There was no power, no water, and no heat in the church; a generator (or maybe more) were keeping the lights on, although only in targeted parts of the massive church. For folks pitching in at the church and probably just folks in the surrounding houses, also without power, water, or heat, port-o-lets were placed outside in a neat row. A bit later, someone asked me to break down cardboard from all the donation boxes and then take it outside, next to those port-o-lets, to a "garbage area," where within minutes of me bringing out a bunch of scrap, a trash truck of some sort came and took it all away.
Inside the cavernous church, there were mountains of donations, first unloaded by the front door, and then carried into the enormous main sanctuary (if that's the right word for it; "no gods, no masters, no correct religious vocabulary!"), and then divided into areas between by type, such as paper products, blankets and clothes, or "babyland," "baby world," or "baby island," as it was variously called.
At first, I was put to work hauling in rolls and rolls of toilet paper to the paper area, and each time I did so, over dozens and dozens of trips, a guy organizing that area with self-directed efficiency said, "Thank you, thank you!" "Thank YOU!" I started replying each time. When I'd run out of toilet paper to deliver to him, he explained how he was trying to set up that area so that people could easily get four rolls each tomorrow, when there would likely be a big distro push. A woman brought him a bunch of sponges, and he redirected her to the household cleaning supplies area.
A friendly Catholic Charities woman than asked if I'd mind helping to sort diapers in babyland, and even though it was self-evident how to find that self-created area, she patted me on the back, thanked me, and walked me over, again asking if I needed food or coffee first. The baby products area included diapers, diaper wipes, and assorted baby stuff like powder, but for some mysterious reason (like the ol' gender binary, I suspect) also tampons, "sanitary" pads, and shampoo, and then for good measure, toiletries like toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, and deoderant. But the diapers overwhelmed all else. One woman told me that she had taken it on herself to make order of the diaper chaos, and between her, myself, and another woman, within forty-five minutes, the mayhem became manageable.
Two other folks joined us. One was from Park Slope and the other from Bushwick; they said they were still shocked by how their neighborhoods were untouched and here, well... yes, it felt almost as if the hurricane had just hit. One told me that they had tried to lend a hand with an Occupy Sandy Relief site, but "because it is so big, doing so much, it's harder to instantly plug in." She didn't say this as a criticism but rather as an observation. Her matter-of-fact explanation underscored for me how, for volunteers like her and so many others, mutual aid has proved to be the mainstay of how people are helping each other after Hurricane Sandy and the nor'easter; how longtime and large NGOs like Catholic Charities are now the little guys by comparison; and FEMA, the city, the police, the National Guard, "caring" capitalists, and other "from-above" people and institutions seem—and pretty much are—irrelevant (well, irrelevant in terms of offering help; dangerous and sometimes deadly in terms of most else). No one mentioned the standard "relief agencies" or city/state/federal officials that usually get associated with disasters. Instead, it was Occupy, or that "a friend" had told them about this church, or that they were already part of Catholic Charities (yet another friendly Catholic Charities' woman came over to say good-bye to us, as she was leaving for the day, thank us yet again, and then offer her heartfelt "God bless you!"). The guy from Bushwick said that he'd been to DUMBO, and a fancy waterfront cafe where one of his friends work had been decimated by the hurricane. That cafe, he told me, "lost millions and millions," and "will be closed for a year. They have insurance," he observed. "I guess my friend is out of a job, though." Her Park Slope friend remarked that she hadn't thought of that at first—how even if big businesses she didn't like and could afford it got destroyed, that meant lots of people making little money wouldn't have jobs now. What about them? The Park Slope and Bushwick pair marveled at the profound unevenness of the destruction, relief, and reconstruction.
We were all getting overly involved in both chatting with each other and being super efficient, super organized. The first woman I'd met —the diaper-organizer extraordinaire—commented that she was going to bring a big "organizer shelf" that she had at home to the church tomorrow, to make it even more clearly organized for the big distribution weekend and beyond. The Park Slope woman and her friend were putting together toiletry packets in ziplock bags, and she had determined that removing the boxes from toothpaste first meant fitting more toiletries in each baggy, so people would get more supplies in each ziplock when they came in. Plainly, there was plenty here, and plenty of need. We soon filled up a big cardboard box with smaller, glittery cardboard boxes extolling the virtues of each particular toothpaste—and I carted that outside to the garbage area. The third woman in our diaper-organizer crew realized that inserting pieces of paper indicating the diaper size in all the thousands of loose diapers she was sorting into plastic bags—a god-awful task, especially for someone like me who had no idea before today that disposable diapers came in so many different sizes!—so I found her some blank paper. She and another woman remarked that they didn't have time to sort by color (blue and pink) or patterns (trucks or butterflies), but that likely the baby boys and baby girls wouldn't care right now—or maybe they never notice.
The point here in all this mundane description is that the people in this church—and at so many other relief sites, growing little resilient weeds around NYC, the boroughs, and NJ—no matter who they were or why they had come to help, all seemed to proudly relish doing things well, in a way that would make easy sense when people came in to get material aid, and in a way that made the space itself feel tidy, friendly, and welcoming. Each person proudly relished their own innovations and self-organization along with the doing-it-together ourselves aspect. They wanted to bring dignity to their work and dignity to those who came in for needed supplies for homes without light, heat, or water. They wanted to treat each other as equals, as all doing a good job, as all needing to be thanked and all wanting to thank each other.
