There are Disabled People in the Future

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 0:05
Hello beloved listeners and welcome to No Future No Cry. My name is Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware and I’ll be your host as we deep dive into the wild imaginings of leading artists, activists and thinkers, who are all dreaming us into future worlds, while reckoning with the reverberations of the one that we all collectively inhabit and have inherited. Join us as we explore a series of short stories and speculative interpretations that engage with all that could be, and all that has been. All of these stories are set within a century from now. And these stories offer us a way of surviving and growing into something not yet created: the apocalyptic, the beautiful, the hopeful, the sacred. Today’s story is entitled, There Are Disabled People In the Future’, written by our featured guest, Leah. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a non-binary femme disabled writer, a memory keeper, and a disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A 2020/ 2021 Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle finalist and winner of the Jeanne Córdova Queer Nonfiction Prize for a lifetime of work documenting the complexity of queer of color, femme and/or disabled experience. Leah is a longtime disabled bipoc spacemaker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers and creators. A Worcester survivor who has seen some shit, Leah lives with their family in South Seattle and West Philly. Stay tuned after the story for a conversation between Leah and I, where we discuss its inspiration and writing process. Without further ado, There Are Disabled People In the Future by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 2:39

There Are Disabled People In the Future. November 5, 2020, edited October 11, 2023. In memory of Stacey Park Milbern, Rebel Fayola Black Burnett and Lucia Leandro Gimeno.

Generals of the Crip Rebel Alliance, all. Ravenna Black, journal entry logged on Facebook, close friends/crip filter 9/15/20, fall Smoke Storm. We’re preparing. For what, I can’t say. But we bought a ten person stand-up tent, extra gas cans, solar lights, a crank radio. Not that there’s anywhere we’d want to use any of this right now. We left Portland for Idaho last night, the last place I’d ever want to go, but the first place the Purple and AirNOW maps read even yellow. Leaving colors we’ve never even seen before- not just unhealthy, red, but purple, burgundy, maroon, all the way into numbers that break the map. 600, 800 AQI. Numbers the map weakly says there are no ratings for, because they’ve never existed before.

We drove and we drove, eight hours, five crips and two dogs and one cat in two cars through Nazi and Bundy territory til we got to this Hilton Garden Inn. It has air purifiers and coffee. I hope the WiFi is strong, but I cancelled the disability justice conference anyway. Even though we made it out, most of our people who registered are still in Oregon or California or WA, bags packed, barely able to think from the smoke even if they have five air purifiers going, looking over their shoulders fearfully seeing if they need to get in the car right now.

I hate this shit. Is it more disability justice to cancel a dj conference to honor our body/mind needs in peak climate chaos? Or would it be the most disability justice to somehow hold the conference anyway, right at that moment where we are the most disabled? What if I have no answer to this question? We’re preparing. But I also don’t know that we can leave. It’s not that there’s nowhere to go, it’s that no place is a chill place with coffee for cripples. I think about our house, one stop on the runaway from smoke/fascist railway- then there’s my siblings in Puyallup, then the contacts we have over the border in BC. Lisa looked up all the places you can pull over and walk over the border because they’ve closed all the transporter roads. It’s not awesome for access, but you know, if the 5 is blocked what else are we gonna do?

This isn’t a game anymore, some kind of science fiction for social justice apocalypse book we read to educate or titilate ourselves five years ago. This is happening. I’m writing this, for myself, but I’m also writing this to urge you, if you find this, to assess your own life, what your cripbodymind emergency alert system is. This is what we’re doing, imperfetly. Eight Crips, two cars, one fan, one maxed out credit card, Hilton Garden Inn, fucking Idaho.

Journal entry, November 5, 2020, Duwamish Territories, Commander Sidney Brown of the Crip Rebel Alliance, hand written in autistic Scrawl in an unlined artist notebook, analog, recovered.

The past taunts me. This morning, Ulrooj texted me and Surya a photo someone took of us at the US Social Forum in Detroit, ten years ago. A million years ago. I remember us finding each other, three South Asian femmes, laughing and exhausted sitting on the grass, day three of the forum knowing we had days more to go and we already hadn’t slept for a week. Objectively, I remember that sure, my life was hard then. My two best friends had just suddenly dumped me at the beginning of the year, and I was years away from understanding that I was autistic and it was that autistic thing of thinking people are your friends but realizing crushingly, in a moment, that they really, really aren’t. I had just run away from that terrible job at the bookstore where I made $12.15 an hour and worked myself to the bone every night with an hour commute each way, whether I took the subway or drove. But I was still struck by how relaxed I looked in the photo anyway–tender. You can see how my body trusts the soil. Shit, I haven’t looked that relaxed since he got inaugurated, I texted. Two hearts floated up. None of us had any white hair then, either. Two thumbs up. One of them texted (I’m not going to say who), I even pulled a white chin hair the other day! That’s a deeply desi moment, I thought, but I didn’t send it.

We missed the window to get to the Northeast safely. It snowed in Toronto the other day, six inches. I know, it’s only November. My friends there have maybe given up on me, I’ve said, “oh ya, I’ll gonna leave” so many times. But there are no apartments for rent there, all the students who got kicked out of their dorms when schools went YouTube University and they snapped up all the rental housing, took them all. And I don’t know if we can safely drive that far. The snow, the pan, and also being maybe tailed and killed by some Proud Boy or Oath Keeper in Montana.

