A week ago, I came across the call for an economic blackout from September 16-20. Someone made the suggestion that the real impact would be for as many people as possible to stop using social media for the duration because Facebook and Instagram and their ilk are also owned by the big-money folks, so I stepped off social media for the week as well. Yesterday, I talked with my friend and mentor Sarah Preston about boycotts and protest and change. Here are some of my thoughts in response to our conversation and this past week:

• I’m not sure this particular economic boycott had much effect. Probably the more affective economic protest this week was the Disney+ cancellations in the wake of the Jimmy Kimmel suspension.
• Sarah pointed out that writing to the company/ies you are boycotting to explain what you are doing ought to be part of the boycott. Write to Disney-ABC Home Entertainment and Television Distribution, 500 S. Buena Vista St., Burbank, CA 91521-3515. Perhaps those of us who can’t really boycott because we don’t have Disney/ABC ties can write letters anyway.
• What do we want from boycotts? Is it just to force the billionaire bros to notice how they hurt the people by supporting an authoritarian regime? If we want to make lasting change, will a short-term boycott of the soulless corporations do that work? Likely not. They might have some excellent short-term effects, but in the long run, we have to have other tools in our basket.
• Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Let’s get to thinking outside of the master’s toolbox.
• The billionaires are definitely part of the problem. Also, their fortunes are made on speculative economies, of stocks and bonds and “imaginary” wealth. That imaginary and speculative wealth is certainly powerful in the world today, but what if we move more and more to economies that work outside their paradigm? That seems to be at least part of the intention of a boycott. But what if we began functioning more completely and permanently within our local economies? What if we did more barter? More gift economy? More sharing? More creating and growing and making? It’s all well and good to refuse to go to Walmart for a week or to temporarily stop ordering from Amazon, but what if we refused, en masse, to ever buy from them again?
• Ugh. That means I have to find the will and the creativity to republish my books of poetry in some other format, instead of the Amazon-adjacent KDP. (Here’s another reason to join temporary boycotts, even if you don’t think they’re going to do much to actually change anything: they change you. I need to follow up on this.)
• Also, when there is an economic boycott or a buy nothing week, consider local impacts. Instead of simply refusing to take part in any economy, use times of boycotting the billionaire bros to flood the local economy. Buy from local stores, local farmer’s markets, local businesses. Strategize more permanent change to working within the local economies. Let these experiments in shifting economic power become permanent shifts in your buying habits.
• That brings me to my title: Yes, a lot of our work in these days is about breaking down. Breaking the power of the billionaire class, breaking the power of the authoritarians and the theocrats and the demagogues, smashing the patriarchy. But what are we creating to replace those structures? What can you and I do right now to begin developing the just and safe community-based world we envision? This has been a time of great network-forming, such marvelous web-building. How can we look to these webs as the basis for the future?
• I admit, the networking and community-building can often be exhausting for me. I am realizing that I can be a part of creating and supporting and participating in the webs without it feeling like I have to attend every potluck and party and teach-in.
• The social media fast for the past week has been good for my mental health.
• Also, I have missed that web of community. I feel like my social media connections have been an important part of building the community webs I have been talking about here. But they’re all on platforms owned by the billionaire bros, and they support those very structures I want to tear down. I’m not sure how to shift this. I know lots of people have abandoned FB for Substack and others. I totally get it. AND–I am also hesitant to make that shift complete. I don’t do social media because of the amount of influence I can build, but because of the particular people I have connected to there. If I leave FB or IG, I may develop connections on another platform, but I lose the particular (and meaningful) connections on those sites.

I’ve been attending Menno Action’s Tuesday evening Zoom meetings called Courage School for the past few weeks. One of the images they keep referring to is the idea that we think of the power structures as a pyramid with a strong, wide base, impossible to break down. In reality, it’s more like an inverted pyramid, propped up by church, community organizations, schools, businesses, corporations. If we can begin to very deliberately pull out the support of those struts, the structure will collapse. So yes, I think boycotts can be at least a temporary part of influencing those props to shift away from supporting the empire. And also, we need to be strategic about pulling out those props, and using them to build the world we envision.

Let’s keep staying grounded, keep breathing, keep loving, keep checking in with each other, keep reaching out, keep building, keep nurturing, keep protesting. . . Breathe, ground, dance, hug, write, sing, hum, hold babies, paint, remember, tell stories–whatever you need to do to stay with the process, to hold onto hope and truth and peace and your sense of your truest self.