Refuse Fascism Philly just finished up a few days of tabling at the Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference. The annual Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference is massive, several-day event that attracts thousands of people from all over the world for educational, professional, and community-building workshops related to health and wellness of trans and differently gendered people, and those who care about them. Networking is a huge aspect of the conference, since day-to-day social networks for this community are practically nonexistent outside a few pockets within cities here and there or online. While its impact spans the globe, it is also a major part of the social fabric locally and in the broader northeastern US. A significant portion of our contacts & discussion were from people far outside of Philly. With this in mind, we had to set out to organize people principally as a nationwide movement to end this nightmare, to drive out the Trump/Pence regime in the name of humanity, while also recruiting people locally.
The most common expressions about the situation in this country were that of fear and despair. Fear about how bad it has gotten and how bad it could possibly get, a feeling a sense of encirclement both ideologically and socially, and despair because the way out of this nightmare is not known to them, or that the normal political mechanisms they thought would sort this out are clearly failing them. There was no ecstatic enthusiasm about a blue wave or the outcome of any investigation.
It was very important to introduce people to this movement and recruit them to become organizers and spread the word in many different ways, such as encouraging people to take extra materials to take with them, inviting them sign up and to check out the website often, starting a chapter in their area, getting connecting with the student or faith task force, spreading the word everywhere on social media, and asking for donations. While we were mostly speaking to brand new people, we did run into some that have been running with us for a while and some who had seen us around at a protest (especially the Handmaids Tale Brigade protest).
The people with the least to say were often the ones that just walked right up and starting signing up to join Refuse Fascism without prompting. When invited to talk more they would often just simply state that they were afraid, angry, that anything which is against Trump must be supported. Most here were obviously very keenly aware of and feeling the weight of recently-won LGBTQ rights being assaulted. A lot of people expressed that they are afraid to go out and protest, that they will be specifically targeted for their gender or callously & deliberately thrown into jail facilities according to their assigned gender at birth.
In response to the many “good work” or “thank yous”, one organizer had the orientation of expressing to people that “this time last year I was on the other side of the table like you”, to encourage people to change the way they think about who and how a fascist America will be stopped. Thousands of people do urgently need to step outside of their comfort zones, overcoming the uncertainty and necessary sacrifices we will face with courage and conviction, for the sake of all humanity and the planet.
With some people who wanted to know what kind of organizing we did or “what this was gonna look like”, we would take some time to speak with them one-on-one and dig a little deeper in to things. In the main however, we united with people on their concerns and questions and directed them to the Refuse Fascism Call to Action, the film of the talk The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go… by Bob Avakian or the indictments on the website to dig in deeper to those so as to have these resources do the heavy lifting for us as well as encouraging people to take some initiative to interact with this movement and investigate on their own.
One woman who was a refugee from Pakistan said that she knows that this kind of movement is possible around the world (“In our country, overthrowing prime ministers is a national pastime!”) but wondered if it could really happen here in America with “your great democracy” – a question directly addressed in the Talk that she was directed towards.
Many people were taken in by the indictment panels we had in front of our table. One student expressed how they didn’t really know what was going on because they have been just keeping their head down with schoolwork, and asked if they could read the indictment panels for a bit to see the evidence. Once they were finished, they signed up to keep in touch. This was one example of what was a very common scene, although just as much if not more people would glance for a moment and pass by.
We met hundreds of people who signed up wanting to be part of this movement in some way and we are excited to be calling them this week to get them involved in raising the demand: “This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!”