It’s more than that, though. I know I keep saying how much I hate it here. But today, I put down my phone and went to the Station and everyone was chin-nodding to each other, everybody Black or Brown. Even over masks we met each other’s eyes hard, you could feel it. The daycare ladies in masks walking their kids on the clothesline past the mural of Comandante Ramona riding a crosseye to pier on the side of the housing project El Centro built, and the dudes trying to sell me incense even though every morning I say “no, thank you so much, I’m allergic”. I walked in to get my coffee past two empty sheriff vans parked by light rail and I said hi to Larissa, and she was like, I’m sick of being scared, that’s the worst thing about the last four fucking years – every Black person, every POC- we just walk around fucking scared all the time- those proud boys want to come in here? Fucking try it! I’ll kick their fucking asses, I’m not afraid! My ancestors aren’t afraid of shit! I mean, the reality is- we probably are afraid of shit but it was so good to see her.

I drove home, drank my coffee, I drove Q to driving school, and then I went back up and I met with X and T at the headquarters/ the birdshit. That’s the code word I came up with for the spot in the El Centro daycare where we meet during the day when it’s light out and not too cold yet. It’s this spot with kid-sized picnic tables I guess the kids sat at for snack but ain’t no kinds having snack right now. There’s a rain cover on top covered with bird shit and enough room for the three of us to eat our burritos from Carneceria Michocaun and discuss matters. After we stood on line for the free food box giveaway at Estrelita’s to help T get their food, because their scooter won’t quite fit inside the door. That was a trip- just going into the bookstore and seeing it all filled with boxes of cabbages, potatoes, hamburger meat, those good pastured eggs the food bank never has, spilling over next to the bookshelves with their cracked spine copies of Assatta and George Jackson’s bios. There was a line of people around the block more than ever went to the bookstore.

X asked if I wanted to go to the rally and I said nah, I’m one more body there, just one more, a virus-vulnerable body, a slow walking marching duck. I’ll go out if we have to but I’d rather take advantage about how most of the cops have quit and whenever there’s another hyper young, abled protest- what I call “anarchist 5k”- they all just go to where the protest is and try to pepper spray it. Let’s go be knife-in-the-back, sneaky disabled people, is my thought. Drop a banner, make some food to give out. I don’t know, something, shit that I don’t even want to say into this message. T finally four years in gave up on getting a gun but they built a catapult, they’ve been practicing. “I want to be David” they laugh.

I’ll admit it, I’ve been totally lost since Mona died. I have no fucking idea what to do to make the rev, and she’s dead so we all have to honour her memory by being her, but mostly all I can do is barely get in the shower by 4 and sit in my car crying and whispering, “I miss you, I miss you so much” to myself. Along with being, you know, a once in a generation movement organizer, she was my north star- she was so many people’s north star- and when she died, after the COVID-safe car parade memorial and her Democracy Now obituary, I was fucked up for months. I mean, I still am. I mean, I did things, sure, – I did all those webinars and articles, invoicing and calling on my friends to see how you’re doing. Oodles of free fucking counseling and mailing people herbs- but it all felt fucking pointless. She wasn’t perfect, she hated when people tried to put that on her, but she was really good coming up with the next brilliant thing that hadn’t been tried before, that worked. Now she’s gone and even though she tried to train up all her friends before she died, we’re a bunch of shell-shocked, grieving fucks. Some of us stay in our apartments crying, some of us never let ourselves cry and bustle around throwing Google docs at each other and snapping- why haven’t you written me back yet? When Jana sent me a care package of her things and things they gave out to people who had made it to the in person, there was this little tiny tarot deck in it, like an inch and a half wide, Rider Waite, laminated the kind you get at the dollar store as a stocking stuffer. I grabbed it and pulled the first two cards and there we fucking were, the magician and the high priestess crossed by death- you really cannot make this shit up. I sobbed on my falling apart shitty leatherette porch couch for the sixth time that day, eye crinkles and all. It was true: I was the weird witch writer cranky in the woods, she was the brilliant organizer from when she was 16.

But when I walked to my car today, I heard her whisper, “just do something Sid, that’s all you have to do. Just do anything”. At a certain point doing anything is better than doing nothing. Anyway, also most of what organizing is doing is just bugging people. You can do that.

Journal entry on scrap paper. Commander Sidney River Brown of the CRA, Scrawl June 6, 2021.

I thought I would run, I thought I would hide. I thought I would wear a hat over my head and try and look normal and smile at all my stupid white neighbors who never smiled at us. And hide people in the upstairs rooms. I thought I would use the fat fucked up fellowship I got to buy some land for us. But I read the parables. I’m autistic, so I read them 20 times. I know what happens when people all try and make Acorn. Acorn gets raided and raped. And it’s too late, anyway. It’s way beyond bug out or SIP. It’s crip. If you talk crip. It’s not a magic farm. It’s the “Crip Rebel Alliance had three meetings and then no one could get the Dischord to work”, they said. But it didn’t mean things stopped. It’s this moment, at headquarters with T and X, painting a banner that says THERE ARE DISABLED PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE and getting ready to drop it on the pedestrian bridge by the high school that has a ramp that we can get to.

It keeps unfolding day by day in cripple time.

We’re all just trying to survive any way we can wherever we can. What else is new. The difference, maybe? We do more than that now. Maybe. We won’t go back. The sign I painted that said DISABILITY JUSTICE IN OUR LIFETIME, that I stuck up on the trees on my street in the middle of the night. That’s what we want. It’s either death or that, I guess. Maybe both.

