatively -- more creatively able to imagine that moment happening again. And that's so important right now, when everything feels so impossible, I think.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:24
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about, we have upcoming in early April, the anniversary again of the Section 504 occupation, which is, you know, this really important moment in disability history. But the part of that action that is so rarely discussed is the fact that to this day, it is still the longest continuous occupation of a federal building in US history, and disabled people occupied that Federal Building, under duress, that even -- we talk about this in our history of Section 504 episodes about it, you know, they even -- like the Feds used fake bomb threats on a bunch of disabled people to try and get them out. And it was only possible through this kind of one time moment of unity and collaboration from all of these different organizations, you know, absolutely essential work was done by the Black Panthers towards ensuring that everyone was like getting fed, right, and sort of putting a lot of work into the logistics and support of access needs and things like that. And yes, that was like a fleeting moment. And we sort of talk about that, and we talk about the wins, but what we rarely talk about is that under threat of bomb, with guns pointed at them, disabled people occupied a federal building for a month. A whole month. Like that -- that was not -- not the whole building, of course. But still.
Vicky Osterweil 51:58
Right. Yes, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:59
You know, that's not something that I think we -- that like the state would like to see happen again. So it's one of the things that is memory-holed, when that sort of moment of remembrance comes up again, you're gonna see a lot of people talking about how transformative the sort of collaboration and the unity of those -- of those protests and that movement was. But also the occupation was a big part of what motivated the state to finally act on implementing something that they had already passed years prior.
Vicky Osterweil 51:59
Yes [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:14
That multiple presidential administrations had been like, uhh, we don't want to do this, actually. We want to take this back. And then passed the buck to the next person. I mean, this is like one of those sort of classic examples, right, of how the idea of how that official history can often conceal these moments where maybe the tactic was not considered respectable by everybody involved, or something. And so that aspect is written out, and the kind of causal narrative transforms. And we see the ways the sort of stories that we're living now are being rewritten in real time, whether that's doing something like decoupling the Medicaid unwinding from the Federal Public Health Emergency, because allegedly, you need to give states more time to prepare, only to just go ahead and end the Federal Public Health Emergency anyways, like right afterwards, but history will not remember that when the Biden administration ended the Federal Public Health Emergency, millions of people got kicked off of Medicaid, because those two events were de-linked, right, and that was incredibly strategic. And it's incredibly frustrating, right, but one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is that, particularly during the pandemic, we've been dealing with kind of like demands that people participate in denial, right, in denial of like pandemic guidelines that were acceptable merely a week prior, right, you know, the kind of constant process of denial that has constituted the sociological production of the end of the pandemic, this kind of like declaration of an end to the pandemic and to the pandemic welfare state, to the possibility of these interventions that were not perfect, right, and which are being delivered by a state that, again, we're caught up in the kind of risks of dealing with the state, a benevolent state, and how that in and of itself -- like, you know, there's a whole critique of sort of the kind of fascist nature of how various olive branches of policy are offered to sort of quell uprisings and whatever, but that's like a whole other conversation.
But what is -- what I think is important is that denial actually takes up energy as well. And what I've been thinking about a lot as you're talking about sort of remembering 2020, and remembering the many things that were at play, but also, that was a moment where everybody was kind of on the same page about COVID recommendations, right? It was a simpler sort of process. People were not commuting. Not everyone, obviously, there were a lot of people who were still working in person, like very-- tons of people were still commuting. But there was a portion of people who were working from home now. All of these things free up space. We almost pretend I think that like our brains are merely limited by our willpower, right, that there's not some actual limit to the amount of cognitive processing that we can do in a day, right. And that -- that fiction, right, perpetuates a lot of internalized ableism and the kind of idea that distraction or something, is an issue of willpower or personality, right, or psychology and not that maybe the brain is just out of juice right now, you know? And so when we think about this, like, for example, in terms of administrative burdens, right, where the paperwork of the thing exacts a price in terms of like mental and physical costs from the benefit recipient, right? The paperwork of merely getting the insurance is a burden to sort people out based on ability in advance, right.
