By  Eleanor Goldfield
Mintpress News

I‘m not from DC, but I live here. I’m now a part of this living, breathing being that is a city. This city. It helps me to think of cities that way, even ones that I don’t fully feel at home in – like a body. And I’m like a blood transfusion. I know this isn’t my city, my body, but it’s where my life flows now, and so I best flow with it. This body holds me – it is my literal and figurative structure. I am one of the millions of cells rushing through the veins of this place, and although I’m a relative newcomer, I can feel that this body is not well. I can feel that familiar illness – it’s the same as any city I’ve ever lived in..

Every body is weakened and bowed under the weight of capitalism. Yet, there is a new illness – one that found a foothold in our immunocompromised bones and at the same time exposes the severity of that underlying sickness so old it’s etched in our souls.

Now, with the renewed vigor of a body on high alert, cells rush in symbiotic aid to save each other. A new fever awakens dormant fighters and engages new ones. The city pulses with ancient knowledge and emergent ideas.

As I steer my bike through a quiet street, I smile at the seemingly cliché and trite synchronicity of it all: all systems go, all working together for the common good. This city and I can now claim each other. The fight, the solidarity, we share it. We can beat this, and we can beat the underlying cancer. For a body is not its sickness. A city is not its oppression.

I park my bike outside a nondescript brick building. Earlier, our Mutual Aid team established some new protocols on how to address emergency requests for food, between our scheduled delivery days. I make a call to the number listed and a man comes down to collect the bags of sanitized groceries I’ve left by the front door. I wave my gloved hand and we get to chatting – at more than a six foot distance. He says he’s tried calling several places around DC that had previously offered boxes of food but weren’t anymore. He heard about us from one of those organizations. He says we’re the only people he called that sounded like real people. We talk a bit longer – about his kids, about my house plants, about these bizarre times. He offers me advice on how to keep my bike chain from slipping. I remind him of our DC Mutual Aid number and he reminds me of his, in case the bike acts up again.

Mutual aid is built on reciprocal exchanges like this one. Small and personal, it represents the antithesis and the answer to top-down, whitewashed charity schemes that treat aid work as school credit, or karma crystals, or what have you.

Mutual aid is the medicine that bodies respond well to, the antidote to capitalism, and the salve for those basic elements of humanity so ruthlessly shanked by our system: solidarity, community, sharing, and supporting. It’s not about charity. Charity pities. Mutual aid understands. Charity distances. Mutual aid connects.

As Dezeray Lyn, member of the Tampa, FL Mutual Aid Response to COVID-19 puts it, “Charity is transactional, hierarchical.” Mutual aid is about “sharing with your community because they are us, we are them.” Josiah king Harris-Ramos and Brianna lee Marie Coleman, co-directors of Black Trans Blessings in NYC echo that sentiment in saying, “Our people need us. We are passionate and driven to do this work, because our community is us, and we are our community” […]

Via https://www.mintpressnews.com/government-failure-address-coronavirus-sparking-mutual-aid-revolution/