I see a wave from Latice, they moved back to Korea. Oh, that’s right. Last time I saw them online they were posting selfies from a hospital bed, can you please donate blood, it’s like blood play but different, 30 donations in 30 days for my rare blood disease! “My intention is to take care of my brother’s kids for 6 months but also maybe just stay through the pandemic”, they said.

But we’re in the blinking dawn of realizing: maybe there isn’t an after. From COVID but also from the smoke, from the white killers.

Maybe none of us go back to pushing a cart through Target and taking Lyfts again. We’re still here. Nothing just “went back to normal”. Racist white people who hate cripples don’t magically change en masse, even if a lot of them get sick. And there’s not enough SURJ comrades in the whole fucking world to talk them down into sucking less. We didn’t want to go back to waiting for the end. We’re in the after the end.

Things that might have been weird are normal. My stock of batteries, the way we meet at Estelita’s every week for the food distro, the ways we already have the mask and purifier drops planned for August when the storms will come, and leave, and come back again. I’m not surprised by it anymore. The small jars of dhal I leave out on the porch for anybody to come pick up. Sometimes I go out to the circle of cedars by the house’s edge, bow my head to them, I whisper thank you for still keeping me alive, I listen. Sometimes I feel the brush of Mona’s soft hand, she had the softest fucking hands. Her voice repeating, “You can’t predict anything, our bodies are never predictable, right? You didn’t predict my death. All you have to do is keep moving”.

End note: the opening section weaves in and expands on some phrases that were written by my friend Rebel Sidney Fayola Black Brunette on Facebook of his experiences fleeing the West Coast Super Smoke Swarm of 2020. Rebel was an incredible disabled mixed race organizer and a survivor of severe abuse who died by suicide in June of 2023. I didn’t have a chance to talk to him before he died about how his writing was one springboard and echo for me writing this story. To learn more about his work, you can visit his obituary at northwesthealth.org/news/remembering-rebel or his website, rebelblack.org. I love you Rebel.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 17:05
Thank you so much, Leah, for that story, for that reading, for taking us to a future where disabled, deaf and mad people are thriving, where they’re surviving, where they’ve somehow made it despite all of the things that our character is facing in their everyday. I would love to hear a little bit more about how you came into this story. There’s this one moment of the story where, you know, they talk about this movement through space. They talk about- is it more DJ to cancel the event or to keep it going? They really imagine a future that is based on our present that also remembers our past. Tell us a little bit about how it came to be that the story was created.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 17:53
Well, thank you first of all, and before I speak to that question, I want to say it’s funny because when you started off by saying “thank you for creating a future where disabled people are thriving”, I was like, I don’t know, are they in the story? Because I mean, it’s a story that’s very much a future present. That’s, you know, writing a reality where disabled people are facing down climate catastrophe, fascism and the pandemic and are losing people, are desperate, are stressed out. But we have each other and we’re finding ways to survive that are very imperfect, but real. And in terms of how the story came to be, I mean, it’s based on actual events. And it was so funny when y’all reached out to me about this podcast I was like, oh, I wrote this story in, I think late 2020, you know, the first year of the Coronavirus pandemic in North America and the world. And pretty much everything in the story is very much based on everyday moments that were happening that year.

Like the you know, narration of the people fleeing Portland to go to Idaho, during, you know, what was the West Coast Super Smoke Storm of 2020 where it was one of the first times in Turtle Island that we saw Air Quality Indexes going up to 600, 800, like numbers that had never been recorded before, in the midst of a pandemic, right, where people could not go, especially on the west coast where there’s usually not air conditioning because it never gets that hot. But normally, for lesser smoke events, we would go to the library or the mall and we couldn’t do that because of lockdown. And all of us were trying to figure out how to survive. So how it came to be is I really wanted to, first of all capture those small moments in time, which I think is a big part of my writing practice is documenting the little moments that make up the reality. The actual, the Disability Justice actual is survival, which include – that’s a story of my friend Rebel who was organizing a Disability Justice Conference in Portland, as we are, and had to flee to Idaho. That was based on things that he went through. That scene where everybody is going to pick up the boxes of meat and cabbages from Esperantists Library, like that’s a real place in Seattle, that’s a real place in my neighborhood in South Seattle. That’s a Black Latinx radical bookstore and community center that was just giving out these like bootleg food pantry boxes of food distro. Very much in keeping with the Black Panther Party’s food distribution and survival programs. And that scene where the three characters are sitting by the bird shit in the abandoned playground, like, that’s what me and my two friends would do. And there’s a lot I wanted to capture in that moment. Not just… I think a lot of people might jump to- oh, you’re capturing the survival programs, the organizing. And I’m like, yeah, I was and I wanted to.

And I also wanted to capture the depression and the experience of, you know, at that time, we were at a different phase than a lot of, you know, even disabled BIOPOC folks that I know have come to and dealing with the pandemic in year four, where none of us had vaccines, we still believe that vaccines would end the pandemic and that everybody would get them because of course, why wouldn’t they? And so we were seeing people very rarely, and we didn’t have some of the technology we’ve developed in the science, the disabled science, of you know, layers of protection, masking outdoors, and outdoor air and air purification, and those sprays- can all help. So I wasn’t seeing anybody but my partner at the time, who I was living with for weeks at a time, and then we would have these occasional, we’re gonna risk being outside, you know, we think this is okay, we might die. But we have to see somebody. Meet-ups that were very clandestine, and where we were all full of fear, but doing it anyway. And just kind of fumbling our way through it. So I wanted to capture that.

