(Don’t get) COVID for the holidays

November 22, 2024Leave a comment

As we’re facing the next COVID surge (brought on by holiday travel), I thought I might try a different kind of COVID post. You can skip to here for some easy to do tips and tricks you might have missed, or you can read down for my discussion of why this is important.

I have recently been writing and thinking a lot about why so many of my friends and family’s actions on COVID are so different from mine. Namely why so many people I know no longer seem very interested in either preventing themselves from being sick or, importantly, not spreading sickness to anyone else.

In my own case, the experience of staying home to stop the spread in 2020 forced me to strongly reconsider my behavior up to that point. Why had I ever thought it was OK to go to work or ride the subway with the flu, unmasked and taking no precautions, knowing that the flu certainly hospitalizes and kills people each year? Even if the flu was no big deal for my body, my behavior had limited other people—particularly disabled people—from comfortably being in public during flu season. I had knowingly spread around an illness. I radically reconsidered a lot of my behavior, and in particular, 2020 pushed me to focus more specifically on disability justice in my activism. A disability justice framework pushes us beyond thinking about individual access to consider how ableism limits us all from liberation.

Getting back to why this reconsideration didn’t happen on a mass level, understanding disability justice also means understanding that ableism is the current social order. And if it’s the order of the day, like other oppressive ideologies, that means we are all drenched in it and it is impossible to avoid ever doing something ableist. Furthermore, most people are going to act in ableist ways, most of the time. None of this are exempt from this, but not even trying is definitely worse!

I am also well aware that good COVID information is hard to come by, especially if you are not on the regular lookout for it. And if you do go looking for it, it can quickly get overwhelming. So I’d like to offer here a very short, distilled list of things people might have missed since 2020. (I’ve not taken the time to track down citations for all of these things; you’ll have to trust me that I got them from trustworthy sources or you can verify on your own. I’m happy to give more info on any of these too.)

Some of these things are easy enough to do. I’m offering this list because from a “stop the spread” mindset, each specific thing you do is helpful. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, and it’s hopefully not overwhelming. You don’t have to be perfect or avoid COVID 100% of the time or make this part of your identity, but I’d like to ask everyone reading this to take one step up in your mitigations for the holiday season, since this is reliably a time with huge increases in virus transmission. With around a thousand people still dying every week from COVID in the US, you don’t know whose life you may save by being a little more careful.

Masking

This is the biggest bang for your buck, precaution-wise. If it’s hard for you to mask all the time in public, consider masking in places that disabled people really can’t avoid, like the pharmacy, the grocery store, and on public transportation.

I’d also suggest that if masks are uncomfortable, try different kinds of masks! The Aura is my favorite mask – it’s tight to my face so my glasses don’t fog and head straps don’t hurt my ears like ear straps do. Wellbefore sells masks in different sizes and colors, and Armbrust has sampler packs. Just try a bunch and see what works for you!

Finally, know that if at all possible, you should wear an N95 or KN95 mask. This is a change since spring 2020 because the current variants of COVID are more contagious.

Mouthwash

Washing your mouth out with a mouthwash containing CPC (cetylpyridinium chloride) before or after seeing people, or just regularly, will kill some of the virus in your mouth and keep you below the threshold to get sick and/or shed the virus to others. This is a really easy one; CVS brand mouthwash has CPC.

Sip mask

These valves will allow you to drink without breaking the seal of your mask. This is great for airplane travel, crowded conferences, or other risky spaces that you need to be in for an extended amount of time.

Airplane

The most dangerous time on an airplane from a virus transmission standpoint is the time sitting on the runway (because of the way they circulate and filter the air onboard). Even if you don’t mask up during the flight, this is the best time to mask. (And if you do mask, this is the worst time to have a snack or drink – try to keep your mask on for all of this period.)

Space out risky or crowded events

Don’t go to a wedding and a concert in the same weekend! Illness takes 3-5 days to develop after exposure, so give yourself time to know if you got sick from the last thing before potentially spreading that to the next thing.

Air purifiers work!

