The luxury of time

There have been a few typos in my last two newsletters, and the reason is simple: I rushed. I was on a road trip through Colorado and New Mexico with a friend over the last week, but I felt compelled to write some nights and early mornings. I had a vague awareness of the compulsion, and that I shouldn’t have listened to it. But the world feels like it’s moving a million miles an hour right now, and the spigot of news has turned into a firehouse. And I feel compelled to write about it at the same unsustainble pace at which events are moving.

In the vicinity of San Luis, Colorado

It’s tough right now, when the need for urgency is so real, to remember that moving urgently doesn’t mean rushing. These are two different things. Rushing we know; rushing is harried and rapid and moving at maximum speed. Urgency, here, is moving quickly but deliberately, doing what needs to be done as soon as you can, but doing it well. Like so many of us, I feel the stress of this moment, but I responded by rushing rather than with the deliberate and methodical urgency that I'm aiming for.

This isn’t really about a few typos over the last week, it’s about time. It’s about how we move in this new political reality we find ourselves in. During the first Trump administration “the resistance” was so guided by mass mobilizations that a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money would go into bringing together tens of thousands of people for a one-off march. Then, everyone would go home. This time things are already a little different. We’re seeing sustained protests of Tesla, an emphasis on unions of federal workers, and long-term power building.

This is what’s necessary to shut down fascism. Isolated moments of protest must be situated deliberately within a larger strategy and movement. Otherwise they’re just spectacle. But the difficult truth is that long-term work takes a lot more time. It takes money, space, commitment, energy, and thinking through difficult questions and decisions. Each of us has to very deliberately commit to this work, and recommit and recommit. That is the hard reality of our era — we’re called to make sacrifices and set aside a piece of our lives to fight the menace of fascism.

Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

Thinking of ourselves as organizers, and behaving as such as much as possible, is crucial here. In a recent piece for In These Times, Sarah Jaffe spoke to federal workers. Several of these workers across unions and departments have come together to form the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) to resist Trump and Musk. One of these union members, Chris Dols, says very clearly: “Everybody needs to become an organizer right now.”

And I couldn’t agree more. Especially for anyone and everyone within the federal government. Organizing on the job is a hugely important task for all of us, but those who can fight this beast from within have both a special opportunity and a special responsibility. If that’s you, I highly recommend checking out the Federal Unionists Network.

But all of us should take Chris’s advice. It’s time for all of us to become organizers. That doesn’t just mean telling people what to do, arguing with them, or trying to spread awareness. It means plugging into an organization in your community, forming a union, or bringing other people along in the efforts you're engaged in. It means recruiting people to organizations, strengthening institutions, and collectively increasing the capacity of whatever organization you’re in so that you all are more effectively able to wield power and do good work. It means personally dedicating yourself to building power for us all.

It isn’t easy, of course. For many of us, the biggest barrier to organizing is that there are only 24 hours in a day. Work, kids, sleep, the time we’d like to spend organizing can disappear. There are a few answers to this nearly universal issue. One is to organize where we are. That’s part of the power of a union; being able to do meaningful organizing on the clock is an amazing thing. And a strong union movement can eventually be one of the most powerful tools of the working class, giving us the ability to control the economy and force change rather than ask nicely and get ignored.

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

There are other answers as well. One is being extremely disciplined with our free time. This, too, is difficult, and can often cross into overextending ourselves. Right now, to engage in this marathon rather than getting winded in a sprint, a lot of us need to learn when to step back and when we can put more on our plate. It’s particularly crucial to reevaluate our relationship with the news cycle; we can spend incredible amounts of time, and even more energy, fixating on every news item and every event. Every cabinet appointment, every hearing, every debacle in DC can consume us quite easily if we’re not careful.

But we can step back. I happened to be reading something I wrote a while ago, something that might look familiar to you from the welcome email to this newsletter, and it bears repeating today. Two and a half years ago while I was setting this thing up I wrote: “My feeling is, and has been for some time, that a lot of us are so caught up with current events that we take less and less time to zoom out and put it all together.”

