Hi,  As a teen growing up in Kansas, queer youth organizing meetings were the highlight of my month if not my year. This was when a bunch of queers carpooled to Kansas City to eat Oreos and talk about television.  We may not have gotten any organizing done, but the fact that we were all in a room together, and could AIM chat in between, meant that we were doing something. We were working together, even if we weren’t sure what our goal was.   When I worked at a national LGBTQIA organizing group, I remember another organizer struggling to articulate the value of this in his campaign --- the value of getting people in a room together.   I also lacked the words to describe why it mattered, and when (because not every group of people is one that transforms society just by existing in the same space, you know?)   I think part of this is because you get the chance to see people -- and be seen yourself. You can be vulnerable in that space. It doesn't have to be a literal room -- it's any gathering.   --  The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin is such a powerful book because of what Melissa Harris Perry calls "The People v. the people".   Or, if you’re fancy, Utopia v. utopia.   This is a quote from her I had above my desk for years:   "The People are good, and noble, and the revolution, but the people are difficult, annoying, and ugh."  So… what if you want to work with People but you have a hard time with people?   One answer to this is sort of rote, the adage “if you’re surrounded by assholes… it might be you.”  But let’s go deeper: the world is hard, and people, even well meaning ones, can get bogged down + not be their best selves.   We can have compassion for people who are being jerks, but it’s still important to recognize… sometimes people are jerks.   This is Shevek’s deal: he wants to make Urras, an anarchist society, a better place, to transform the universe through his physics research. But society… people… keep pushing back against him. He’s beset by bureaucracy (and famine), academia politics, and general apathy.   So, he ends up corresponding with physicists on a different planet, a capitalist one, ultimately travelling there to exchange ideas.   The problem is that the politics, the people, of capitalism, are… as you might imagine, just as confusing and a lot more lethal than the politics on Urras. So things get weird.   --  So when you come together, you get a chance to see + be seen. With the good and the bad.   People who do incredible things in collective are the same people who at the collective planning meeting repeatedly ask for Google Doc access when you already sent it to them twice, who can't stop talking because they're anxious.  So who do you value being in the same room with? why?    stay strong, h