Movement-Building As the Pandemic Fades (?)

How Marked By COVID is struggling to insure that we memorialize those we have lost and demand real accountability. Plus, why it's time for progressives to go back to face-to-face meetings.

Welcome back to another weekly edition of The Connector, where I focus on news and analysis at the intersection of politics, movements, organizing and tech and try to connect the dots (and people) on what it will take to keep democracy alive. This is completely free newsletter—nothing is behind a paywall—but if you value it and can afford a paid subscription at any level, please hit the subscribe button and choose that option. Feel free to forward widely; and if you are reading this because someone forwarded it to you, please sign up!

Three weeks ago in this space, in an edition titled “Where Have All the Marchers Gone?”, I wrote about the failure of the voting rights reform bill in Congress and tied that to my larger sense that the post-2016 explosion of grassroots activism among Democrats had run its course. Who, among progressives, was working to meet people where they are hurting now because of the upheaval caused by the pandemic?

One answer, I suggested, was with new groups like Marked By COVID, an all-volunteer effort co-founded by Kristin Urquiza after her father died of the virus in June 2020. It took a few days to chase her down, but we managed to connect for an intense hour of conversation. The full edited transcript of our chat is available here and here if you’re not one of my Medium subscribers (but please sign up!), but here a few key takeaways.

First, Marked By COVID is drawing on an undeniable source of narrative power: people who have lost loved ones or themselves been measurably harmed (long-haulers, in particular), and who want those losses to have meaning. While no one likes the “oppression Olympics,” it is undeniable that we instinctively pay more attention when someone or a group of people die unnecessarily than when they are just disrespected or harmed by losing their job or their home. Many national movements for significant social change can trace their roots back to this kind of loss and pain.

Second, the family survivors and long-haulers who make up the heart of Marked By COVID’s base have managed to channel their grief and pain toward two practical goals: memorialization and accountability. They are pushing for the creation of an annual national Covid Memorial Day to be adopted, ideally the first Monday in March, which would give the country a singular focus point to mourn and memorialize those we have lost. (This is something state legislators and activists can advance even before federal action, as New Hampshire is doing.) And they are lobbying hard for the creation of a nonpartisan national commission, chartered similarly to the 9-11 Commission, to investigate and report, in an impartial way, on how the pandemic was handled and what we need to learn for the future.

But if Marked By COVID has an undeniable source of power and practical, achievable demands, why isn’t it bigger on our radar screens?

Talking with Kristin brought a number of issues to the fore. The biggest one, to her, was psychological. “It’s been challenging to help expand the imagination of people to really deal with COVID, because we all want it to be over,” she said. Indeed, as New York Times columnist Charles Blow noted Sunday, a majority of Americans just want to be done. According to a recent Monmouth poll, seven in ten agree that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.”

Unfortunately, as Blow noted, those wishes aren’t quite going to come true, and our lives aren’t going back to some pre-Covid “normal.” (My goodness, more than 2,500 people died from COVID yesterday! That’s nearly the same as the number who were dying at the first peak in May 2020! See the CDC chart above.) But groups like Marked By COVID, which are trying to offer a collective response that is more responsible than shouting “FREEDOM” and demanding an end to vaccine and mask mandates, are dealing with a lot of institutional inertia. As Kristin said, “to go about making professional contacts, whether that’s with well-established organizations or with funders in the funding universe is just a total nightmare.”

Sadly, progressive funders and philanthropists have yet to wrap their heads around today’s reality. She told me:

…there are four things that I get quite often on this front. One is “Oh, my God, you’re amazing, you’ve done so much with so little.” And then the next three things I get are first, “Covid is over, we’re not going to have to worry about this.” It’s been a little less so in the last month, not to say that I’m excited about this [Omicron] surge. (I’m currently getting over Covid myself, which is why I have a scratchy throat. And I have no idea how I caught it, because I’m like a hermit in this room all day.) The other two kind of things are, well, “This is mission creep — we’re already at capacity.” And then the last one, which is “This isn’t in our strategic plan.”

So for now, Marked By COVID is all-volunteer, with a small donor base that is just enough to keep it going.

Could things change? Maybe, especially now that we are watching how a rag-tag army of rural populists who got a few hundred truckers and conspiracy theorists to occupy downtown squares can hijack a whole country’s national conversation and cause a few billion dollars worth of economic damage for the equivalent of a temper tantrum over masks and needles. (Paul Krugman rightly calls this “economic vandalism,” calling out Republican leaders who have voiced support for the Canadian movement for backing the destruction of jobs and businesses.) Politics abhors a vacuum, and if people on the center-left fail to offer meaningful channels for the frustration millions feel about life during Covid, these rightwing populist formations will continue to fester and grow.

But unlike the “freedom convoy” fans, who already share a common, aggrieved and highly visible and easily communicated identity, being marked by Covid alone isn’t much of a shared identity. I sat in on one of Kristin’s weekly Zoom calls with Marked By COVID activists around the country and noticed several things. First, that it’s a diverse group: Black, brown, white, young, old, queer, straight—Covid has cut across many communities. Second, that it’s a pretty new-to-politics group, which is great because people who haven’t been active politically are often the hardest workers. But this is also a challenge, as the job of absorbing new people—which Kristin did ably during this Zoom—always requires time and patience.

Lastly, I noticed that it’s hard to build communal intensity in virtual settings alone. Kristin and I talked about this a fair amount, and she made several cogent points about how being on text threads and Zoom sessions together had fostered real relationships among Marked By COVID activists. She also noted that for many with long-term health challenges, being able to join meetings from the safety of home was invaluable. I respect those points. But until we can literally see and feel each other’s pain, I don’t think a collective response to Covid like the one Kristin is seeking will gain enough traction. There’s no room like the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Greenwich Village, where weekly community meetings were the crucible for the formation of ACT-UP.