This is a great one for places that you can’t avoid, like school, work, or daycare. You can make your own Corsi-Rosenthal box, but there’s also a variety of high quality air purifiers you can get for $70-100. You want to make sure it has a HEPA or Merv13+ filter on it, and check how quickly it changes out the air in a room. Since COVID is airborne, there can be COVID in a space even after the person has left it. Setting up air purifiers and/or opening windows until enough air has circulated before you remove your mask is a great way to make a space COVID safer

Test before going to events, even if you don’t feel sick

Rapid tests (the kind you’re used to getting from the government and at the drug store)

False negatives from these are rampant but a positive test reliably means you have COVID. The accuracy of these tests also increases a LOT if you take two of them 48 hours apart.

Better home tests are now available

Metrix and Pluslife are both testers you can buy that offer a similar level of accuracy to a PCR test (that is, very accurate!). These devices are expensive, but so is another COVID infection: think of the missed work, cost of Paxlovid, and potential for Long COVID to keep you down even longer.

It’s a good idea to get an updated vaccine 2x a year too; like the flu shot, these vaccines are updated to try to fend off the particular variants that are circling. Be mindful though that vaccination will not necessarily stop transmission, especially of asymptomatic cases. Handwashing is also good for general prevention, but it doesn’t really stop COVID transmission. In the early days of COVID, researchers guessed that it was spread by physical droplets. That’s why we were instructed to wash our hands and groceries. But now we know that COVID is airborne; it spreads more like cigarette smoke than spit!

Of course, no single thing works perfectly. The best model is still the Swiss cheese model, but that also means each thing you do helps. If you’re reading this, please consider doing *one more thing* to take care of yourselves and others. I love you.

A photograph of a sidewalk display in NYC. Approximately 20 mannequin heads wear a variety of colors of KN95 masks, amidst ball caps and other items for sale. Handwritten signs adorn the table saying things like "On sale KN 95. 1 for $3, 2 for $5." — Photo by Sam Stone. Manhattan, New York, on 6th Avenue somewhere between 20th and 17th Street, 2020. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppbd.01588

my interview with Harsha Walia at the Socialism Conference

September 16, 2024Leave a comment

The left in the United States faces a series of urgent questions: How do we stop a genocide in Palestine funded by our own tax dollars? How do we engage with or confront electoral politics? How can we get beyond the insularity of our own context to learn from each other?

Truthout caught up with Harsha Walia at this year’s Socialism Conference, a yearly convergence of over 2,000 people on the left hosted by Haymarket Books in Chicago, to discuss some of these questions. Walia is an organizer, anti-violence worker, and the award-winning author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. She lives in British Columbia, Canada, where she is involved in migrant justice as well as feminist, anti-capitalist, abolitionist and anti-imperialist movements.

In this exclusive interview, Walia discusses building supportive containers for new organizers in this moment of heightened mobilization for Palestine, celebrity culture and the U.S. presidential election, and what we can all learn from international struggles.

You, Kelly Hayes and Robyn Maynard designed a session for the Socialism Conference called “World Building Workshop: Abolition, Solidarity, and Decolonization.” At it, you invited participants to discuss the infrastructure our movements need, any recent wins or stumbles, how we can connect across struggles and how we can manage principled disagreements. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to do that session?

Read the interview, “Harsha Walia: Democratic Party Laid Groundwork for Anti-Migrant Border Policy,” at Truthout here: https://truthout.org/articles/harsha-walia-democratic-party-laid-groundwork-for-anti-migrant-border-policy/

the politics of COVID information

September 5, 2024Leave a comment

The pandemic isn’t over. Why is it so hard to find accurate information about it?

This week, Nassau County, New York, passed a mask ban. Those wearing face masks will now face the possibility of up to a year in jail or a $1,000 fine. Angry at the power of anti-genocide protests, lawmakers banned one of the most basic forms of disease protection just as the world is experiencing a record surge in COVID cases. While officials insist that the law will not be used against those masking for medical reasons, disabled activists protesting the move say they were intentionally coughed on during the city council meeting where the bill was passed.

In a world of airborne contagious diseases, everyone has a medical reason for masking. So why doesn’t our public health policy recognize that?

In 2020, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, then-President Donald Trump was excoriated for saying that “when you test, you create more cases.” This statement was met with outcry by journalists and public health professionals and pundits from all major outlets.

Read my most recent article here. In it you will also find a list of places you can stay more informed about COVID, critical during this record-breaking surge.

The response to this article has been tremendous. I was especially honored to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, Death Panel, to talk about the piece. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you can check out a preview of the first 20 minutes of the episode here.

