Rambling

Book Thoughts: The Free People's Village by Sim Kern

After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit.

Original Sent Date: March 27, 2025

This was my book club book for this month and like the only thing I've managed to read recently due to friend drama as you know.

Thoughts: Really struggled with the beginning of this book as Maddie is pretty insufferable as a naive white person. Though she improves later on, she still is not my type of character in general. The romance plot lines with her were also supremely uninteresting to me but overall I thought this book did make me think a lot. This is the first thing I've read that has really gone into the whole movement building instead of just glossing over it, noting things about how they handled day to day stuff in basically trying to keep their own little autonomous zone and the eventual collapse of it. Someone in my book club was saying that they wish they had gone even more into it though, but maybe that kind of look into movement building is more for nonfiction.

Maddie as a character in general situates the book as a more general entryway for naive white readers, and she messes up multiple times. I feel like that's a choice to let white people watch her mistakes and then learn from them. As a person of color it was pretty cringe at multiple parts, though I related to her misstep with "ancestors" as I am not in touch with my own heritage and don't think about what it means to be an ancestor in a lot of cases. Someone new who showed up to the book club this time (who was really well-spoken and flamboyant, seemed well-read) said that they didn't understand this slip up because as they understand it with their family you also think of ancestors as including the living and into the future with whoever comes after you. I'm kind of curious about the two different ideas of ancestor now and whether any particular reading is like more common for certain cultures such as African-American (the situation in this book).

The alternative timeline with Gore winning the election against Bush seemed kind of like "why bother" to me in the beginning, but the book really detailed all the ways that carbon credits would be implemented in a racist manner so I really appreciated that. It rang extremely true, esp with how white affluent people would game the system while not cutting down on waste at all. The war in the name of greenwashing was also a very interesting take esp since the American military is like the greatest polluter on earth iirc.

The characters of Gestas, Angel, and Shayna were all interesting and I wish the book had been from Gestas or Shayna's perspective but then it would've been a different book and given what it was trying to achieve with Maddie and with what I said before about white readers I think it makes sense.

Something interesting is that in the book club those who had listened to the audio book thought that Gestas's name was Justice. Very cool.

The topic of the conversation with Gestas and the man that's trying to get him to vote was brought up and I mentioned the org I'm volunteering with as well as the fact that I see a lot of people abstaining from voting on social media for progressive reasons and I have a friend who refuses to vote because of America being an imperialist project. I didn't go into the details but they've been jilted by the whole immigration visa process and even now that they're a citizen they doesn't see the point, especially because of Palestine etc. The new person asked if I asked these people what they're doing against the system instead. I said no but that is a good thing to ask. Tbh tho idk if I can ask that without coming off preachy. This friend does a lot of like radical art already so maybe that's already enough idk.

The conversation about the vandalization of the construction equipment was also really interesting. Someone said they didn't mind the action in itself, but the way that Gestas went behind Shayna's back was really disrespectful, esp as the movement was Shayna's to begin with. They also brought up that Shayna was absolutely right in that they should not have gone for a decentralized horizontal organizing plan since it immediately got co-opted by white men. Agreed with this and I honestly think that was one of the most interesting parts of the book, was seeing how gender played out in terms of role division. Reminds you that you really have to be intentional about these things and is an interesting counter point to the whole idea of horizontal organizing. Ultimately, I think Gestas was right in terms of tactics, but the fallout and then reversal of that fallout was very interesting to read. Actions that are violent need to be done very intentionally. Someone else pointed out that the whole thing of the team of people sabotaging the bulldozers being made up of primarily white men + Red (who is masculine and edgy) really reminded them of their own experiences in organizing. The book's characterization of these vigilante actions for this team being primarily about acting out instead of intentional about what was best for the movement really rang true to them.

Someone else said they wished the brine had been like a pebble in the tire instead as according to How to Blow Up a Pipeline i think the book was. Not that they think the writer should have necessarily wrote it differently just like as a action and thinking about the costs of destruction on the environment in general. No clue what this pebble thing is referring to.

Red's trajectory seemed like a narrative argument for how movements cannot and should not be sustained purely on rebellion and should also invest in healing, aka working out trauma and the like. Maddie's own descent into suicidality furthers that theme, as does the argument the book makes around shame not being necessary or useful in general. It really stuck with me how Maddie is eventually told by her therapist that shame is a feeling that comes from thinking you could have done something differently and wanting to control the past rather than accepting that the past is already over. I would also argue that it's future facing too, in the same way that nostalgia is, where nostalgia is living in the past in order to orient future actions to experiencing that again, but shame is the flipside of the coin where you absolutely do not want to experience it again and hate yourself for being in the position to have even experienced whatever it was to begin with.

