Hey everyone! It’s your favorite Twitter-punching-bag reporting back from the trenches of what Elon Musk calls “X” and “his”, neither of which I’m willing to concede or affirm.
A couple weeks ago, I posted something. Now… I’ve been controversial on Twitter before. I have even engaged in hyperbole for the purpose of making a strong point and trying to jar people loose from engrained patterns of thinking.
But Y’ALL! I did not think this was going to be the one that dragged me to hell.
Of the 181 comments it got, I would say about 90% of them were people jeering, yelling, cussing, and harassing me for this viewpoint. I can take it—not my first rodeo with this. (Although I refuse to get used to the particularly cruel accounts that call people I care about things like “worthless”, “trash", “failures'“, or other dehumanizing names.)
It got me thinking though about the distribution of interactions here and how that reflects the way different groups engage this issue. I want to be so clear: I am not saying that my Twitter post is the barometer for how people engage, or that failing to comment on my (or anyone’s) social media post is being a bad advocate. By no means! I am using it as an analogy for what I have experienced in other spaces.
Despite the 181 comments, the post got almost 4x that in “Likes.” (We’ll ignore the RT/QTs, since they were basically split, and Retweets usually mean “I agree with this!” but most of the Quote Tweets were like “Look at this moron!”)
I truly believe that in the general population, and in most major cities, this ratio is close to accurate in terms of who supports housing for people experiencing homelessness versus who supports criminalization and just getting-them-out-of-here. Those numbers get a little closer when you start to talk about where you’re going to house them, but even still I have found that those who are supportive outnumber those who aren’t.
But when it comes time to show support, it looks a lot more like my Twitter post: the opposition is loud, constant, and demanding—and the support is quiet, anonymous, and impersonal.
Hundreds upon hundreds of affordable housing, supportive housing, treatment centers, and other much-needed resources have been shut down at the local government level because the NIMBYs (Not in my BackYard-ers) are loud, organized, and consistent. They show up, often mad and with matching shirts, and they win.
They don’t have the numbers. They’re on the wrong side of history. But they win; nearly every time.
Friends, we have to show up. We have to get organized. We need to be loud.
We need MATCHING SHIRTS! I’m serious!
If we want to win, we have to match the energy and strategy of the opposition. The cruelest among us are getting their way because those of us who care, care from too far away.
There’s an early church story that I heard when I was in college. I don’t know whether it’s true, and I’m not going to look it up because the point isn’t whether it’s true.
In the early days of Christianity, there was a huge fire in Rome. (That part is definitely true!) It spread disastrously and caused catastrophic damage through a significant portion of the empire. This is where it gets debatable depending on historical accounts and verges into myth. Emperor Nero, looking for someone to blame, accused the Christians of causing the fire, igniting (no pun intended) a wave (mixing metaphors!) of persecution. The Christians were easy targets because they were new and weird (do they drink a dead guy’s blood?!)
But one version of the story says that the Christians were scrutinized because the areas in which they lived were less affected by the fire. Now, there’s two ways to look at that story: one version says that God protected the faithful from the fire, the other says that the Christians were so together in community and solidarity that they were able to work together to keep the fire from spreading in their areas as quickly.
I would argue that those two things are actually one thing—that solidarity and communion in responding to need and crisis is the divine intervention of God. God is the sum of them all, the love in between them, and so much more.
Jesus once told his followers to be as shrewd as serpents, and I think about that a lot. We are not called to be passive in our doing good, but to exercise cunning, strategy, and power in community. We must of course be wary of doing evil in the name of good—but we need not be complacent, submissive, or resigned in the face of our opposition. We’ll only win if we are like the early Christians in the story: so involved and intertwined with our neighbors that we face everything together, to the shame of those who insist we are all each of us on our own.
May the love and justice of God be made manifest among us and between us as we fight together.
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YIMBY Action, a nationwide housing advocacy organization (with tee shirts!). My local chapter, BEND Yimby, does show up, and does work to elect pro-housing people to local offices, and we are starting to win. Look for a chapter in your town, or start one. 😊
I've spent a lot of time thinking about how organized the far right is, and it often frightens me because those of us who want to see justice and wholeness and flourishing for all are so much less organized. I think it's in part because complex problems require complex solutions, and it can be hard to rally around complex solutions. But I agree that we need to keep trying to work together, and be more organized, and get louder.