Finally, I want to officially announce my name change to October! This has been a long process for me since letting go of the past is not always easy, but I am excited to have a name that better reflects who I am in this part of my life. If you have known me a long time, please feel free to continue calling me Meg, but I will gradually be removing Meg and Meghan from my byline and business information, and may change my email address eventually too.

Anti-LGBTQ Censorship Is Endangering Trans People Behind Bars

June 13, 2024June 13, 2024Leave a comment

The rampant banning of texts about queer and transgender people has been in the news a lot recently, but nowhere is book banning more of an issue than in prison. Trans people, in particular, suffer from prisons’ arbitrary restrictions. Sophia Alexsandra Brett Laferriere, a trans woman living in a Washington state prison, told Truthout via the prison’s online messaging system, “Most of the information we ask for doesn’t get to us, or staff steal it or write over it. They block it from us.”

Although data is not easily available, there are clues that indicate the severity of these impacts. For example, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a textbook-like educational resource for trans people, is banned in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin for “obscene material,” and being “sexually explicit,” among other related reasons. In Washington State, prisons keep a copy stocked in the library after legal intervention from the American Civil Liberties Union, but individuals are still not allowed to have a copy, says Dillon.

My latest piece of writing for Truthout is up. Read the rest: https://truthout.org/articles/anti-lgbtq-censorship-is-endangering-trans-people-behind-bars/

really facing the climate crisis

May 23, 2024May 21, 2024Leave a comment

Recently I heard Dean Spade on the podcast Death Panel talking about an article he wrote for In These Times. The article was about two recent pieces of “cli fi” (climate fiction), and in part inspired by his essay, I went looking for more literature representing more realistic views of the climate crisis we are facing (and already experiencing). (I’m also looking for helpful representations of pandemics or specifically the coronavirus pandemic in literature, so if anyone has recommendations, please do point me to them.)

Spade argues, in part, that even among the left we retain some liberal fantasies when it comes to climate, believing that climate is somehow too big for our actions to impact and that ultimately only state intervention will be meaningful, or worse, that we hope that state intervention or actions of some kind will save us. Spade writes, “avoidance and denial perpetuate and stem from people’s hope for state-based solutions and the belief that states or corporations are the only actors that can ultimately implement solutions to these problems. The (often suppressed) awareness that the very entities that got us into this mess are not going to get us out of it — much less contribute to building a society where people have what we need — can, of course, cause our overwhelm and immobilization if we believe they are the only answer.” Spade continues, writing about Peter Gelderloos’ book The Solutions Are Already Here, “It is so helpful to remember that no matter what fictions are used to justify domination, we did not design or consent to these arrangements of extraction, and people lived for tens of thousands of years without them. To resist and survive the current crisis to whatever limited extent is still possible, we have to work against states, not inside them.”

What I ended up finding in my own search for fiction to help me think about this was The Light Pirate, written by Lily Brooks-Dalton, a book I liked a surprising amount given that it is a book about the climate that is also part of Oprah’s book club. In fact, I really liked the book and found that it really helped me tackle some of the things that Spade mentioned in his interview and article, specifically my own denial and avoidance.

[mild spoiler alert] In the Light Pirate, people in Florida are abandoned by the state. This happens in sudden, but realistic feeling ways. Our already frustrating, impersonal, uncaring local, state, and federal government systems – one where elected representatives never even bother to answer their phone lines – are tipped over the edge by the collapse of their tax base as people flee.

I liked too, Brooks-Dalton’s portrayal of how everyday people react, and especially her portrayal of the failure to notice the crisis until it is already too late to do much, perhaps even too late to survive. People in the book engage in acts of trying not to recognize what some part of them knows in a way that makes it easier to understand the total avoidance that most people in the U.S. engage in when it comes to climate crisis.

Listening to Spade talk about our difficulty facing the grief, anguish, and hopelessness we feel, and how that relates to our inability to really face the reality of the situation, really made me reflect on the silences in my own thinking. Up to now, I thought that I was facing this in a pretty clear-eyed way. I talk about climate crisis and the future I expect from it much more than the average person and more than almost anyone else I know, and preparing myself for this crisis is a specific part of the way I think about arranging my life. A lot of my thinking about COVID, and the ways that I have made permanent shifts in my life in response to COVID, are driven by the knowledge that COVID is very likely only the first such illness and pandemic I will face as the Earth warms. I do not expect to find a house or a career or a life that I can stay put in for decades because I do not expect that to be a real possibility for me among the varying levels of collapse. Even so, as I listened to Spade, I realized that there are a lot of aspects of the climate crisis that I have not thought about in specific detail.