The hardest challenge for groups like Marked By COVID is the inevitable danger of burnout. Organizing for change around a shared trauma is inherently exhausting, and while mass death can spark mass action, the numbness or apathy that many appear to display toward the issue can be deeply dispiriting. If some Marked By COVID activists decide that they, too, need to “get on with their lives” it would be understandable.

I don’t know when it will be safe for everyone to actually get on with their lives, whatever that is supposed to mean. But I do think it’s high time for progressives to at least shift from all-virtual to hybrid meetings that invite physical participation by people who are vaccinated and comfortable meeting face-to-face, along with accommodations for people who want to stay home. In the same way that Democrats who gave up on door-to-door canvassing in 2020 probably also ceded vital ground to Republican foot soldiers, groups that organize in their communities are literally losing touch with their members and constituents now. It’s time to get back together. In rooms. With each other.

—Related: Speaking of the importance of face-to-face organizing work, this article by Greg Jaffe in the Washington Post about how the Starbucks workers at a store in Buffalo were the first to unionize is an absolute must-read.

—Also related: ““I get frustrated with the Democrats’ lack of movement, to be quite transparent. I think the other side has an engine that is always moving. They have a playbook. They’re playing chess and we’re playing Go Fish or something.” That’s Revida Rahman, a mother of two who is the founder of a racial equity group in Brentwood, Tennessee and a new member of Red Wine and Blue, a post-2016 “resistance” group of more than 300,000 women. She’s quoted in a great piece by Annie Gowen in last week’s Washington Post on how Red Wine and Blue has broadened its focus to help its members confront address the culture war hitting school boards around the country. For more info, go to Red Wine and Blue’s new Book Ban Busters page.

—Speaking of Democrats being stuck in an old playbook, there’s a reason for that: it’s a great business model for campaign consultants. Michael Sokolove has an absolutely damning portrait in The New Republic of how that all works focused on the ill-fated 2020 campaign of Amy McGrath against Senator Mitch McConnell. Even after the McGrath campaign knew that it had more than enough money to run a robust campaign, and that their internal polls show that the contest was hopeless, they kept sending out emails claiming it was “tightening” and begging donors for more money. Yet one more reason for Democratic donors to stop lighting their money on fire!

—Semi-related: When you are heavily reliant on digital networks to organize, you are also more vulnerable to disruption. That’s one lesson to take from the efforts of anti-convoy activists, who successful infiltrated one of the “freedom convoy” movement’s Zello channels and then trolled them quite effectively on Twitter last night, as EJ Dickson reports for Rolling Stone.  

Fascism Watch

—School board members are enduring a rash of death threats and other abuse related to controversies over Covid policies, bathrooms for transgender students and the teaching of America’s racial history, Barbiella Borter, Joseph Ax and Joseph Tanfani report for Reuters. Chris Valentine until recently the school board president in Dublin, Ohio, said, “It’s easily been the most difficult year-and-a-half of my life.”

—Legislation is moving forward in Florida that would prevent classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels, which opponents have labeled the “don’t say gay” bill. The state’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, who is angling to run for President, has endorsed the bill.

—Thursday night in Castle Rock, Colorado, a group of 2020 election deniers met in a church to hear speakers like John Eastman, who authored legal memos that tried to justify decertifying the results, during which one attendee accused Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold of election fraud, saying “you deserve to hang.” Applause filled the room. David French of The Dispatch has more on the evangelical churches that have been hosting the “ReAwaken America” tour here.

—Emma Jackson’s piece for The Breach on “What the Left can learn from the ‘Freedom Convoy’” sums things up pretty well. A lot of young people in Canada (and by extension here and elsewhere) are up for grabs politically.

Odds and Ends

—The indefatigable Lorelei Kelly reports for the Beeck Center on the successful effort of one group of civic techies at Code for Boston partnered with Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA)’s congressional district staff to build the Windfall Awareness app, to help Social Security recipients manage the confusing process of understanding how their benefits might be affected by a technically confusing amendment to the system.

—Amnesty International has crowdsourced a map of where the New York City police have facial surveillance cameras placed, and no surprise, it disproportionately targets non-white residents.

—Here’s a very deep dive by David Rosenthal, a veteran technologist, into why cryptocurrency is a terrible idea. The very quick summary: the only way for cryptocurrency to work is for it to make stealing more expensive than its worth, which is why building crypto networks are so resource exhaustive. But that in turn drives crypto miners towards centralization, the very thing they claim they want to prevent.

Deep Thoughts

—“Imagine that during the civil-rights movement you had the SCLC, you had the NAACP, you had the Urban League — and imagine some group just called themselves Civil Rights Movement, Inc.” That’s Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University and the executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, talking about the simmering tensions between the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and local Black Lives Matter activists, the subject of an in-depth report by Sean Campbell in New York magazine. Campbell details a confusing swirl of organizational vehicles, all with BLM in their name and some money in their pockets, and a lot of frustration among local activists who feel they haven’t gotten their share of the tens of millions that have flowed, especially since June 2020, toward the movement.

—In a similar vein, Ernest Owens reports for New York on how Campaign Zero, a police reform group formed by four activists that came together in the wake of the Ferguson protests, DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie, Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Samuel Sinyangwe, fell apart as the four feuded over recognition and control. Live by the speed of social networking, die by the failure to build strong bonds of trust, I say.