by Josh L
A friend and comrade asked me to write about why I joined DSA. Looking back on it, my motives were slight and small, a fragile seedling, really. I was searching for something but I couldn’t articulate for what very effectively. I might have said that I was looking for ways to get involved, to make change, to be part of community; I would have sounded like someone campaigning for Obama but somehow even more vague. And that’s okay. I can fill your ears with platitudes about how everyone starts somewhere and somewhere can be anywhere, but I just need you to hear me when I say that simply starting is the optimal move. It’s the step you’re always in charge of. You decide whether or not you will be involved and it’s an important choice you have to make, again and again.
As for that choice, you alone hold the power, but you are not alone. This choice is fundamentally about who you will stand beside and why. In some ways, these questions are easy to answer. Many of us have friends and family that we love and care about and it makes sense to stand beside them, doesn’t it? It’s very easy in part because it’s very expected. Your choice is presumed affirmative. And that, my friends and comrades, is the rub. What can you say you’ve chosen when your assent is assumed? What kind of system operates this way and why? It sounds to me like there is power in our choices. And, if that’s the case, we ought to decide how that power is used.
Nothing in this world has ever been accomplished alone. We do not make or raise ourselves nor did we create the earth. We are always building on some foundation we didn’t make. And that is why who you choose to stand with, to build with, is so fundamentally important. You start by asking yourself what about the world ought to change and how it should be changed. This is potential, a potent possibility, an idea, a seed. It takes root within you, but to proliferate, it must be shared. You bring the idea to your loved ones and others to see if it takes root within them. You tend to it over time and watch it sprout not just from you, but from them. You make a tangle of saplings as you grow and build together, reshaping the world not in unison, but in parallel. You all expand into a sort of mycorrhizal network, connected to each other and this place, variations on a theme, germinating from the questions you answered for yourselves.
I joined the DSA because I couldn’t see a real place for myself in this world and I didn’t know what to do. I found a place and I found questions here. It’s the answers that I made and chose that have created a home for me in the Quad Cities DSA.