In the same way that it’s easy & tempting to think of the bad effects of capitalism—debt crises, wars, income inequalities, bad corporations and bad employers—as isolated things apart from a system, it seems to be trendy & tempting right now to think of 2020 as an anomaly—as if the bad things about 2020 have to do with some unlucky attribute of the year itself. Can you imagine, though, if 2021 is just as bad, or even worse? Can’t you just see the headlines now?
“You thought 2020 was bad… welcome to 2021!”
Well… we’ll have to see what happens in 2021. In the meantime we at Mid-MO JBGC choose to look at 2020 deterministically, as the inevitable and logically-consequent result of cumulative decades of bad policy taking place under a stochastic uptick in density-dependent factors—the latter being big words to describe things like climate crisis and health pandemics.
Just the same, we would be remiss in not noting that 2020 was a remarkable year for bringing all this to the fore at one time. After years of apparent western imperviousness to things like Bird Flu & Ebola, the Covid-19 pandemic emerged as something that didn’t just happen to brown-skinned people in far-off places, killing hundreds of thousands in the west, and permanently ruining millions more lives through chronic illness and losses of income, jobs, and housing—to say nothing of grief suffered by surviving loved ones. But Covid also provided the world with the emergence of the notion of mutual aid, a term largely unknown to the U.S. middle-class prior to this year; in some places, mutual aid initiatives for food, household goods, utility and rent payments may have borne resemblance to a charity model, but in others, such as New York, block-by-block mutual aid functioned more in the reciprocal nature of the original intention of the term. Despite the requirements of social distancing and despite being kicked off of our Facebook organizing platform during the Great FB purge of 2020, within two weeks after the first Covid case in Missouri, JBGC members and others spun off the Como Mutual Aid project, which between March and September helped an average of 20 families per week with items like groceries and prescriptions and, for a time, helped with rent and utility payments. We sincerely thank the many donors, volunteer workers, and volunteer coordinators who helped with what, for us, was a massive undertaking. Also this year we continued with the 3rd season of our Mobile Soup Kitchen, which still functions during the pandemic, providing an average of 80 individual meals over 3 mornings per week throughout the winter months to homeless individuals on the street or in camps.
The nature of living under a pandemic also helped give shape to our support group, the Friends of John Brown, which offered up several socially-distanced homesteading types of workshops this year, including ones on victory gardening, home canning, and rabbit processing. If mutual aid and ideas and skills about collectivity under changing societal conditions interest you, we suggest you find out more about our Facebook Friends support group by contacting us at: MidMoJBGC@protonmail.com
After decades of police murders of people of color followed by failed efforts at police reform, 2020 saw public attention focused for the first time, after the tragic murders of George Floyd and others, on the topic of police abolition. While the pandemic forced us to end our monthly public meet & greets and limited our ability to table or to make public presentations, we provided an outdoor police abolition workshop in June that coincided with a nightly rally by our friends at People’s Defense. Locally we saw leadership on this from the faith community, and we applaud Missouri Faith Voices for taking a firm stance on police defunding. The faith community also came through in community care during a particularly difficult time, with Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbia taking direct action on utility payoffs as well as responsibility for continuation of Room At The Inn during Covid. The already-challenging work done by Wilkes Blvd UMC and Catholic Workers with Turning Point day center and Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen was made more difficult by the pandemic, but club members supplied three weekly Door Keepers and served food, mostly outdoors, for Loaves & Fishes every 2nd Sunday.
We also saw the rise of new organizations in Columbia concerned with community defense and arms training for the marginalized. We were glad to see the continued growth of Sharp End Gun Club and their training programs for women & people of color, and before the onset of Covid partnered with them in one indoor training event and one regional meeting. We were glad to work with People’s Defense in security and medic support for several events; especially notable was the emergence of the People’s Defense Security Team, who, in the wake of two vehicle attacks and several armed threats, helped normalize open firearms carry by the left in protests in Columbia. While left-wing protesters in places like Seattle and at some places in the south have become accustomed to having armed support, this is something that, we admit, we never ever thought we would see happen in Columbia Missouri… at least, not unless things got really, really bad.
Well, perhaps, things got just about that bad, because (speaking of firearms), starting in about March, we noticed an uptick in contacts from new shooters wanting training. Typically, we begin these with with a no-ammunition living-room show & tell and move on to a range trip if the party is further interested. While sessions like these were limited by the requirements of masking and social distancing, there was sufficient demand to make things happen in small numbers… and as the election drew nearer and right-wing escalation became pervasive, we received even more inquiries. Such requests rapidly fell off after the Biden election victory, presumably due to the public perception of a lessened threat from the right wing paramilitary violence.
Let us say here that we are glad to provide this resource, especially for the marginalized in society; and while we do provide security for protests, we should make clear that our larger goal here is for you to become empowered to defend your own community. We like that term “community defense” in the broadest sense—as having to do with the health, security, and resources of your own community, block-by-block.
We will see how things play out in 2021. While we hope for a lessening of the conditions and policies that bring pain and deprivation to so many, we also hope that in the wake of all that’s happened people will continue to depend upon each other and to further build community in response. May the “normal” that we return to after pandemic living continue to build on the lessons from 2020.
In summary; for 2020, we:
-Presented one outdoor workshop on police abolition
-Provided one active shooter training workshop for one local organization
-With our support group, Friends of John Brown, presented 3 workshops on food & homesteading topics
-Trained 4 novice shooters over 7 indoor & outdoor sessions
-Tabled at one public event
-Provided security and medic support for 2 large regional events
-Provided security and medic support for 4 Columbia protest events
-Made 11 post-covid food & fuel drops to Columbia homeless camps
-Co-led one training event with Sharp End Gun Club and participated in another
-Coordinated security training with People’s Defense
-Participated in security at People’s Defense rallies and protests
-Participated in 3 community-wide homeless camp cleanups
-Served food on 12 Sundays at Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen
-Provided at least 3 weekly volunteers for Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen over each of 52 weeks, totaling over 230 person-hours of help
-Provided over 1300 individual meals over the 2019-2020 Winter seasons via the John Brown Mobile Soup Kitchen
-Spun off the Como Mutual Aid initiative, which went on to serve ~20 families/week for 6 months