So these kinds of ways that we see, for example, like the rapid shifts in COVID guidance that are not only like not tied to the science, but been poorly communicated, and we're constantly being asked to sort of deny previous versions of "pandemic knowledge." And you talk about this as forgetting that we -- we can't afford, you know? We can't afford this kind of comfortable forgetting, right. And I loved -- I loved the use of the word afford, right, kind of weaponizing cost benefit analysis back at the beast itself, because ultimately, there is a cost to, for example, just the fact that the guidelines changed, and people had to sort of deal with the denial of the original guidelines. And they had to deal with the kind of cognitive processing of that. And if you look at, for example, it's funny because like in some ways, your essay is not just right in terms of vibes and history and analysis, it's also right in terms of what science on cognition says, and what science on memory says actually, where there isn't a lot of research on, for example, exactly what denial is, but all of the research is kind of narrowly focused on this one aspect of it, which relates to how denial impairs memory.
And it -- denial comes from the psychoanalytic tradition. So it's -- the kind of meaning of it that we think of most commonly when it's like used casually is -- comes from psychoanalysis and the kind of idea that it's a -- it can be a protective state, it can be in response to trauma, right? It can be to deny something uncomfortable, to deny something you're not ready to deal with yet. But, you know, ultimately, what comes with that idea as well is the idea of kind of like -- well, and we even jokingly refer to it of like memory suppression, right? That denial can basically allow us to suppress that content, right, that initial -- that memory itself. And what's really interesting is that that hypothesis, right, of the kind of like suppressed memory is not actually what is kind of borne out in experiments.
And what has been widely reproduced is actually really interesting and reproduced across a number of ages, a number of different places, people who speak different languages, right? And it's that, really, when someone's being asked to engage in denial, being asked to participate in denial, right, they're being asked to sort of take part of the content and leave part of the content, right, and enforce a certain position on it. And so the way these studies work is they'll give people a particular movie to all watch or something, and then they split the group in two and they take one group and they say, okay, now in this interview you're about to go into, say that you did not see XYZ in the movie. The second group are told just to go into the interview and tell the truth, right? Then there are follow up interviews conducted. And it's not that people don't remember the movie, they don't remember what their lie was that they told because --
Vicky Osterweil 1:00:15
Whoa. Whoa.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:00:16
Because denial, denial is a type of deception, and deception against yourself, which is -- which requires cognitive load. And so literally, the hypothesis is, or the theory is, that denial takes cognitive load and more cognitive load than merely just sort of absorbing the truth and reflecting it back, right. And so it affects memory, not in the kind of repression and suppression of memories in this very like literary way, that we've been talking about in the sort of psychoanalytic tradition, but the way that it sort of functionally works like as a mental process, you know, and it's so interesting to think about how it's also tied into theories of mourning, as a stage of mourning, right? Really, what's going on also is that your brain is processing more in these moments, and it is going to actually affect your memory, and it's okay for us to be real about that for a second, right? And wrestle with the fact that not only are the people, our comrades who have taken up the call to participate in this denial, helped reproduce it, they also were responsible for making themselves believe it right, like, and it's not necessarily coming out with intent and doing that. But ultimately, belief itself is just about ascribing truth to our own thoughts, or thoughts that we hear, right, or things that we remember, as we've sort of accepted these realities of the developing pandemic, sort of rollback of pandemic precautions, as we've sort of seen attacks on masking, the removal of testing, being told to look at the data to determine your risk, and then taking the data away. You know, like each of these moments that we're up against people who are -- who are taking in the content, right, and maybe at the time, they're like, okay, yeah, this is probably a little premature, but I want to get back to my life, right? They're not going to remember the denial and the self deception that they engaged in, they're going to remember, no, the guideline changed in 2021 and they said it was okay to take off the mask. And that's what that evidence is actually points to in terms of like how -- what is sort of actually functionally going on in the process of recollection when denial is involved. And again, we're talking about a study. And I'm only bringing this up as relevant because it actually is very specifically relevant to what we're talking about, because the study design, keep in mind, is about an authority figure telling you to lie to yourself.
