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as public resources are dismantled by a growing facist state, some of these lines may not be accessible. always reach out to someone when in crisis. you are loved




mental health
psychatric mobile response team   310-482-3260
west LA psychiatric emergency team   310-966-6500
crisis hotline   800-854-7771
LA suicide prevention hotline   310-391-1253


youth
boys & girls town national abuse hotline   800-448-3000
CA youth crisis hotline   800-843-5200
child abuse hotline   800-540-4000


domestic violence & sexual assault
DV/SA assault hotline   800-339-3940
LA county domestic violence hotline   800-978-3600
LA rape and battering hotlines 
        cental LA   213-626-3393
        south LA   310-392-8381
        west San Gabriel valley   626-484-2896
stalking resource center   855-484-2896


people experiencing houselessness
LAHSA winter shelter hotline   800-548-6047
LAHSA hotline   213-225-6581


lgbtq
trans lifeline   877-565-8860
the Trevor Project   866-488-7386


substance use
LA substance use hotline   844-804-7500
SAMHSA’s national hotline   800-662-4357


elder
elder abuse hotline   833-401-0832
adult protective services   800-992-1660



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The Property Registration Problem in the Anarcho-Capitalist Individualwealth

by BLACK CAT WORKER COLLECTIVE

Capitalism depends on abstract property rights, those is where the owner is neither the occupier nor user of the property in question. This scenario is presently upheld via a system of land registration encapsulated in cadastral maps, which are legitimised by the state and underpinned by its monopoly on force.

In the absence of government, property rights simply default to mutual respect and the natural desire for social harmony. That scenario is termed “occupancy & use” or “possession property”, and is a fundamental tenet of anarchism. The rightful occupier/user is whomever is commonly recognised[1] to occupy, possess, or use the asset in question. The onus being on establishing this by peaceful means, and not laying claim to assets that are commonly recognised to be occupied or used by someone else. Disputes can then be settled by negotiation, entering into arbitration or seeking adjudication, rather than resorting to force.





Community is
Resistance
by ELAD NEHORAI
There is an assumption in many people’s minds about what constitutes resistance against fascism and oppression. For many, the answer is larger, louder, more public: marches, social media, big names, big causes.

For many reasons, this is flawed thinking. But in the context of fascism, it is also dangerous thinking.

The fascists will act quickly to destroy dissent. They will target movements and leaders. They will use violence without hesitation. They will jail people. And going big makes it easier for them to do all this.




mis/dis-information
by STAFF WRITER
As a history teacher, all I ever want is for my students to appreciate what they’ve learned and see how the events of the past relate to our current day. Maybe I’ve made that wish too much? Maybe I really wanted the past to come alive, so my students could really feel what it was like to live back then? If so, let me express my profuse and deepest apologies; they always say be careful what you wish for... I didn’t realize the past coming alive could literally mean regressing and reliving our exact past mistakes. Nazis parading in plain sight? Measles and epidemics ravaging communities? Isolationism and appeasement are cool again as political strategies? That’s the world we’re in now-everything new is old again.
For anyone who has studied any amount of history, the phrase history repeats itself has never felt more true. And for anyone who was paying even the smallest amount of attention to even half of what is going on in our current government, the phrase I’m scared shitless has probably also never felt more resonant. So what can we do? How are we gonna make it through this? Do I have any answers? Probably not, but I do have some knowledge of how people and other societies survived, and I do truly believe that we can learn from them and do better ourselves.

 But that’s going to take a lot of work. And even more so it takes effort. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s challenging. It’s much easier to ignore the fears, and want to make one’s world small, so as to not have to do the difficult work. But I’m gonna assume that if you’re reading this, you’re paying more attention than that, and genuinely are wanting to do the work. Which brings us back to what we can do. On a global macro scale, honestly, not a whole lot. Unless someone in the State Department is reading this, and suddenly feels inspired to massively reverse course on the past several months and reset to normal... But for the rest of us, despite not having the ability to change geopolitics with our own actions, I’m gonna blow your mind because we actually do still have a lot of agency and power in our own lives.

We do have a lot of ability to be aware of our habits, and also the ability to adapt and change them to serve the needs of the day. And that’s what this column/manifesto/random writings of an elder millennial is all about. What small changes can we make to both survive this current hellscape in which we are living, and even have some amount of positive change and impact. So let’s get into it. 

For example, how do we consume information? As an aforementioned member of the Oregon Trail Generation, I grew up with three information sources-print media (newspapers and magazines), television (local and cable news channels), and radio. All were respected mediums, with regulations and solid fact checking. They were also part of a capitalistic system, so not without their flaws (dominant narratives of culture reinforced, not very accessible or interesting unless you were an “old soul”). But in general, we believed what we read and heard, because we trusted the sources. Now, think to where you normally get your information from, is it from social media, new sources, random strangers yelling at you in the street? 
All of these have some valid reasons for consumption (hey, sometimes a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet). We live in an age where information is easily transferable and accessible, more so than at any other time in human history. That is incredibly powerful. Information has become decentralized, which means counter narratives and sources that have historically been marginalized now can have a voice and an audience. People are more connected to information more so than ever. At any moment, at any time, anyone can search information about just about any topic. We are smarter, more connected, and more powerful than we as a human species have ever been before.