By taking a hyperlocal perspective rather than a global one, The Light Pirate encouraged me to think in specific concrete terms about what the next few decades are likely to bring exactly where I live. For me, this is obviously not to disregard what will happen elsewhere; it is critical to expand our nets of solidarity as wide as we can so that more people can survive. But if I’m honest with myself, I have allowed myself to consider this a global phenomenon and thus more abstract or harder to conceive of, and to leave the concrete realities of what will likely happen to me, right where I live, out of my thinking. It’s as if a wall goes up when I try to think more about that and my mind just switches topics. Reading this book helped me see how essential developing that understanding (and facing it) is to any kind of preparation, whether mutual or individual. There are knowable things that I can learn, like understanding the ecosystem that I’m in and how it is most likely to change, that will increase my chances of adapting and, crucially, of supporting others.

One of the Light Pirate’s main messages is one of adaptation, an evolutionary message of adapt or die. The book also really helped me understand why this kind of adaptation is so difficult for us. Through the character’s eyes, I have a better sense of why so many refuse to see what is happening to our environment and our living conditions right in front us. I found the portrayal of a world where people in Chicago are still taking vacations to Europe and attending graduate school while people in Florida are literally being swept away by hurricanes and a rising water table to be realistic. After all, we are already in that world where we go about our daily lives in ways that reflect that the problems suffered by people in other parts of the world do not have urgency and are not our own. Why would it be dramatically different as the zone of “not here” gets larger and the zone of “stability” gets ever smaller? Recently I had a really good conversation with an old friend about COVID. We were talking about the feeling and meaning of being “early adopters” when it comes to making permanent shifts to our lives as a result of COVID, and in preparation for the other pandemics that are likely coming. Being an early adopter is a lonely thing, and by definition it means doing something or conforming to an idea that is not widely held. Personally, it can be hard for me not to question my actions or understanding when it seems so contrary to everyone around me. I think the Light Pirate really helped me grapple a bit more with that. After reading it, I feel affirmed in my early adoption preparing for the next pandemic, and in refusing to go back to a normal that has now vanished and instead working as hard as I can to prepare for what’s to come.

A green sign carried a protest reads "Make Detroit the engine of a Green New Deal". The sign is laying on a plain floor.

Living through COVID has prepared us for the worst. We are now prepared to abandon each other.

March 26, 2024March 26, 2024Leave a comment

I worry almost constantly about the ways that the pandemic – which was traumatic and disturbing for everyone – has set a precedent for our collective ability to avoid thinking about the well-being of others.

Prior to COVID, we were already living in a very dehumanizing, death-making, and callous society. I think all the time about the disappearance of 1.9 million people to imprisonment at any given moment in the United States. These people live in cages, yet many of us on the outside do not dwell on their existence. I think of the multitudes of people – the full count unknown but being in the hundreds of thousands or above — who were killed by the U.S. war in Iraq, a war that was started by a straight-up lie. Many of us knew it was a lie, but we learned to live with that reality (if unwillingly). And then there are the more than 650,000 people living on the streets. Most of us have learned to step over these neighbors, to look away from this reality, in order to go on with our own lives.

This society is one that forces us to draw a distinction between our own satisfaction and the lack that others experience, because no amount of personal sacrifice by a working person can fill the lack. It is by design that some of us have houses, food, and objects that give us pleasure while other people struggle for water, because that society allows a select few to have private jets and to establish or maintain dynasties for their families.

The result is that we are forced to accept the need, deprivation, and violence, that others experience and to figure out for ourselves how to negotiate that acceptance. This has been true for at least my lifetime. It’s true that throughout that time new levels of deprivation have come and gone that we have, in general, accepted. But the pandemic was another level. The number of people who died – vanished from this earth – in a period of months was previously unfathomable. We lived the Monty Python “bring out your dead” skit becoming reality as morgues across the United States and across the world were unable to keep up with the pace of death. And so it took us a while to understand – if we have understood it — that while so many were dying, even more were being disabled, having their lives changed forever in profound ways, in a society that discards disabled people.