And I wanted to capture in particular, something that one of the main characters speaks of with the main voice in this kind of dialogue of journal entries that’s in the piece. Which is that like, this is not… we’re not in the 90s reading Parable of the Sower anymore, and being like, ooh, what’s that going to be? Like? It’s like, it’s that moment of like, never again, is now. And the apocalypse is now. Like, I mean, I know a lot of people who read various kinds of speculative fiction, but especially in a lot of people who are Butler heads, who are like, “Ooh, Parable of the Sower!” And I mean, that book is incredibly important. She also was very cranky and realistic. Like, sometimes people are like, “oh, just read this and see, it all works out”. And I was like, no, actually, it doesn’t all work out, like, Acorn gets raided and everyone gets raped and killed. And you know, the main character is very destroyed as a person.

But jumping back, like, I think a lot of us read those books in the 90s and were kind of like, “oh my god, climate change is coming. Fascism is coming. And that’s so awful”. And I wanted to capture the moment, 30 years later, where it’s like, we’re middle aged, or younger. And we’re like, okay, it’s here now. So not only what do we do, but like, what’s the actual day to day quotidienne or whatever like, of being fucked up and destroyed because your best friend dies during a medical procedure, and you’ve got to get the cabbages and you get this burrito once every three weeks with your friends and you… And also very much, and I’ll pause after this, but there’s, you know, there’s so much of a narrative throughline in a lot of people’s thinking about, “ooh, if it gets really bad, I’ll be the one to see it coming and I’ll get out and I’ll go to the safe zone”. And it was my way of talking about well, when it’s a slow motion disaster, that sometimes it’s happening really quickly.

First of all, like, you know, there’s a lot of reasons why people don’t leave. And we especially know that as disabled BIPOC where we’re like, yeah, I can’t move my CPAP or my medical equipment, or I don’t want to leave my accessible apartment, right? And then there were just things that were really happening to me in 2020, where I had friends in Toronto, my chosen sister was like- can you please come home like, you’ve got dual? Like, this was your Get Out of Jail Free card, like you managed to get dual citizenship back in the day, so you could escape? And I was like, there’s so many reasons, like physical and political, emotional, why can’t Where, first of all, I’m like, I don’t know if I’ll make it across the country, or I’ll be shot. And also, I was like, I’m really… what’s the word? I have responsibilities to people here and I can’t just abandon them. I can’t just save myself, which is a very Disability Justice practice.

I mean, we’ve got that line, which is much easier said than done, but we do it anyway. But it’s also much easier said than done- we move together with no one left behind. And I think that so often, like when I’ve heard people talk about, like, “ooh, I was if I was in Nazi Germany, I’d be on the first flight out like I wouldn’t think that everything’s gonna be okay”. And I mean, that’s bullshit for so many reasons. But like, in this case, I was like, yeah, I can’t just abandon my whole fucking community that doesn’t have Canadian papers. Like, who would I be if I did that? I have relationships and not only do I have responsibilities to the people that I am in relationship with, they’re who keeps me alive. So what, I’m just going to like dick out and watch them die? And like, be in like a bachelor basement in Toronto? Like, I don’t think so. So it’s really about like, documenting the time and part of that is documenting these ways that we negotiate the relationships that keep us alive.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 25:11
I love that, I love that. And in that documentation, you have managed to capture that feeling, that palpable feeling, whereas the character says, “Nothing went back to normal”. And, you know, that phrase, things that were weird, are normal: the stock of batteries, the food distribution, the small jars of dhal that are left on the porch for people to take, like, how quickly this character (and I think a lot of us) in this pandemic have grown accustomed to things that are very strange, that are very unusual.

And I’m so moved by this idea that, despite everything, they continue to organize, they continue to come together, they continue to show up–they continue to show up for each other in these beautiful ways. “We’re still here”, as the character says, and I love this use of the journal, of the use of this, you know- who are they speaking to? Are they speaking to themselves? Are they speaking to future communities? Who might find this journal? Like, who is the audience for this? And I love that. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about what, if anything, has changed since or how your dreaming might have evolved? Or transitioned or transformed now that we’re in 2023 thinking about, The Future is Disabled, there are disabled people in the future.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 26:38
Yeah, that’s a great question. The first thing that I think about is, you just quoted that line, “nothing went back to normal”. And then there’s a line after that, that says “people don’t want normal”. I would have to revise that now actually, a lot of people really want normal. And I think that we’ve seen that in the last two years, especially since there started to be what I have named as the great forgetting, which is the push on the part of capitalism and the state to be like, there’s no pandemic. Like, don’t remember the rebellions, don’t remember the mutual aid, don’t remember the small charts of dhal, don’t wear masks. And to literally do like, such red pill Matrix shit of like, well yeah, there’s no pandemic, because we’re not reporting on, you know, we’re not recording positive tests anymore.