Vicky Osterweil 1:03:02
Right, right. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, that -- that's so -- it's like, it's this very subtle, but really fascinating and important difference, right, about how that works. Thank you for bringing that. I really appreciate that. And I think, what's so -- what's so beautiful about those moments, I think -- I think what can be beautiful about moments like 2020 -- I think 2020 was particularly good for it -- is that all of that denial, all of that cognitive load and burden that this system is fine, that it makes sense that people should have to have a job to be able to live indoors, and even if they do have a job, they might not be able to anyway, and it makes sense that people should starve if they don't work, or can't get assistance or whatever, all of that stuff, you can see -- you can feel putting that load down. Some of that feeling of freedom maybe is putting down that cognitive load of denial, and being like, no, the police are the baddies and we don't like them and we don't want them around and I'm not going to justify, I'm not going to make it -- let it be okay that I see them on my street, you know? I'm not going to let it be okay that people are suffering. Like I refuse to deny, to continue to do this labor of denial for the state, you know? And I think like that -- that -- the way that that cognitive load, I think is a really -- really good way of putting it. I mean, obviously, it's also a technical term of art. But it's just, it is exhausting to constantly put ourselves in line with this world. It is exhausting. It takes so much effort to not run screaming into the streets, I think, on some level. And what is beautiful about moments of social eruption and social movement is it allows us to put that effort down, and to really look each other in the eyes or whatever, to hold each other's hands, to be present with each other in whatever way that matters to us and makes sense to us as a thing to do, and to put down all of that cognitive load, all of that denial, and just say, like, no, this is wrong, we don't have to live this way, and we don't have to convince ourselves we have to live this way.
Because, you know, I think what you're pointing to, Bea, is that we do have to -- we have to convince ourselves to go to work every day, those of us who have to go to work every day. You have to convince yourself, you know, you have to say, [sigh], like, what do I want to do right now? Anything but this. Okay, but I have to do it, because it makes sense, because I have to pay my bills. And we do so much of that labor constantly, of justifying to ourselves, and to our loved ones, and to the people we care about, no, no, no, it makes sense that I'm spending all this time doing something I hate, so that I can pay someone who I will never like enough money so that they don't kick me out of my housin, right? Like the worst person I know -- I spend all day at a place I hate so that I can give all my money to the worst person I know. That's how -- that's how we move through the world every day as like a worker, right? And we all know it. And we also all forget, we all have to not know it, to make it work. Of course, most of -- of course so many of us resist that through various sort of cognitive or physical "failings," right? Disabilities, madness, like, because actually, that's a reasonable response to what's being asked of us. This amount of effort, this amount of load, this amount of self denial, righ, that we're being asked to do. It makes more sense to let go and to not do that a lot of the time. Whatever, I don't over-romanticize anything. It's not all resistance. I'm not an expert on any of this beyond my own lived experience of a lot of this stuff.
I just think like, there is a way in which when we remember those moments of togetherness, whatever that looks like, if it means like reading -- you know, reading posts we made during 2020, going back to the group chat from 2020, you know, whatever, whatever it is, reading the thing we were reading in 2020, the novel we read during that period that was really powerful. You know, any mode of remembering that, maybe will help lighten that cognitive load, will maybe give us that moment of rest and peace that this year is so determined to never give us.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:30
Absolutely. And I think it also potentially offers you more than that too, you know. The more times that we're exposed to say, the rhetoric of COVID minimization, the more times we have to refute things.
Vicky Osterweil 1:07:45
Yeah. I mean, if anyone knows that to be true, Bea, it's you [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:48
The vilification of looting, of protests, of riots, the more times we're exposed to the rhetoric of climate denialism, the Democratic Party sales pitch, you name it. What else? I'm leaving a bunch off. But you know, you know what I mean? Each of these moments of exposure, your brain is wading through deception. Everyone's brain is wading through deception when we encounter these things, right? I mean, just think about when XYZ news item goes around about state level laws attacking trans life and the kind of responses that you'll encounter, right, where you have people in disbelief and denial that it's happening, that it's getting this bad, right? Who argue, oh, this is just a distraction, right? And whenever we encounter these sort of points of rhetoric, right, we're like wading through this deception.