And it’s truer now than it was then. It’s so easy to get caught up in each news item, and it’s so easy for a day to pass us by while we worry and stress over things that are, for the moment, out of our control. Current events hit us psychologically, but it can feel physical, it can feel like the threat is immediate and here with us in the room, in our chest, and day after day we can find ourselves captured by the latest breaking news item. We need to zoom out. We need to break free from the minute-to-minute news cycle. And, oddly enough, that takes time.

If we want to be meaningfully involved, rather than victimized by apps and adrenaline, we need to take the time to step back, we need to take the time to do politics with others rather than with our phones, we need to take the time to process and organize instead of merely reacting. I say this for myself as much as anyone. As I’ve talked about here before, my 9-5 is involves being on Twitter for a news organization. I’m paid to react and react and react to events, and when the Trump administration began things immediately got more hectic. For eight hours a day I absorb it all and convert it into bits of news, bits of content. But it takes its toll. And, more than anything, it takes my time.

In the spirit of candor, this was supposed to be a simple piece. When New Means reached its 250th edition I thought I’d pause and ask for your support. But I instead was repeatedly siezed by the urge to write something else. So, here we are at 252, and I want to ask for your help, because I crave more time. I want more time to write for you, to research, to read and organize and learn and bring my findings back to you. I’m not so good at slowing down right now, but that’s in part because it takes time to slow down. I’ve gotten too used to writing fast and editing fast, and, as it turns out, not editing as well as I might like. It’s the pace of social media, the pace of my job, and, increasingly, what feels like the pace of the world.

But it doesn’t have to be. I can slow down, we can slow down — it just takes time. So I will ask for your help here. If you’re able to support my work you’re giving me time. In exchange I hope to bring you writing that can help you slow down. And, beyond that, I hope to bring you writing that helps us all slow down. The only real way to do this is together, and I hope to bring you writing that helps us reshape soceity so that time is no longer such a luxury. The only real way to grant us all more time is to organize and shift this world so that we’re not constantly pressed to exchange so many hours of our lives for money at a pace that feels less and less sustainable, and I hope to help us move just a little closer to that reality.

Photo by Pietro Mattia on Unsplash

Right now I’m reading the fantastic book “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying” about radical organizing in Detroit in the ‘60s and ‘70s. At the center of it all are Black auto workers at Ford and GM and Chrysler, and at the time these companies were telling the world about their cutting-edge technology. These were three of the six biggest manufacturing companies on Earth, and they’d tell the public about the fancy new systems and automation and processes. They would build new plants and hype them up, and the media would get in on it. And, at the end of the day, it was really the “speed up” producing a ton of the efficiency improvements. What that means is speeding up the assembly lines. The companies would demand more and more and more out of the same workers at the same plants. And more cars would be produced, but workers would get hurt, they’d lose limbs, some died. Yet these workers were largely powerless at the time, so they didn’t have much choice but to speed up and speed up and speed up.

Almost all of us feel the speed up these days. Our jobs aren’t all on Detroit assembly lines, but capitalists everywhere demand more and more, and the result is an anxiety around productivity and efficiency and speed permeating all of society. I, certainly, am not immune. So today I’m asking for your help. It’s not easy to ask, but I have no shame in asking you, the reader, to help me do more writing and do it better. Because what I’d really like is to slow down, and produce something more valuable for you.

For two and half years I’ve worked about 50 hours a week and written this during early mornings and late nights. And I have no (or very few) regrets about what I’ve written, but I’m coming to a place where I’d like to be of more use. Specifically, I’d like to have my writing be more helpful in these times. And, with your help, I think I can do just that. But, as you know, it takes one ingredient that I just don’t have much of right now — time. So thank you for reading this today, and if you’re able to pitch in and give me a little more time to write for you, you have my undying gratitude - JP