General Strikes 102 - Pizza can Save the World

Hey all! It's one of those weeks where the outside world got noticeably worse again, so this week's newsletter is going to be pretty organizing-heavy. But first, a couple of pieces of Montague Commoners news:

Artisan Market

We got word this week that our application for the 2026 Artisan Market was accepted! That means I'm no longer jinxing things by planning out retail displays and activities 😂

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be setting up our cabin, making some new signage, and putting together project boxes. We've got some really exciting ideas for this year, and I look forward to sharing them in more detail.

Hour Tokens

The nice weather yesterday gave me a chance to get the rest of the Hour tokens sanded, so we now have blanks available in 1 Hour, 30 Minutes, and 15 Minutes denominations. I'll be bringing these to the Adult Open Studio times at the Art Center, and they'll be available for pickup at the Artisan Market once we have regular hours there. If you want to get started straight away and you can't make it to the Art Center, let me know which denomination you want and what your address is, and Nate can drop some off when he's doing his Saturday errands.

The Useful Stuff page is finally up!

Have you lost track of all of the different stuff you can recycle through Montague Commoners? So have I! 😂 But I typed up what I can remember, and you can find it here. Click on each item on the list for more details. We'll be accepting all of those items at the Artisan Market this summer, so it's a good time to start saving them up.

So what does pizza have to do with general strikes?

When my parents lived in Pittsburgh, the block they lived on had a weekly pizza party. Hosting duties rotated between houses, everybody chipped in $20, and nobody had to cook or do dishes. It was the best-connected neighborhood I've ever experienced, and exactly the sort of neighborhood that most people wish they lived in.

Getting that sort of thing going can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. Start with your friendliest neighbor, and see if they'd be up for it. Maybe on your block, a potluck makes more sense than pizza. Maybe it's a cheese-and-crackers movie night. Find something that you and your friendliest neighbor can agree on, and then see if they can reach out to the rest of the neighborhood. If the first one goes well, make a plan for the next one before everybody leaves.

OK, but where does the general strike come in?

A true general strike is quite difficult to pull off. But, as I talked about in a previous newsletter, they can be incredibly powerful, and we may get to the point where it's the last tool left that can stop a civil war.

The key to a successful general strike is solidarity. At it's core, it's a simple concept. But like all the best fractals, it can be used to build something infinitely more complex. Solidarity is the idea that we are all in this together, and we have each other's backs. It's a natural human instinct, because it's been a core human survival strategy for millions of years. Unfortunately, we live in a media environment that does its best to break down the trust that solidarity depends on.

Rebuilding that trust takes time and patience. Weekly neighborhood gatherings give people a chance to build kinship with each other. Plus, time spent at neighborhood pizza parties is time not spent plugged into algorithmic propaganda.

If you can organize weekly pizza nights for sixth months, you can organize a general strike.

A general strike on a national scale is a really big job. But we don't have to act on a national scale to be effective. On a neighborhood scale, a general strike becomes a series of logistical questions:

• How do we make sure everyone stays fed?
• How do we make sure no one gets evicted?
• How do we take care of the kids if the schools are closed?
• How do we take care of people's medical needs?

If you ask these questions to a group of strangers, these questions are going to seem daunting and overwhelming.

If you ask these questions in a group of people who've gotten to know each other over sixth months of weekly gatherings, the questions get much easier to answer. Everybody knows who on the block is a nurse, or grows a veggie garden. I'd be willing to bet that most blocks in Montague still have someone who grew up on stories of rural foreclosure resistance during the Great Depression. The solutions are going to look different for every neighborhood, and only the people in that neighborhood are going to know the right answer for them.

Solidarity needs to be built a brick at a time, through shared meals, shared stories, and shared resources. The sooner we start building it, the stronger it will be.

A quick note about food and accessibility

I'm going to make a confession that's probably going to sound weird at this point in my pitch for weekly neighborhood pizza parties: I can't eat pizza. I'm autistic, and I have a lot of texture issues around food. And after a lifetime of awkwardness in communal food settings, they kind of freak me out 😅

There are a lot of reasons that people might not be able to eat what everyone else is eating, and it's important to make space for that. Nate and I try to solve that problem by bringing a dish that I can eat, with enough to share, but that's not always possible. So if someone brings food from home, assume they've got their reasons, and try not to single them out for it.

Recommendation Corner

Holding Change by adrienne maree brown is one of my top recommendations for folks who are new to organizing work. It does a good job of breaking down some of the problems that tend to come up when groups of people try to tackle difficult problems together, and provides concrete tools for overcoming those problems. It's a quick read, and I've got a couple of spare copies to lend out.

This Week's Nails!

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I started out looking through my collection for gentle colors, and ended up going for a pastel Pride flag. It's been a pretty rough week for trans folks, from Kansas revoking people's drivers licenses and letting people sue us if they catch us using the "wrong" bathroom to being targeted by Trump in the State of the Union. It's easy for it to get lost among the 1001 other ways the world is getting f—ed up right now, but check in on your trans friends and family, and don't vote for a--holes. If we end up with a law like that in Michigan, I'm going to have to ask some really awkward questions at City Council. I don't think anyone wants me in the women's room, and as far as I know the only gender neutral restrooms in town are at North Grove. There's only so much bread pudding a body can take 😂