Yesterday and today the shop has been closed. We’ve been out in the streets with our friends and our neighbors, voicing our anger, our commitment, desire, rage, and love in this moment.

With the help of Labor Camp we made a gigantic banner, as wide as the street itself, that Sam and Derek carried with Sam’s kids from Lake & Nicolette all the way down to City Hall. Together with thousands of others, it was a cathartic and beautiful collision of unique experience and shared purpose.

Today we made our way to the Minnesota state capitol for the Women’s March, joining over 100,000 others expressing our support for women’s rights in the fight against misogyny and systemic sexualized violence against women.

Many doors to a more inclusive and progressive future are wide open today. Our challenge? Keeps those doors open for as long as it takes to bust the hinges off.

This will take more than marches and more than slogans. It will mean not asking for permission to takes the streets. It will mean speaking up and acting out in our places of work and education. It will take confronting difficult issues at home with loved ones, and in our relationships with friends alike. It will take – each and every one of us – being active, energized, and out front each and every day. In all our moments, not simply the ones we see as “political.” It will take the recognition that politics is, simply, power and how it operates. And power exists between individuals, their relationships, their institutions. It takes our shining a light on that power – ours and the power (or lack thereof) of others – and pushing that power towards what is right…

Women’s Power – POC Power – Indigenous Power and Reconciliation – Economic Equality – Environmental Justice – Immigrant Rights!!!

It will require an America identity that sets a true example for the world about how to treat other humans and the planet we share. But what more? Putting gender, race, class, sexual orientation, nationality aside it might serve us more so to get down to what we can agree on when we think about being “human.”

At the moment this human thing, at least as regards the way we’re engaging it now, isn’t doing us too much good and we are quite literally sketching out our own extinction. Rather than jockeying for positions of power, what if we began to consider what is best for all of us and not just some of us? What if we began to think small as a path towards thinking big; looking directly in front of us rather than squinting into the distance and inevitably distorting what lies right in front of our face? What’s closest to you? What is it connected to, and you in turn it? After a while we begin to understand the network, and radically, deeply personally, comprehend our value as a node within it.