The emergence of the COVID pandemic was a shock, a major hit to just about everyone’s psyche and worldview, even if it seems naïve to admit that now (it does). Confronting suffering on a new scale changed us.

It is absolutely wild to think that now, when I think of the early days of the pandemic or when I hear people talk about that spring of 2020, what we mostly talk about is the ways we were stuck in our homes or had trouble buying certain products. I don’t hear people talk about (and I don’t often talk about) the absolute stark and sudden fear that I felt wondering which of my friends, and how many, might be snatched away suddenly. The horror and dread that I felt waking up every day to a world in which tens of thousands were dying on top of the already harsh, violent, and dehumanizing world I lived in. The pain of trying to assimilate this new horror. The confusion and fear of constantly changing information and directives about how to protect ourselves and each other, and the utter anxiety of all of us being subject to a disease about which little was really known.

It is also worth recalling that the human desire to care for each other came to the forefront and seemed to bloom all over, as it often does in crisis.

We do not, though, talk much about how the pandemic is in many ways our first real step into the absolute chaos of climate crisis. Not only because the ability for an illness like this to spread is itself the result of changes in our climate, but because it showed us what it will be like when large-scale disasters impact our distribution systems. We don’t talk much about this, but it is there, looming.

We all experienced the organized abandonment and collapse in this crisis, and we are still experiencing it. All of us are watching in real-time as our loved ones become more and more likely to have a permanent disability through multiple infections. We are more or less aware of the more than one thousand people still dying every week, although we are less aware because the data simply isn’t available. Not only is it hard to find, it simply isn’t being collected. This is intentional and it is key: if we can’t accurately describe what’s going on, it’s not only hard for us to organize around it, but the fact itself becomes up for debate. It becomes optional to accept this.

And all of this – the deepening push to abandon, the increased normalization of preventable disasters — has led to the situation now, where we are witnessing a genocide in real-time. Thousands of people are being killed in a month again, this time in a tiny strip of land and in a direct, targeted, and above all, completely preventable way. More than 32,000 people have been killed by Israel since October 7, as of today In this case, it is Palestinians who are being killed (we are not all potentially susceptible), but then again, this massacre is preventable – including by the United States government. And we all know that it is happening, whether we choose to entertain that awareness or not.

We are now prepared to accept a genocide. This thing, this awful awful thing, will not be the last or the worst thing, at least not unless we refuse to abandon each other. As Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba emphasize in Let This Radicalize You, the future is not written, and it does not have to be this way. We do not know what will happen, and that is a powerful, hopeful thing. But if we do not want a future even worse than this one – one with even more catastrophic loss of life and health — we must absolutely refuse the many ways we are conditioned to abandon each other and look away.

The image is red, green, and black, with abstract images of flowers. It says "Gaza Lives." — Image by Josh MacPhee at Justseeds

We Are Seeds: Why It’s Worth It to Fight for Change

January 5, 2024January 5, 20241 Comment

Last fall, I made my first digital zine. I have made a few minizines before (the kind you make from folding a single piece of paper) and have found it a fantastic exercise (plus they’re cool). I like how the process of collage, of looking for images and fonts and other little bits, can unlock my mind. There’s a kind of relaxation in thinking about what you want to say without thinking so directly and insistently about what you’re going to say. And, it’s kind of like a blog in the sense that it can be a less polished version of writing. These intermediary steps of daring to get my ideas out and see what people think of them, before putting in the work to polish the writing, have been so critical for me in developing a much more regular writing practice.

A front cover that says We Are Seeds along the side and contains artwork by Melody Yang. In the artwork, a garden is growing out of a cop car, a child is a reading a book, in the background kids are swinging and in the foreground kids are running around garden beds. A rocket crashes to earth and bursts in to stars which are sprinkled throughout the drawing. — click to open and read the zine

For this reason, a zine was the perfect medium for getting a project started that I’ve really been thinking about for several years now: a book on why social movements matter. But more specifically than that, a book on why it matters when we get together to fight for our collective liberation, even if we don’t win. My hope is that this is a book that can inspire people to take the risk and do something. I know so many people who are clear on the problems they see around them but for whatever reason, are not actively engaged to change the situation. My hunch is that many of us think that it is hopeless to fight against big structures like racism, or the prison industrial complex, or environmental devastation. This is a book about why it should never be hopeless.

