A "Good" Org Is Hard To Find

An anonymous asker writes:

“I'm somewhat involved in my campus organizing but have a hard time finding and committing to orgs w the concern that I'm associating w smth bad (not OCD but anxiety along similar paths)- do you have advice on finding good orgs/ being more secure in yr beliefs?”

Hey anon,

In the five years I’ve been a DSA member, I’ve quit and rejoined two or three times (depends how you count).

The second time was a line struggle I lost; the third, just a strategic decision about where my time would be best spent. But the first time was a true ragequit. My chapter had made a decision about a local antifascist action that I strongly disagreed with, and that I believe put some of my comrades outside of the org at risk. (It turned out to be fine.)

Then a DSA-endorsed candidate accepted an endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police, and my chapter did nothing to discipline him. (This was less fine.)

I was furious. I was ashamed to be associated with them. But I was hopeful, because I was moving. And I knew New York had more, and better, socialist organizations than the DC suburbs had to offer.

My first month there, I joined a small nondenominational communist collective I’d heard of through friends. Their politics were completely aligned with mine; I knew they would never capitulate to the Democratic Party or embrace reactionary elements of the “left”.

I was also invited to join the DecrimNY coalition, a group of mostly-nonprofits working to decriminalize sex work in New York State. Because of the coalition model, I was expected to show up as a representative of a group. So I suggested to this communist collective that we vote to endorse the DecrimNY campaign.

The vote passed, but my fellow travelers were skeptical. Did we really want to align ourselves with the nonprofit industrial complex? With organizations that regularly endorsed Democrats, even worked with city officials? They agreed with me on the importance of the issue, but their principled anti-NGO stance was getting in the way.

Even more concerningly, I found I was contributing very little to the coalition. I could neither turn out numbers for canvasses nor recruit directly from the group(s) that made up our political base. So I did what I said I would never do again: I joined DSA. I pitched the coalition to their Socialist Feminist Working Group and hit the ground running.

This is all a long way of saying: I think “is this org good or bad?” is the wrong question. You can join an org that is completely ideologically correct, filled with all your favorite people; if the work you want to do can’t happen there, it’s still not the org for you. So the question becomes “what do you want to do?”.

This is a different question from “what is most important” or even “what is your strategy”. It’s a concrete, immediate issue of where you’re most willing to put your time. Depending on how long you stay with this org, you may be doing hundreds or thousands of hours of unpaid work with them. So—in my opinion—you have to be doing something you kind of love.

Concretely, I recommend looking at the orgs on/surrounding campus with an eye on activity. What does the org actually do? Write letters to prisoners, host reading groups, canvass for candidates? (I personally love a good meeting, but an org that only consists of internal meetings is probably less worth your time.)

Most of the orgs doing the work you want to do will be compromised in some way. I’ve found which kinds of compromises I can and can’t tolerate through time and experience. Some things I thought were dealbreakers turned out to be negotiable, and some new dealbreakers emerged that I never would have predicted. The only way to find out is by experimenting.

Similarly, the beliefs I’m most secure in these days are the ones I’ve struggled over. The ones where I’ve had intense, even upsetting debates with the people I care about, where I’ve synthesized their ideas with mine and tried to land somewhere new. Or where I’ve found the comrades who held my line and stuck to it, knowing we were in the minority. This process has involved a lot of being loudly wrong.

Avoid microsects with very rigid political stances or strict hierarchies. Hal Draper’s advice on this is good. And if I’m being completely honest? I think if there’s a YDSA chapter on your campus you can probably just join that. Someone will eventually do something that makes you angry or hurt, and then you get to decide how much of a dealbreaker it is. But don’t rule it out preemptively. DSA has a lot of failings, but I keep coming back to it for good reason.

If you want your advice questions answered, email me at noahzazanis (at) gmail.com! Or wait for the anon question box to roll around on Twitter again: @communoah, as always.

I’m Watching

Speaking of communist parties, I'm watching Fellow Travelers, an absolutely terrible show about “what if there was a gay McCarthy staffer, no not Roy Cohn, someone cute and sympathetic”. The writing is absolute fanfiction and the politics are abhorrent; I love it so much. My anticommunist woobies.

On My Mind

I've been doing some intermittent EMDR, the fashionable mind-body therapy advocated for in The Body Keeps the Score. EMDR made a big difference for me about a decade ago, when I was still experiencing flashbacks and visceral hypervigilance. It seems to be working now, insofar as it's brought up a lot of dormant emotions to the surface, and is making me confront some difficult things. As a patient and a human, I'm appreciative. But as a critical reader of psychiatric research, I'm not fully convinced of EMDR proponents’ claims.

The idea behind EMDR is that by engaging your brain in bilateral stimulation while talking or thinking through a traumatic memory, you're able to reprocess the memory in a more stable and less fragmented manner. The body memories settle into regular episodic memories.

This has been my experience with EMDR, but I don't know that the bilateral stimulation is the mechanism through which it's happening. EMDR has some other advantages to it: it's effectively self-stimulatory behavior (stimming), which could be helping me self-regulate in the moment and therefore feel the emotions more without dissociating. It's possible that regular prolonged exposure therapy (the typical gold-standard treatment for PTSD) with a squeeze ball or other stim toy could have similar effects.

But that brings me to the most well-documented benefit of EMDR: patient retention. Patients tend to drop out of prolonged exposure therapy: it's painful, can take a while, and tends to get worse before it gets better. EMDR patients are less likely to drop out of therapy, in part because EMDR requires less verbal rehashing of traumatic experiences. In theory, in EMDR, you can get better without “talking through it”.

Some versions of EMDR are very talk-heavy, walking the therapist through every step of your traumatic memory while you move your eyes side-to-side. Other versions allow you to play through the scene in your mind, only verbally informing the therapist of your feelings and bodily sensations as you reprocess. As far as I know, the research on EMDR has not yet differentiated between the efficacy of different forms of EMDR; they’re still working on comparison to therapy-as-usual.

I would love to see comparisons of EMDR to unilateral tapping, comparisons of neuroimaging models of EMDR and prolonged exposure, anything to delineate what the actual mechanism is at play! But in the meantime, I’ll keep doing my therapy. Whatever works.

Secret Third Thing

When I was younger and earlier in transition, I had a bunnysona. It was my profile pic on Twitter until I learned that people follow you back a lot more when you post face.

I feel like I've graduated from that fursona—not quite as twitchy or docile as I once was—but I haven't been sure what my new fursona would be. Thankfully, my friend Jesse (@slimmeroo on Twitter) decided for me, by drawing me a badger fursona. I think it works.