So yeah, there’s no pandemic or we’re just going to let the virus evolve, so that even your rapid tests aren’t really accurate anymore. So it’s very much this kind of black mirror reality of like- see no evil, hear no evil, smell no evil and panopticon at the same time. And I think that in the last year in, oh god what is time, but 2022 and then 2023, when the pandemic emergency was officially declared “over” (in air quotes) has just been such a surreal time, because on the one hand, I feel like, I mean I think especially living in the United States, in the last couple of years with Biden, right, like, I think a lot of members of the left that had been like- and liberals as well, who’ve been like really actively fighting Trump, needed to catch a breath, wanted to catch a breath, right? Like very much so and I understand that. And I’m not faulting anybody, but it was really a trip after the mask mandates dropped in April of 2022 in the States and beyond and the emergency went away, to see a lot of people just kind of frantically throwing themselves into- we’re gonna go to the stadium concerts and we’re gonna go on vacation, and we’re gonna do all these things.

And then at the same time, to be part of what has felt like, because it is this minority of people who are still masking, still testing, still hanging out on the porch, you know. And now, I think we’re at a moment with the genocide in Gaza and Palestine, where I mean, it’s horrible. It’s beyond horrible, the atrocities. And it’s also really interesting because I feel like, for some people I know who kind of gone into the fog a bit, they’re like, oh shit, it’s still this real, the stakes are still this high. Like, whose side are you on? Are you just gonna go to see Taylor Swift? No shade to that, to any of my friends want to see Taylor Swift, I get it. But like, are you just going to go shopping? Or are you going to be witnessing the dead? Or are you going to be finding pleasure and still witnessing the dead right?

But I think that what’s changed is, I think that… I mean it’s changed over and over and over again. I think that for me, and for a lot of us, there’s been a real… there’s been a real kind of feeling of like, this is a very somber night of the human soul. Like, this is a real moment of reckoning for humanity, about what our collective soul will be. And I think, for me, and for a lot of other disabled people I know, there’s a real extra level of crip bitterness of like, y’all cared for two years! Like, I remember someone, my friend bitterly joked, “oh yeah, Disability Justice is so 2020”. You know, there was a minute where the mainstream left was like, asking us all to do workshops and webinars and teach about it. And then, not all of them (but a significant number of them) just were like, oh, we can’t do that anymore. Even when conferences and demos became super spreader events, or whatever. And there is this thing where I’m like, I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant in… like, I did it one time at closing a while ago. But I’m just like, yeah, it’s been four years, you know? And it really is the thing of like, yeah, there’s the people who eat in the restaurant and there’s the people who have like car cafe, where you just get your takeout and you’re sitting in your car. And we take it for granted. And it does give me a lot of fear about, ugh, the possibilities for solidarity, because I knew that ableism is a hell of a drug.

And I actually understand that in the face of overwhelming, terrifying events, like people cling to what is reassuring, and I understand that. But it’s also really frightening to feel like, you know, I mean I keep saying, it’s not going to be… not only is the pandemic still here, it’s not the last pandemic. Of course it’s not going to be, its climate change, there’s going to be… like, someone is like, what do you mean? And I’m, like, bitch, like, do not read the science? Like, it’s zoonotic viruses that are accelerated through, you know, forest clearing and climate change and things heating up. We’re gonna get another one, you’re gonna need to mask again, right? So in short, the TLDR is, I think that… my friend Adrian said that in 2020, he had the sense that we were in some sort of like, kind of general mass conspiracy for liberation in some ways. And then 2022 and 2023 really brought a rollback of that, where I remember speaking to you about it Syrus, and just me being like, a lot of us as Crips are in such a low point. I think especially earlier this year, when the emergency went away, and it’s like, no more free PCR, no more this like, no more any of the safety net. And you were like, “no, it’s a panoptic wave” or a something-wave, a pan wave? What’s the term?

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 31:58
Panarchy, the panarchy cycle.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 32:00
Yeah, where you were like, you know what, it’s after every moment of intense change, there’s just kind of a collapse. And it comes back. And I was like, I really want it to come back soon. And unfortunately, you know, I know a lot of us were in the streets for Palestine and the beds, there’s been this phrase, like, “Palestine is freeing us”. And I’m like, I kind of hate that, because I’m just like, Palestine is dying. Like, you know, 10s of 1000s of people are being slaughtered. And I was at a multifaith protest last night in Philly, where it was Muslim, Jewish, Christian, other folks. And, you know, we marched in front of the senator’s house that’s not calling for a ceasefire, and people had printed out only half the names of the children who’ve been killed, because I think there was… it was 2500. And I think they were like, this was the amount we could print. And they just read the names out loud. And it was often 40 to 50 children from the same family. And we did Janazah prayer and sang and cried. Um, and what I was saying is, is that, so I just want to kind of push back a bit on being like, Palestine doesn’t have to martyr themselves to like, make the world wake up. Like, that’s fucked up.

And at the same time, like, I think that as the world comes together in solidarity and resistance and witnessing as we can, one thing I’ve been heartened by is that so many demonstrations that I’ve seen, even from the beginning, it’s been a lot of masking. Which, as you know, we’d have to push for and often we were to people like, “Yo, can you wear a mask, even if the mark is outside”? And people would be like, “What are you talking about? What what are you mask cops”? And it’s like, no, we’re really not mask cops. Like, let’s take that apart. And I think that between, I mean, I think that we’re just really facing the reality of mass death in numbers in numerous ways. And also, there’s the reality of like, mass surveillance and masking also makes sense, because they’ve got these drones fucking filming us. And in any case, like, it’s that line… I think it’s Che Guevara who said, “Solidarity is the tenderness of the people in the world”, or it might have been from the Zapatistas. And I’m like, I just keep feeling like, I don’t know, if we’re gonna win.