I talked more with my therapist about this and they said that shame is often a protecting emotion, where it feels terrible but it effectively distracts the person from confronting the truth, which is harder to bear in some ways. Such truths are often things like, you were hurt really badly and there was nothing you could have done to prevent it. The whole getting stuck in the prevention is the attempt at controlling the experience and by swearing up and down that there was something else that makes it entirely your fault rather than a confluence of multiple factors. Watching two friends of mine have really dysfunctional conversations with each other where shame and anger take turns distracting from the real issues has really brought this home to me. Shame is fundamentally an issue of control and not accepting that you can't change the past, and it's cued very much by the body shouting that you're in danger of being hurt. Ultimately though, it doesn't actually solve the problem nor provide any path towards peace or accountability in a relationship. It is also, as Shayna points out in the end, self-serving and self-centering. In an ironic way; having shame about one's privilege is further centering that privilege.

That said, if there's one thing I sort of related to Maddie about despite her glaring weird whiteness, it would be the whole shame thing about one's privilege. I may not be white for instance but I've lucked out enough in terms of family resources that I don't have to work (even if my dad and mom don't like that about me), and I therefore don't because of my severe social anxiety. But I'm aware that someone with my qualities who didn't have a family that was as well off would simply have to bite the bullet and suffer to pay their bills. And I always feel guilty about not making myself suffer enough even though the average person with no or mild social anxiety would never have to even suffer much at all to do what I think needs to be done. Maddie's monologues about worrying about saying the wrong thing or not doing something proving other people right about her privilege do ring very true to me. And you could argue that that's actually getting her to engage, but it also sets up her eventual fall when she doesn't address this part of her.

The part near the end where she feels so bad about Shayna comforting her when Shayna is a Black person who comes from an underprivileged area for instance hit close to home to me because I also felt similarly while reading that. For Shayna to say that it's different because they're friends was surprising to me. I guess it's because sometimes I see people talk about how even in their personal relationships the powers of privilege end up playing out so they have to do more emotional work and the like for their friends. Knowing that, and also knowing that Black people in particular occupy the lowest caste of our racial system, I have a mental calculus about people I would definitely not go to with my problems because I wouldn't want to burden them more than what the system is already dealing them. This is like, a literal unspoken rule to me — I refuse to burden Black and Indigenous people with my issues and need to watch myself very closely to make sure that I'm doing right by them all the time. I already monitor how much talking I'm doing vs other people (even if I have a tendency to be wordy online), and sometimes I worry that I'm taking up too much space with one of my friends with the volume of word difference. I try my best to be concise but this is also where I run up against my own personality tendencies.

To be honest, I don't even know how white people deal with this. If I was white I feel like I would be watching myself even harder. I don't know if this is racist or if this is just me trying to correct for my ignorance. I know enough to be accountable for if/when I do something wrong (even though I barely interact with people of these identity categories due to not talking to many people in general and general segregation in our landscape) but I don't know when the constant vigilance is good or bad. It reminds me when I was reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and she talked about how she could spot who was upper caste in a South Asian context just by virtue of seeing how they navigated the space and whether they felt entitled to take it up — even if they were dating a Dalit. That really stuck with me because I don't know what ways I'm displaying this. I can assume that I'm already doing so in terms of class since I don't know what it's actually like to be poor, but there must also be obvious stuff on the racial side that I'm missing also. I guess I just also don't like, understand why someone from an underprivileged group would want to date someone of a higher status. Isn't the potential for harm really great? Like what could possibly be appealing about them enough if they're literally taking up more space than you?

I know that thinking about it in this way is unhelpful because people are people and they're complex and individual so all the schemes we draw about how relationships and power generally flow may not actually pan out in the actual individual person context, or else women would never be abusers and we know that's not true. But it's stuff like this that makes me feel straight out that I would not want to have a partner that is from a lower status because I wouldn't want to be another facet of the harm they face from other people and the system at large when I mess up. I guess that itself is racist thinking because it encourages a self-segregation whereby I only accept a position of being a "benefactor", aka someone that they can come to if they need help, while refusing to let them get close to my own humanity. But at the same time like, dude, how much are they missing out on, anyway? I'm literally just one schmuck of a guy and it's not like I'm Not Talking to them I just specifically don't talk to them about anything I don't think is useful to them. (This is also in general how I navigate relationships to begin with, it's just more stringent the more I sense an innate power difference.)

Anyway. It's confusing for me because I guess I have Maddie's strain of shame virus. Even at this point when I'm committed to killing my own shame though, I don't really see anything bad about having these types of unspoken individual rules of conduct for myself.

As for a different topic: the book made a really good argument for not continuing to walk around glass just because someone in power has something that you think is necessary for the relationship or the movement. Fish's whole black hole of a existence and him turning on them as the ownership of the venue just highlighted this. You can't work with this in the long run. The fact that this was foreshadowed with the whole Fun Machine thing was narratively smart. I guess that's a lesson to me in general by making sure that the things I have set up are sustainable from the beginning in terms of power. ...I say this but I let the other translator and this other one member I specifically don't like walk over me and only get involved in holding them back when other people are hurt. Arguably the best group would've just been small and less accurate and everyone would at least have fun even if the actual product would suffer. It's hard when other people have things or skills that you don't have. I guess the other thing is that I might be actively avoiding having conversations about things, but I feel like I'm already calling in their actions when it becomes a problem. I just am not saying outright stuff like, "I don't think you get to say that anything in writing is objective and free from personal preference and cultural conventions, ever, and the way you go about arguing this really bothers me. Stop it," or "You know what, I really just don't like the way you turn topics into things about you and your projects. It comes off as lacking respect for my efforts and I honestly don't want to work with you anymore, can you leave?" Even typing that out is pretty funny to imagine the sheer emotional onslaught I would receive in return. I don't even want to deal with it or the subsequent fandom fallout / callout situation. Maybe I'm overestimating how bad it would be. But putting in the effort to be civil is already so much effort to me I just dunwanna.