But as with great power, comes great responsibility, so must our media consumption. Because with all that beautiful decentralization, we’ve also lost some levels of regulation. Anyone can create a story, and with technology, even create “credible” facts and data to prove their legitimacy. The less traditional the media source, the more freedom one has to spin information to suit their own purposes. Information-and more importantly, those who consume it-can be manipulated. So we must do our due diligence when receiving information. And it’s actually not hard to do! Hooray! Today, it’s all about what you can do when consuming information. Just as with a good meditative practice, you should be checking in with yourself as you consume. How are you feeling? Given our current state of the world, we should all just accept a baseline of terror and apocalyptical fear and anger. 
But aside from that, when we are directly reading or watching, are we getting more heightened, is our heart starting to race, are experiencing feelings of extreme anger, etc? If so, why is that the case? Is it from the raw data being shared, or how it is being communicated? Is inflammatory language being used, does it reinforce stereotypes or polarizing feelings? Thinking about not just what is being shared, but the means of communication is an important step in taking agency over our media consumption. Checking in with ourselves as we consume helps us stay present and critically and intentionally receive information. 
If we are critical consumers of information, then we are less likely to be manipulated. And if we retain our power, then we can’t be used by others. It might not seem like a lot, but being part of an informed and conscious community is a bedrock foundation of democracy. And at times like this, when democracy is clinging to a precipice, any steps we can take to help maintain are vitally important.

Democracies exist when there is a social contract between people and the government, and both partners have responsibilities. We know the government as it currently stands is not doing their part, but if we want our democratic ideals to continue after this hellscape of an administration, we do need to maintain our role as constituents and participants. Being informed and in control of the information we receive empowers us and can be one of those small actions that help us get through this historically significant and emotionally draining time. Societies have been through worse and we will get through this as well.







Emancipatory 
Mutual Aid: Practicing Liberation
by PReP / NEIGHBORHOODS

A mutual aid practice that aims to augment rather than reduce the autonomy and self-determination of those in need must avoid the missionary model, however secular. Rather than parachuting in from the outside to save those in distress, practitioners of a liberatory mutual aid will acknowledge and work with existing community emergency response and disaster resilience networks that are not tied into the power structure that brought about the problem in the first place.

To avoid duplicating efforts already undertaken by existing organizations and to make well-informed choices about what is needed where, from the very beginning mutual aid start-ups need to break bread with other organizations in their locality. Southern Solidarity, for instance, has collaborated with a variety of organizations, including People’s Assembly, Overcoming Racism, New Orleans Workers Hospitality Alliance, Trystereo, Beloved, Women with A Vision, Greater New Orleans Caring Collective and Hidden History Tours.

In addition to connecting with local organizations, mutual aid groups with claims to radical liberatory frameworks should refer back to the work of past and current liberation fighters specific to their locale and acknowledge how people shape the current political terrain.
Despite heightened levels of inequity and racism, New Orleans, again our example, has long been a site of cultural resistance to white supremacy — what Ishmael Reed fictionalized as “Jes Grew” in the novel Mumbo Jumbo. From the 1811 slave revolt to the recent Take ’Em Down movement, organizing in New Orleans is characterized by both the delegitimization of the narrative power of the colonial head and an emphasis on the dignity of Black life in all of its manifestations. Southern Solidarity emerged out of this milieu and upholds that history by working with local healers, musicians, advocates, activists,and scholars such as Spirit McIntyre and Angela Kinlaw who continue to pass down affirmation of Black life in a variety of ways.

Scholars with an activist impulse might be best off collaborating with community-based organizations with which they already have long-standing relations rooted in mutual trust. One possible vocation of a “people’s expert” is to comprehensively map community capabilities — research that enables community members themselves to better understand the array of emergency response and disaster resilience resources they already have at their disposal, as well as resources they lack. These capabilities are often grounded in distinctive histories unique to a place.
For example, in the aftermath of 2018’s devastating Camp Fire disaster recovery, activists in Northern California got a crash course education in disaster management policy. Leveraging a core idea in the national emergency response and disaster recovery framework — the primacy of local communities in deciding the substance of disaster recovery plans — the activists coalesced around local tribal governments. The governments contended that their status as sovereign tribes qualified them as public agencies eligible to secure contracts and jobs in disaster recovery. Coalition members gained practical experience as executors of disaster recovery. The learning and skills thus acquired became part of the community’s repertoire of disaster resilience capabilities, ready to be activated when the COVID-19 crisis and state lockdown directives came to Northern California.

Exercises in sizing up a community’s capabilities can help community members and scholars alike realize the distinctiveness of a locality’s history and conditions, and guard against the tendency to propose one-size-fits-all solutions in mutual aid practice. At the same time, a community might be endowed with remarkable survival skills, its story very much worth telling not least because there might be some generalizable lessons about disaster resilience to be drawn from it. Taking an inventory of community capabilities also entails identifying social groups isolated from mainstream communication flows, such as sectarian religious groups — especially important knowledge to have on hand during contagious disease outbreaks.
A bedrock principle of an emancipatory mutual aid is providing space for communities to collectively deliberate and decide upon their own needs and priorities. Assemblies and other democratic fora are settings in which such deliberation and decision-making might occur. Consistent with this, action researchers and people’s experts with an interest in emancipatory mutual aid might conceive their roles to be facilitators and catalyzers of community self-determination.

























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