Practice corporeal politics

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my sister told me something that has stuck with me. She told me that she was saying “yes” to any and all opportunities to be social. It’s not that she was antisocial before—but she had recently amped it up. The reasons for this were personal and not political, but her resolution is similar to lesson 13 from On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder: “Practice corporeal politics.”

Snyder’s rationale is that getting together physically makes it harder for the government to divide and conquer. Snyder uses the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 80s as his historical example. Before Solidarity, it was apparently easy for the Polish government to play, say, the workers against the students. But in the late 70s, the various groups of Polish citizens—students, intellectuals, clergy, and trade unionists—got together in the streets and brought down a communist government. It wasn’t easy and took a long time between the foundation of Solidarity and its victory over tyranny. They suffered under of martial law starting in 1981, but out in the street they placed their bodies against the state. Given that Trump has fantasized about shooting protesters, this is not a trivial lesson.

This lesson is a pair with the previous lesson: “Make eye contact and small talk.” These are two hard lessons for me to enact personally because of my shyness and solitary nature. But my sister’s radical openess to saying “yes” has inspired me to make the effort. We will need a new Solidarity, and that takes a very diverse mass of citizens to say “yes.”

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