I have gone back to read your piece again because I honestly do not want to mis-read you. So let me quote the parts I am speaking to directly. The following five quotations come directly from your piece.

“We don’t have the time or competency to find everyone’s special unique spot.’

“Your job is to hold two things in tension: first, you have to take the responsibility to linking up with people to change the world for the better; second, you have to learn when to shut up and follow instructions.”

‘You don’t show weakness publicly.”

“Hold the line. Win the world.”

“We serve the people.”

I agree that we live in a world dominated by power and this will not disappear as a result of wishing it were so. Yet doing ‘power’ in the same vein does nothing to alter our lived realities. However, creating circles in which people, individually and collectively, find, develop, nurture and live their ‘special unique spot’ is a radical undermining of power today.

Shutting up and following instructions, NOT showing weakness in public, ‘holding the line’ against all personal good conscience, the idea that we (whoever that may be) can ‘’win the WORLD’ and the idea that we (the good ones) are truly serving ‘the people’ (them over there) like the priests of old…  These ways of thinking and doing are deeply part of the empire project itself. The more we cling to them, the more we serve empire – perhaps of a different name, yet it is still empire. As Audre Lord alluded to, the master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house.

Imagine a world where people all deeply find their ‘zone’; where monoculture dies with every person who takes one more tiny step towards their uniqueness and away from fitting in; where no one media can ‘harvest’ our attention because our attention is so multifaceted and multidirectional, where thousands of small formations dance a million eddies of difference creating this amazing and persistent change, breadth, and depth of human reality.

The reality of military discipline is exclusively death-dealing. That’s it. Life demands multiplicity of unlimited dimensions. As long as our ‘alternatives’ remain rooted in this clinging to illusions of military might (even if it’s called militancy), we are circling the same drain.

Books to crack open our imaginations that speak to crazy and wonderful alternative strategies and lives: Kazu Haga’s Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm; Erica Chenoweth’s Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know; Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You: Organizing the Revolution of Reciprocal Care; Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning; Resmaa Menakem’s The Quaking of America; and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.