"We keep at the work, because the work is good, and we couldn't live with ourselves otherwise," + "You have to accept that there's no winning, and learn to live for the joy of the struggle. And for maybe. Maybe someday," are interesting quotes. Reminds me of the long emails I wrote on the whole Tragic Optimism vs Hopelessness etc. I think it's basically true. The new social butterfly that showed up though was saying that it can't always be about resistance because otherwise you lose what you want to actually create. I feel like they also phrased this in a better way about joy in the struggle and not struggle in the joy or some sort of sentence phrase flip that sounded very poignant but I think what I've just put down as an example isn't quite it. Oh well.

Shayna's mushroom metaphor was also good. It's good that it foregrounds all the work that is necessary for any movement to emerge. The whole doing a little thing every day during the slower period where they were trying to get Gestas out of prison was also really good, especially in contrast to the other stuff that went down in the series.

For that matter, Angel's whole thing about becoming a conscientious objector and the whole conversation about where they were discussing the degree of culpability / who is even shielded from having bad choices presented to them to begin with was also very interesting and made me think a lot. I also didn't realize that the army can just? throw you in prison if you refuse to serve out to your agreement? I assume that wasn't made up for the book. Big yeeks and yikes. Him ending up in prison anyway though made sense. Someone in the book club who seems to have gone to protests before and gotten tear gassed etc. said she appreciated this aspect of the book since usually stuff that talks about revolution and the like glosses over how much shit hurts and how hard it is to do the dangerous thing and how much you might not even want to do the dangerous thing. She said she appreciated that there were very real consequences for everyone in their revolutionary actions. In fact, the practice of nonviolence is probably partially protective against these things, or at least is meant to be. That's probably an obvious statement but I think people tend to just frame it as a "good" and "peaceful" thing rather than a strategic thing in trying to minimize how many of your people get brutalized, because when you put people at higher degrees of risk you should be intentional about it. But of course in the Civil Rights era and to this day (if you're a Black person in particular) even doing nonviolent things already carries that heightened risk without the violence part added to it. Still thinking about that whole 3.5% figure thing that claims that nonviolence has higher chances of being effective (still don't know if I agree, but it is true that I would never get involved in something violent because I just wouldn't have it in me).

I must say I don't actually understand the attraction between Red and Maddie but like with most things allo people say, if they feel it, they feel it I guess. I liked that they acknowledged that Red was an asshole though. I guess it's a sign that no one is unlovable.

The whole conversation about indigenous practices vs. western religion with Red and Gestas was fun to read. The conversations about indigeneity where Red didn't feel connected at all to that heritage while Vida wanted to see if she could get connected with that aspect of her lineage was also interesting.

Fish's character as being a white man who wants to larp as progressive was also interesting because I don't think I've really seen that and fiction before. His history of raping Red and coercion of Maddie long term really highlights that ongoing violence can be quiet, too.

The white guys that did infiltration of racist groups to prevent them from being able to counter their protest was also interesting. I got the sense that it was trying to say that we need a variety of approaches to try to make something work — even when it doesn't, ultimately.

The whole teaching part of this book where Gestas pointed out the issues with Maddie's white-centric curriculum was also very good and reminded me again that we need to be sure that we're not discounting young people just for being young when ultimately they will always come to point the compass towards what's not working for them in ways that can be very illuminating. It's weird to have to even think this because it feels like not so long ago I was a teen, but it's been a decade now. I think partly an embarrassment over the mistakes I made and watched other people make in my younger years leads to an impulse to write off all of the processing abilities of those years in general to try to assure myself that it wouldn't happen again now or whatever. But doing that also throws out the very real fact that teens often have good insight into the systems around them even if they don't have the language for it. They know what they're experiencing doesn't work and those with the least privilege can likely identify it very well. I think with the recent AI stuff we're getting a push to start devaluing young students' uses and impulses regarding it as lazy and whatever else when the truth is likely that our curriculum doesn't seem relatable to the issues they're facing in their everyday lives + the very structure we have set up for schooling just doesn't lend itself well to learning. And well, we know this latter fact as having survived it ourselves. It just gets more and more holes in it as time goes by without anything to fix it (or replace it; decolonizing education is I'm sure a conversation, though I'm not sure if I'll ever be part of that as opposed to just anti-colonial efforts).

Anyway, I can't say that I like Loved this book, mostly because I would rather be reading a book from Gestas or Shayna's point of view (in which case Maddie would probably be even more infuriating without intimately understanding her shame brain lol), but it achieved what it set out to do and I respect that and do not regret reading it.

The book also seemed to suggest some other good things to read in general through Gestas so now I'm wondering if I should pick up some of that. A list:

#books #fiction