You know, it is so clear that I used to feel like oh, if a million of us go out, like, even if the government’s fascist, you know, settler colonists, they have to listen because they need our votes. No, I’m like, they don’t even need our fucking votes. You know, like, it’s really it’s like that. But whether or not we can win through moral pressure of the masses, I think that we’re winning in being together and refusing to give up our humanity. And there is some disabled solidarity in that, in the masking and the care for each other at protests. I was at the kid’s march for Gaza last Sunday with chosen family and one of whom was four and you know, everyone was just keeping up fruit snacks. And I was like, right. It’s a small thing.

There’s ways that I see us reaching to, now more than ever, find ways to make pleasure in the middle of hell. And I think we see that with Gazans who are like, yeah, we’re making fucking falafel in the south, you know, and we’re like, or the photos of like Gazans carrying their cats out of the bomb zones and feeding each other no matter what. Stefanie, Stefanie Lyn Kaufman, I’m forgetting her second last name (*Mthimkhulu). But she works with Project LETS, she has a beautiful, beautiful statement on Instagram the other day, where she was like, you see disability justice in what’s happening in Palestine. Because people are literally, I mean, first of all people stayed, they were like, we’re not, you know, I mean, not only in their buildings, but like all of the doctors and staff were like, we’re not abandoning disabled people in the hospital, we’ll die together if we have to. To people walking with elders and carrying elders and walking with people in wheelchairs and helping people when they need to push through the rubble and moving slowly, and sharing everything they have. I’m just like, this is literally the principle of the ‘people with the least do the most’, and aren’t abandoning each other. And I think that if we can continue to do that, even if we die, we will have died with our spirits alive. And sometimes I think that’s all we can hope for. I don’t know if that answered your question, Syrus, but those are some thoughts I have.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 35:58
Haha, yeah, I mean, and there’s so much in what you’ve just discussed. But of course, I was thinking about in the height of 2020, you know, in the middle of some of the uprisings that were happening here, north of the Medicine Line, I made an innocent remark on Twitter, then Twitter, just saying, you know, if you’ve been out at a big rally, you know, could you consider quarantining?

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 36:21
I remember that, I remember that

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 36:22
And then testing. And I was absolutely vilified, absolutely vilified by activists who were like, “you’re just trying to tear down a new group!” And I was like, no, I’m disabled and I want to live.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 36:32
And like, also, not only are you disabled and you want to live, you want all them to live. You’re just like, no, I don’t want you to have a long standing cardiac fucking illness.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 36:40
You don’t need to get long Covid!

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 36:41
Like, I don’t want you to have a stroke in two years. And then oh, where’s the new group? Everyone’s dead. You know, they’re in the spirit world.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 36:46
Yeah, it was just so, it’s so interesting to me that people couldn’t seem to see that even in the moment. So I am, you know, seeing all of the masking at marches and rallies, it is so interesting. What I’m sort of stuck on and what I wanted to ask you about was this phrase in, and I think that you sort of, you know, have gone through this. We’re in this moment, witnessing this present, witnessing this incredible uprisings literally happening all over the world. You know, and thinking about, you know, some of the light finally also being shone on what’s happening in the Congo, and in Sudan…

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 37:23
And Ethiopia…

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 37:24
You know, exactly, and so much stuff is happening. You have this line in the story, “the past taunts me”. It’s from a journal entry November 5, 2020 in Duwamish Territory. And I’m curious, what does the future do for you?

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 37:44
I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, and I don’t know if this is my final answer, is a line of Stacey Park Milbern’s, where she talks about the ancestors, the disabled ancestors of which of course, she is now one. And she said, like, “how do I demand and entice the future to change with them?” So I think that the future has a lot of the dead in it. And something that I didn’t say about your last question about what’s different is, you know, the dead are–some of them are recent dead, some of them are not so recent anymore–and I think they’re settling into ancestorhood in a different way. And the way my grief is, and also the ways I relate to those ancestors has shifted.

And I really feel them kind of tapping their foot, being like, “Get your shit together. You know, we’re really not coming back! And we let you cry for two years and you can still cry, but like, come on bitch, you know, you can’t just stay in your bed for the rest of your life. I mean, you can, but also like, it’s you. You know, you don’t know what’s going to happen”. Um, I think that when I think of the future, I do think of… what I often call the gift of… the gift of anything could fucking happen, as a disability justice principle, and also as a spiritual principle. Like, a lot of times, I think especially in the past 5 or 10 years, when people were like, “that’s it, we’re fucked”. I’m like, literally, you don’t know what’s going to happen.

