“Survivor’s Guilt”

During this year+ of plague, I’ve felt the strong presence of my chosen Jewish rebel ancestors. Sometimes they bring comfort and resilience, especially via their millennia-long legacies of resistance and utopian experiments outside the bondage of colonialism, Christian and white supremacy, capitalism, fascism, states, etc. At other times, concurrently, they compel me to feel and hold their ancestral traumas, as duty, memory, and love.

Today, they conjured “survivors’ guilt” in me.

Guilt is not one of the many emotions I typically feel. It’s never seemed to serve a purpose, whether to illuminate phenomena, help to fight egregious ones, or aid in protecting myself and others. Yet for the past week, leading up to my first vaccine, I’ve been tormented by how awful it feels to get the shot on a haphazard individual basis, mirroring the lack of #CollectiveCare in the so-called United States during the pandemic. It hit me this 3/23 that ancestors wanted me to experience survivors’ guilt so I’ll never forget, never forgive, the collective trauma, and throw my heart harder into how we anarchists can do better at leaving no one behind.

As I drove through the former Sears auto repair bay to get my vax this afternoon, my dead dad came with me. He spent hundreds of hours at this auto repair, mostly getting to know all the workers there, plying them w/questions about the details of their lives, remembering them, and engaging in all sorts of acts of mutual aid and solidarity, though my liberal dad wouldn’t have used those words. He practiced them; he saw the wholeness in everyone, particularly those whom most other people would barely notice, nor treat well. My dad died from another virus, West Nile, caused by capitalism’s disregard for the ecosystem, after 9 hellish months suffering on a “life support” ventilator. He didn’t have the chance to visit this former auto bay for a West Nile vaccine, just like many folks now will die ugly deaths globally before their separate and unequal shot at getting a vaccine.

My dad-as-ghost sat w/me in my car, his eyes filled with ancestral sorrows that have plagued his whole life too. We need our ancestors if we hope to ever mend the world.

#FuckCOVID19 #FuckCapitalism #Everything For Everyone #TryAnarchismForGenerations #TryAnarchismForLife

(Picture-prose posted on my Instagram @cindymilstein on March 23, 2021)