Taylor Sparrow: Thinking More Than The State Allows -- Radical Politics In These Troublingly Quiet Times

Thinking More Than The State Allows: Radical Politics In These Troublingly Quiet Times
by Taylor Sparrow
People of Color Organize!

What is in a life?
How can a life be understood, as you continue to make meaning along the way?

Stories. Hints. Scraps.
Little bits of evidence that lead in possible directions.

Our lives are made up of all the choices that we make, or do not make. Choices made visible, but not chosen. Choices made, but not understood, or not re-evaluated later, or regretted and carried like a weight.

The work of studying history is – whatever else historians might claim — quite simply the study of human choices. We learn from other people’s life choices so that we can choose how to live.

Our lives are quite messy, and perhaps even more so if we are living in opposition to an established order, against armies and ideas that try and constrain us. We do not really live our lives ‘in order,’ so the attempt to make a clean chronology from the outside is futile and pointless. We live our lives more in the form of a collage — or multiple collages layered on top of each other — rather than in a simple linear progression from birth to death. We are constantly connected to ideas and people and places and memories and dreams and plans, in an endless web that has a coherent logic only if enough of the connecting threads are visible at once.

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Protestors Breakdancing In Wisconsin State Capitol Building

Emma Goldman in her 1931 autobiography Living My Life:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everyboy's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

[Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]