And like, I don’t mean that in a comforting way. And I also don’t mean it in a like, oh, everything’s gonna work out. I mean, like, crazy batshit bad shit could happen, that devastates us. Like, I didn’t know there would be a war like this a year ago. So many times with Israel/Palestine, in my lifetime, there’s been these like, horrible, but short wars that are then over. And I think that the beginning of this, I was like, okay, it’s gonna be like 2014, it’s gonna be like whatever–it’s gonna be a week, and it’s gonna be horrible. And then they’ll have to go back to this, like, not quite data. And then this time, I was like, oh no, they’re just gonna take Gaza. Like, they’re just like, we want to push Palestinians out of the country. So I think that’s one example of the future that is predictable but not unpredictable, that shows up and then you have to figure out how to respond. And then I think there are the moments that we never could have predicted that open up possibility that’s bigger and better. So I think the future demands of me that I stay ready and I stay… And staying ready, I think a lot of times people go, “oh yeah, you know, you’ve got this go kit and like, you know exactly what you’re going to do, and you have it all mapped out”. And, you know, I’m somebody who’s a 12-step person, and one of the very anarchist principles of liberatory recovery is that you got to let go of fucking control, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You just have to show up and be in meditative. And walking in a good way, moving in a good way practices, because so many of us who grew up in families where there was addiction and violence learned- oh, I’ve got to control everything. You know, I’ve got to map it all out because I’ve got to know where every single exit is and I have to know exactly how I get there–which isn’t wrong, it’s a survival strategy.

But I also know as an adult, who is trying to transform my family’s beautiful and fucked up legacy, that I can sit there and be like, I have it all mapped out, I know exactly how it’s gonna go. And then it doesn’t and I’m fucked. And also, I don’t have any room to breathe. And you know, I hate emergence in a lot of ways. I’m just like, goddamn, have a lesson plan, y’all. Like, some of the ways people use it. I’m like, this is not what Grace Lee Boggs meant. But I do have a different take on it, where I’m just like, as a spiritual person, as a person who is in liberatory recovery and as somebody who… I think the Zapatistas said, “moving, we ask questions”. Like, I think it’s that principle of like, how do you keep showing up for the future? How do you keep making yourself ready, but knowing that your plans… I mean, it’s like, it reminds me of like, being a younger teacher and learning, I have to bring three lesson plans to every class because like, especially working with like, queer, trans and Two-Spirit youth who was like, the people I worked with most, in the most focused way for like five years in Tkaronto in the early 2000s. I was like yeah you show up with your fucking Dorothy Allison, they want something else. Or like, somebody’s crying or somebody’s like, no, let’s write porn today. And you’ve got to pivot.

So I think that being grounded, I think the future demands that we be, I be grounded but stay open. And it’s really hard to stay open when you’re traumatized and fearful and wounded. And I think it’s been something that’s been tricky and important for me as somebody who’s now going to be 50 in a year and five months, which is quite something for someone who did not think they were going to live past 25. As I move into, and I’m really strict about this, I don’t claim elderhood, I sometimes jokingly claim ill-derhood, you know because like, sick and 50. It’s pretty whatever.

But I really am in cripple middle age. And I think that as somebody who’s now a middle aged writer, cultural worker, organizer on a good day, I have to stay, I have to, like, claim that like, there’s some things where I’m like, you know, what, I’ve got some knowledge, I’ve got some expertise, I know some things. I have some, you know, earned leadership. And also, I don’t fucking know everything. And I’ve seen a lot of people… you know, as we wal towards, as we move towards elderhood, it can be really easy for us to get bitter and fossilized. And to be like, “No! My way is the only way!” And we have to be… and I mean, often, you know, as racialized people, as working class people, disabled people, all the above–our authority is questioned all the time. And we’re told we don’t know anything. So of course we have to get our backs really up and be like, “No, I do know how to do that shit”. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. And that’s not wrong, but I think at the same time like, I’ve had experiences lately where somebody showed me something where I was like, oh, I didn’t know you could do it that way. And that’s in very personal spaces. And that’s also in bigger political spaces. And the places where the emotional and the political meet that are really… and I’m just like, I need to stay humble, I need to stay open, I need to stay listening, I need to try new things. Because, again, with the, you know, Al-Anon old thoughts which are still true, “nothing changes if nothing changes”.

And if you keep doing the same shit, the same shit is gonna happen. And I think that, particularly at this moment in time, we see–this is kind of like, mixing together a bunch of questions you asked–we see a lot of people in the face of terror, like hunkering down and being like, I’m just going to do the same shit that I know how to do, because I’m terrified. And I really get that. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but I’m really calling for us to, you know, do the holing up and the hiding we need to do. And also staying open to possibility and mystery and surprise, yeah.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 44:25
Thank you. Thank you so much. Wow, I’m so… the way that you talk, there’s a way that you articulate your thoughts and your ideas that is so visual for me. It really takes me into… so it feels like we were just in a conversation with a bunch of people, just because you bring such expansive ideas. I’m curious, Leah, what do you hope people leave with after hearing this story or after reading this story? What do you hope the listener is maybe propelled to do? Compelled to do? Or just to feel or think about after hearing this?

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 45:05
I hope they’re compelled to memory. I hope they’re compelled to not going into their own great forgetting, I’m hoping that they can find a desire to record these times that they are living in. As you know, in the real nitty gritty, yes, like the real deal of the shit we’re going through that’s history, that’s really important to record. Especially as more and more the official story is so blatantly censored. You know, we were all in the 90s being like, “They’re taking over, it’s gonna be five big media companies!”. And now, you know, I mean, we’re at this place where, you know, I am somebody who actually has found a lot of like, butterfly-like joy and lightness in my Venus in Gemini with social media. And I’ve used it, and I’ve enjoyed it. And the other day I went to post, you know, there was a demonstration where somebody was saying “all the people who didn’t get gentrified out of the Bay Area are so fucking metal”. It was a demo where all these people drove on to the Bay Bridge, like, parked their cars, locked down with each other, and threw the keys into the bay. And we’re just like, you know what? And it was during, like, I think, the second day of the APEC conference where Biden is in town, and they were like, yeah, we’re just gonna completely shut this shit down. Like, try and move these cars.