This and so much more is what, I think, gets lost when we use the phrase "mutual aid." When it appears on banners, like the one pictured at this essay's start: "Mutual Aid Not Charity," even when we circle our A's. The mundane usage of mutual aid as a term is simply an anarchistic version of charity ("we're helping those people or that community, autonomously") or a capitalistic version (it's merely about reciprocity or more likely exchange, or a nicer version of quantitative aid). Its marvelous usage, and the one working at cross-purposes with state and capitalism, to paraphrase Peter Kropotkin, is the mutual aid that is cognizant of and reliant on its own self-organization; that is aware of the wholly egalitarian social relations it is forging explicitly against the wholly inegalitarian ones of the current social order; that is networked, grassroots, and confederated horizontally; that is about sharing, enjoying, and using spaces and things together in ways that highlight self-determination and self-management, even as we reappropriate and expropriate those spaces and things; and that sees each and every person (and the many animals impacted by this human-created disaster) as fully worthy, fully capable, in what John Holloway has labeled "a politics of dignity."
I posted that photo of "Mutual Aid Not Solidarity" (taken by Joshua Eaton, and borrowed from his tweet of the image) on my Facebook page yesterday. I wrote: "Sign of the times, post-hurricane & nor'easter, outside the Occupy Sandy Relief hub at 520 Clinton in Brooklyn." As of this evening, 167 people had shared the image and my caption, and in numerous instances, there was then discussion on other peoples' Facebook pages of why mutual aid and charity were the same, and that charity wasn't bad, as implied in the banner in the photo.
I ended up in a good conversation about this with someone who shares work space at Interference Archive, David; he's working on a dissertation about mutual aid, so we talked a good long while, interrupting both our projects for that day. The crux of our discussion, and what underpinned our numerous examples of what we both consider marvelous mutual aid, was: mutual aid is, and has to be, a social relationship—a profoundly different form than what capitalism tries so hard at socializing us into for the whole of our (then-miserable) lives, and succeeds so well at doing.
The people-to-people—without mediation or compulsion, without bosses or police—cooking and sharing food, offering medical care, opening up one's home for someone de-housed by the hurricane, using bikes and cars to get supplies to areas cut off by the storm, and on and on are, no doubt, the beautiful kaleidoscope of Occupy Sandy Relief across the battered landscape. And the facts that it has taken hold, captured the imagination, and brought thousands into DIY circles of relief efforts and aid are all, also, beautiful. But all this fits all too well into the cruel capitalist-statist structural domination and its equally cruel systems of oppression, which go merrily along even as we feed, clothe, caretake, and house each other.
The cross-purposes of mutual aid that just might point past this current structure, toward a social transformation that's been tantalizingly glimpsed these past two years in do-it-ourselves social movements in squares, parks, plazas, and encampments around the globe are those new social relations we're experimenting with. They can be oh so small, like when I was volunteering for a short time at the 6th Street Community Center in Manhattan's Lower East Side; when people came in to get material aid, no one questioned them or their need, no one made them fill out a demeaning form or ran them through a charity bureaucracy that shames, no one gave them predetermined quantities or supplies but instead let them take what they needed, desired, and could use, and together, we somehow all figured it out. We self-managed, self-organized, self-determined, self-governed—not in a formalistic sense, but in qualitative, humane manner, person to person, with dignity.
David mentioned that in his view, this all implies we need to appropriate/expropriate spaces so as to be able to do this always; I agree, focusing on what I understand to be a notion of "the commons" that extends beyond physical space (but includes it) to embrace ecological, caring, social, and resource commons, and for me, as noted above, that means not only that we can use, share, and enjoy our world in common but also self-govern it, have shared and enjoyable power-together over it, in all those appropriated/expropriated spaces.
Today, I moved a bunch of toilet paper, sorted a bunch of diapers—in a church sanctuary under the mournful eye of a gigantic Jesus nailed to a gigantic cross, with blood dripping from his hands and feet—and worked to create toiletry bags in clear-plastic ziplock bags—not for the "culture of fear" that airports have become but instead for the "culture of caring" that this mutual aid moment is gesturing toward, in a way that I hope we recall for those many everyday moments outside hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns. Mundane activities, in a poor, ignored, toxic-filled, abandoned, mostly people of color neighborhood called Red Hook, in the aftermath of yet another capital/state-induced climate catastrophe, but somehow I kept thinking that Peter Kropotkin would be proud. Maybe not as proud as the folks sorting diapers with me, but damned proud nonetheless!
I'll end with another Facebook share from yesterday, a photo by Nik Fox of the Yana Medical Clinic at Beach 113th, with my caption, "Wellness that warms the heart—or how folks in post-hurricane NY are prefiguring wholly new, healthy social relations through mutual aid, thanks to Occupy Sandy Relief self-organization. Fuck FEMA, Obama "Care," and capitalism; "we got this."
You can find other blog-musings and more polished essays by Cindy Milstein at Outside the Circle. Share, enjoy, and repost—as long as it's free, as in "free beer" and "freedom."
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