And for people who like accept that ask, who answer the call to participate in that deception and denial, especially people who themselves reproduce it, their memory is then shaped by that denial. And since belief, after all -- you know, again, the attribution of truth to a thought, right, belief is shaped by memories. So like if denial in real time shapes memory and memory shapes belief, then exposure to these things in real time, not only just induces the forgetting but reshapes belief, right, but the opposite is also true, which is -- I think you're not just right that remembering can be an act of revolt in a vibes based way, it's also, I think, in a kind of sense of shoring up and strengthening belief, right, that is an important part of what growing a left movement needs to be, right. If anything, one of the biggest obstacles that the left is up against, for example, in the United States is the kind of position of disbelief that we are constantly sort of navigating against, right.
And this should be a point of unity between leftists and people who are disabled, especially chronically ill people, people with invisible disabilities. It's not, right. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done. But boy,has it gotten better than when we started the show. And when you're talking about, you know, Occupy, I'm like, oh my God, I'm thinking back to endless arguments about why I needed to mask at Occupy and why it wasn't a security risk. And no, I did not need to show the police officer my list of medications, and you know, like, I -- you know, and those are some of the memories that do color that time, right. And they also shape the sort of ways that I think about encountering these same fights now. And while sometimes it can feel like we're sort of fighting these arguments over and over and over and over again, it is important to remember that our task is quite large, right. And we have a lot of forgetting that we have to work against, right. And that is going to require as many opportunities as possible to repeat ourselves and to sort of reinforce belief at that same moment, right, which is much more than just, as we're saying, like about motivation, or emotion, or mood. It's also about sort of lessening the literal burden the state is placing on your brain asking you to participate in normalization of many things that you disagree with deeply and profoundly.
Vicky Osterweil 1:11:35
Yeah, no, that's so well put. And I think one of the ways that that also works, you know, I think that what you're talking about is sort of that -- that sort of how much further and how far we still are on these questions of disability justice. But one thing that I think about often is that because we were taking the pandemic seriously in 2020, everyone on those actions was wearing a mask, which is the big thing you have to do to protect yourself from state repression. And I genuinely believe that part of the reason that state repression wasn't as good at like singling out and arresting rioters and looters, as they normally are, was because everyone was wearing a mask, right. And that was a gesture of solidarity around COVID, and that was a gesture of care. People weren't necessarily aware of the political ramifications that an anarchist will tell you is like always have your face covered if you're doing anything adjacent to illegal, right. Like, it was just -- it was that these forms of care overlap, and they reinforce each other. And another example of that that I think, you know -- I also do a lot of this reflection, because when I sort of started "organizing," it was really in 2009 was when I sort of started doing things that I would describe as organizing in a real concerted way. And I was doing police and prison abolition work from 2013 on, and from 2013 to 2020, aguing that police should be abolished was the most frustrating, like people who are otherwise very reasonable and on your side, like call themselves leftist or even revolutionaries, like you would just -- you would hit the police and it would be like this -- it would be bashing your head against the wall, right? And then suddenly, over a week in 2020, everyone agreed, and everyone understood, and we haven't gone backwards on that. A lot of people have like reacted to that, a lot of people have turned it into defund, which they then turned into like mealy-mouthed reform, like people aren't activated on it in the same way. But we also -- like I remember what movement infrastructure felt like in 2009, or indeed 2012, like post-Occupy, and what it feels like now, and like, yes, things are quiet, and it's not necessarily the case that we're gonna be fine. But we also haven't regressed all the way back, you know, we haven't -- we haven't gone back to where we were, and we don't have to. And the denial, as you're pointing out, is an attempt to get us to do that, to bring ourselves back to that earlier space, to actively forget the possibility that things changed, right. And we don't -- we can, we can counteract that in acts of communication, memory, writing, thinking, being together, we can counteract that. And it's small on the scale of what we need to do. It's small, but it's necessary, and it's quite powerful internally and individually. And I think that's really important.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:14:38
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that you end on in the piece that is, I think, really just important to sort of visit for a second, which is really, I think, just to emphasize, because I want to make clear that this is not an interpersonal thing so much as we're talking about really kind of the mass ideology of fascism, right?