And I was posting a video and my friend was like, “When I go and I click on your stories, it doesn’t appear. There’s just this grey, literally this grey fog”. And I was like, wow, they’re not even hiding it. You know, they’re not even hiding it. I think that we’re at a moment where this is a bit of a segue, and I’ll make it short. Because there’s other ways I want to speak to your question that are more focused, but I had a friend recently be like, “You’re from the analog days, like, how are the kids today? We’ve only grown up on social media and like, you know, 4G–gonna know how to go back to that”. And I didn’t know how to answer. And I was actually thinking about it this morning. And I was like, I don’t know if they’re gonna know how to go back. But I think that when this technology ends, they and all of us of different generations are going to figure out ways of communicating that work for us, that we control again, right? Because we always were hacking a technology that was not made for us, but was made to data mine us and control us and spy on us. And we used it, I think, there’s the line that I think… I’m always quoting Aliissa Bierria saying it, and I’m not actually 100% sure if it’s she who said it, but it’s somebody from INCITE! who said once, “There’s a thin line between working the system and being worked by it, and you have to know which side of the line you’re on”. And I think that we’re at the moment where we’re like, yeah, a lot of us worked the system as much as we could. And now we’re like, all that shit is just designed to send Elon Musk’s robot army to Mars, so we actually have to do something else.

But jumping back to answer your question, I think I’m hoping that people will record the moments of, you know, their crip, working class, sick, sad, Black Brown every day. I’m hoping that they will see, I feel like there’s a lot of little gemstones in mosaic of moments in the story of what disability justice looks like in practice. Where it’s like, yeah, you go meet up with your friend who’s a cranky elder in their, you know, Section Eight apartment and you eat a burrito and you talk shit and you gossip or you’re like, “I have extra apples, you want some”? Or you mourn your dead friend. I feel like a lot of times people… I mean, I realize, you know, just two weeks ago that it’s seven years since Trump got elected. And you know, we know that he didn’t start the fire, but it has been seven straight years of dealing with just like very hot fascism, and we’re fucking tired and we’ve been transformed. And so many times, like at the beginning of Trumpism, and you know, like, this year, I witnessed people over and over again being like, I’m frozen, I’m paralyzed. What can I do? There’s nothing I can do. And over and over again, I see disability justice moving and being like, we’ve got four crips and a kitchen table and some lentils and facemasks- what can we do with that, you know? It’s like, you know, recipe making where you’re like, I’ve got ramen and turnips, like what can I do? And then we do something.

You know, since Stacey died, and this happened when she was alive too, people were always like, oh my god, like that thing happens, and everyone’s like, “Oh my god, the stuff that like, Disability Justice Culture Club did, and Nobody is Disposable Coalition did is so huge”. And I was like, it was and it was also completely ad hoc. Like, she was like, “We’ve got $400 of Target gift cards, let’s buy hand sanitizer. Like, let’s set up a Google Doc”. I guess what I’m trying to say is that like, DJ is still never the shit that’s like a big national organization with lots of funding. It is crips in bed, at a kitchen table, on a street corner, in jail, organizing. And I want people to know that they can do that, that it is possible and necessary for us all to do that. While we stay open to completely… constantly changing and evolving conditions–both terrifying and, you know, good on a good day like, full of possibility on a good day.

And I guess the last thing I’ll say is like (not to sound trite) but I hope people come away being like, look, there is joy in there. Like, these people in the middle, they’re building a paradise in hell. Like, they’re half of the… like the Crip snark and like gossip and like love and little jars of dhal. That’s all beautiful. Like, that’s all home. Like, that’s all filling my spirit. And that’s giving me life. Like I mean, I would be nowhere without disabled Brown cackling on a porch. And even if I get shot to death on that fucking porch, at least I’ll go out doing it. So yeah, find the joy. Like, keep finding the fucking joy in a real way, in a way that actually you can access, is what I would say. That’s what I got Syrus.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 50:43
Thank you so much. I’m just thinking about this last line of the story: “You can’t predict anything. Our body’s never predictable. All you have to do is keep moving”. Leah, you’ve given us so much to think about. And thank you so much for the chance to talk about your story today. And thank you for reminding us that may we never forget, there are disabled people in the future.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 51:06
And there are disabled people in the future that is the present. You know, we’re here right now. And then we could talk about time being very quantum and the past didn’t go anywhere. But that might be not more time than we have today.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 51:19
Haha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 51:21
Thank you for your loving questions. I really appreciate how deep you dove and like, what you saw on the piece. So thank you. Thanks, Leah.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 51:27
Thanks, Syrus.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 51:28
All right, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to like, follow, subscribe, and of course share. No Future No Cry is a collaborative production of Visitor Media and 221A, a nonprofit organization that works with artists and designers to research and develop cultural, ecological and social infrastructure based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Original Music and Sound Design by Dominic Bonelli, Podcast Production by Krish Dineshkumar, Production Management by Afua Mfodwo, Editorial and Creative Production by aeryka jourdaine hollis o’neil and a special thank you to New Sound Production Music Studio for their recording services, to Sean O’Neill and Anni Spadafora from Visitor Media and to Tao Fei from 221A.