The zine I’m sharing here is a first draft of the ideas for the book. The book itself – which I’m putting together now! – is an anthology. In the end, it didn’t make sense for me to write a book about collective struggle by myself. I wanted to include multiple viewpoints and more collective wisdom. So this book, tentatively titled The Struggle Is Always Worth It, includes the writing of a dozen badass organizers and folks engaged in thinking about why we on the left do what we do.

As always, I’d love to hear any reactions and I hope you’ll keep a look out for the forthcoming book.

a birthday request

October 18, 20231 Comment

I want to share here some of the organizing work I’ve been involved with this year. This year I have been enmeshed in two big abolitionist projects in and beyond Detroit. And, in honor of my birthday next week, I’m asking anyone who wants to celebrate with me to make a $43 donation to one of these projects (or whatever you can afford!).

The first is the Detroit Peer Respite, an abolitionist alternative to mental health incarceration and coercive care for moments of acute crisis. We are working to pilot the ability to host a person in crisis in a local house for up to 10 days. In this non-medical and consent-based model, guests will be supported round the clock by another person who can listen, help find resources, work through problems, or whatever support is requested and helpful. The organizing and support comes from peers – people who are survivors of psychiatric incarceration or have other lived experiences with mental health struggles with ourselves and in our families. To make this happen, we need a lot of volunteers and a little bit of funding! I would love to talk to anyone local about how to get involved.

Donate to Detroit Peer Respite here: https://givebutter.com/peerrespitepilot#

The second project is the Abolitionist Book Club, a reading group that connects people inside and outside of prison for conversation and political education. This is a project started in collaboration with the Black Prisoners’ Caucus in WA as an act of material and emotional support with our imprisoned comrades. The club is currently reading Kaba and Richie’s No More Police. We’re fundraising to provide money for phone calls and messages to and from the prison (you can read more here about these exorbitant expenses).

Donate to Abolitionist Book Club here: https://chuffed.org/project/no-more-police-insideoutside

Big, big thanks in advance to anyone who can celebrate my birthday with me by supporting one of these projects. I would also love to chat with anyone who wants more info or is interested in getting involved, or doing something similar, or who’s already doing similar work, so as always, please reach out!

Abolition Everywhere

September 13, 2023Leave a comment

In Republican-controlled regions across the country, people are engaged in abolitionist organizing: Even though conditions vary, people are organizing for freedom virtually everywhere. This is nothing new. The South, for example, has been a site for abolitionist organizing for centuries, and it continues to be one, despite the attacks on long-settled civil rights being organized by Republican supermajorities in statehouses.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is the first Black woman to codirect the Highlander Research and Education Center, a century-old nexus for abolitionist and labor organizing in Tennessee and beyond. She is also a cofounder of the Movement for Black Lives. Woodard Henderson says that if abolitionists really believe the most impacted and marginalized people are at the heart of the struggle, then red states and counties must be centered in organizing efforts instead of treated as lost causes. She notes that the South in particular is often ceded by national organizations—which, among other problems, makes it hard for organizations working in the region to secure funding from philanthropic foundations.

My latest piece of writing, co-published with Inquest and Truthout for the series “Abolition in Action.” Read on for more on the successes organizers are having in some surprising places and how they think about their organizing: https://truthout.org/articles/grassroots-organizing-in-red-states-is-at-the-heart-of-abolitionist-struggle/

Amid Right-Wing War on Higher Ed, Montana State Students Fear for Their Lives

June 21, 2023Leave a comment

On February 16, the Queer Straight Alliance (QSA) at Montana State University (MSU), a student club dedicated providing community to LGBTQ+ students and community members, received an email from an anonymous email account. The email said, “Sinners of the QSA you must repent and turn to … the white god of Christianity,” and threatened to kill everyone at an off-campus dance party that same evening.

The students flew into action when they received the email, despite their fear. They spread the word far and wide so it could reach anyone they thought might be attending the event, they contacted multiple campus and police agencies, began arranging alternative housing for students who were afraid to return to their homes, and even set up a clothing resource for students who thought they might be targeted due to an overt LGBTQIA+ presentation. Coming in the wake of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs as well as other recent attacks at trans and queer events, they took the threat seriously and worked to protect each other and their community.

My most recent piece of writing, for Truthout. Read more: https://truthout.org/articles/amid-right-wing-war-on-higher-ed-montana-state-students-fear-for-their-lives/

Dr. October Krausch

public sociologist