Vicky Osterweil 1:15:08
Yes, yes, exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:10
Because I refuse to use the word psychology there. But you know, the kind of mass ideology of fascism and some people could call that consent manufacturing, perhaps, or something like that. But I actually think we're talking about something a little bit different, right, which is this kind of idea of mass forgetting, you know, when we talk about that reference I made to the mass psychology of fascism, right, is a reference to this very important, but kind of half-assed and very controversial analysis --
Vicky Osterweil 1:15:43
Mildly sketchy but valuable. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:45
Yeah, it's like a whole --
Vicky Osterweil 1:15:46
Like so many things.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:47
Yeah. Like, that's a whole tangent.
Vicky Osterweil 1:15:49
[laughing] Yeah. And recently, you know, I've been thinking a lot about the 504 occupation and I've been thinking a lot about the Young Lords ambulance and hospital takeovers lately, and I've been thinking about how we're about to head into a period of really intense -- I was referring to this, I think it's quite possible, we are headed for a period of a lot of empty commercial buildings. We are in the middle of a housing crisis that's really severe. There are going to be a lot of empty condo buildings, a lot of empty investment buildings, and a lot of need for care. And there are often moments that crystallize a certain feeling, you know, that then -- that like lead to this sort of upsurge that then can pass along a lot of people, or it can be very limited. It can -- it can, you know, there are struggles happening all the time, like very small strikes, small ruckuses with the police that would never even get reported, but like, people in a neighborhood fight back against the police and win, but in a very small -- you know, in a skirmish where like the cops are trying to arrest a kid and his friends helped him get away, right? It was a very small moment. Like, there's all of these moments happening all the time. And it's not that like -- I think we either -- I think the theories either are, revolution is like this momentary spark where history is grabbable and then everything changes, or it's like, it's just this accumulation of small moments like that, you know? And it's both and neither, I think. If I knew exactly what it was, I think we -- the only way we'll know exactly what it is is once it happens. It hasn't happened yet, so we don't know. But I think like, there is -- the thing that is powerful individually or interpersonally that's possible is that if you trust yourself and your friends, you can access some of that memory. But that's the extent of the personal part of it. Once you've done that, it allows you to open up into a vista of collective action on either a small organizing scale or on a grand one, right. And I think like that tension between -- you know, as you're saying, like the fascist -- the fascist project is to produce defeat, denial, fear and shame. It can feel really, really hopeless. And I don't know that what we need is hope, necessarily. I don't know that that's necessarily the thing we need. But fascism is built on a certain kind of hopelessness. And we can fight against that, without having a clear, obvious sort of Obama-y hope. We can militate against that hopelessness by remembering that we did fight back, and we can fight back again. And there has been loads of evidence over the last 15 years, that what people want is to care for one another and take care of each other. And there's loads of evidence to the contrary. And so what's actually going to happen is what we do.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:16:06
So well put. Vicky, this has been really refreshing. And I just really appreciate everything we've gotten a chance to talk about today. And thank you for writing an essay to help us get there.
Vicky Osterweil 1:18:59
Thank you so much for all of the work that y'all have done over the last four years. I mean, honestly, it's so important and valuable, and it keeps -- it keeps me feeling both like connected to the world and like I'm losing all connection in the best way, you know what I mean? What I mean by that is like, I'm filled with rage and hope and knowledge and beauty and memory and power.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:24
Thank you. Well, that is the perfect place to leave it for today. To support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, hold listening or discussion groups, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the patron feed. Everyone else, we will see you same time next week. As always, Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
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