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Sharing the harvest

Sharing the harvest

Thanks to everyone who came out to the pancake celebration yesterday! It was great to see so many of the folks who contributed to making the sugarbush happen get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. One of our core principles with Montague Commoners is "share the labor, share the harvest" and I think yesterday was a great example of what that looks like in practice. We also got 6 new email addresses for this newsletter, so welcome new folks!

IMPORTANT: VOLUNTEER(S) NEEDED

We're going to be doing a biochar demonstration this Saturday at the Oceana county Earth Day celebration in Hart, and we need help getting our equipment and firewood up there on Saturday morning. Nate's car isn't big enough to bring everything at once, and it's far enough away that it's hard to make multiple trips. So if you've got a truck, trailer, minivan, or other large vehicle, and you'd be willing to drive a biochar stove, some kindling bundles, and some buckets up to Hart at 8am on Saturday, please email me at wiley@montaguecommoners.org ASAP.

A patch of five violet blooms

Last week in the Commons

Cleanup at the campground and preparation for the pancake celebration was the main focus this week, as we moved all our equipment and supplies back home to wait until next year's sugarbush. We made about a hundred bags of biochar this year, and pedaling them up the Hunt St. hill is proving quite the workout. We've still got a day or two of moving stuff to go, but it's nice to feel so close to done.

The celebration itself was lots of fun, with people of all ages and levels of experience. In addition to the pancakes, we had an origami fish folding station to help the Wisconsin Sierra Club break a record and raise awareness of Line 5. We made 36 fish in a variety of styles and colors. We grabbed the wrong bucket of pancake mix on the way out the door, so we had regular wheat pancakes instead of acorn ones, but they still received rave reviews.

The only detractors we faced yesterday were a pair of robins who thought they'd found a perfect spot for a nest on top of the one remaining woodpile, and were very disconcerted to have a bunch of giant monkeys show up and ruin the vibe. After we were finished with cleanup we did our best to gently move the nest to a table where they might be able to raise their eggs without getting disturbed when we move the woodpile. Nate's pretty sure that the nest wasn't there on Friday when he was moving the firebricks, so hopefully if they don't like their new table-based digs, they've still got time to build something new in a spot where the giant monkeys won't bother them. Either way, it was great to be able to watch them at work, and I was very impressed by their nest-building abilities.

If you helped out at the sugarbush this year, but you weren't able to pick up your syrup on Saturday, don't despair. I'll be in touch over the next couple of weeks and we can figure out a way to get it to you. If you're within biking distance of downtown Montague, I'm happy to drop it off for you, and if not we can arrange a pickup.

A paper towel with a pile of approximately 40 shiitake mushrooms on it

Also this week, we got our first shiitake mushrooms of the year out at Treespeaker. These were from a batch of oak logs that we inoculated with shiitake spawn using a drill-and-fill method a couple of years ago. Mushroom logs are one of my favorite agroforestry crops, because once they're inoculated they'll produce mushrooms for up to a decade with no additional work. Two years ago, we set up a large number of mushroom totem logs, and I'll be interested to see if we start getting results from that this year. We try to do at least a few logs every year, and eventually we hope to have a whole trail through Treespeaker lined with mushroom logs.

Dance for Democracy on Friday went well, with a turnout of around 35 people. We had a perfectly timed gap between thunderstorms and got to protest in beautiful weather before the storms came back in the afternoon. Several folks had used last week's songbooks to start learning the lyrics to the songs in our playlist, and we had a great time singing along.

Coming Up Next Week

In the Broader Movement

While we were eating pancakes on Saturday, millions of people across the country marched against the growing authoritarianism of the Trump administration. In Grand Rapids, they combined protesting with a litter cleanup day and got two things done at once. In Lansing, hundreds of people turned out for a rally. Now that it's becoming clearer that the regime is using its crackdown on "immigration" to go after innocent people and US citizens, even conservative opinion writers like David Brooks and Bill Kristol are acknowledging the need for mass protests and civil disobedience. It sucks that we've gotten this far down the road to fascism, but it's nice to see a popular front forming to oppose Trump's power grabs. To quote one of the songs we sing every Friday:

"I'm going to tell you fascists, sure might be surprised, but there's people in this world, and we're getting organized. You bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose."

Solidarity Steps

Usually I use this slot to tell you about a community that could use a little solidarity and an action you can take to help out. But this week, I have to tell you about the funniest strange-bedfellows solidarity story I have heard in a very long time.

A screenshot of a BlueSky post from user @anklemoss.bsky.social. It reads: "All of us who are #ActuallyAutistic should be able to cite RFK Jr. next time we're asked to fill out tax paperwork. "Sorry, can't do that. The Health Secretary says autistic people can't pay taxes. I know, I was as surprised as you are, but I don't make the rules..."

So, many of you have probably heard about RFK Jr.'s recent comments about Autistic people and how we can't pay taxes or go on dates, and how autism is a horrible epidemic that needs to be stopped. It wasn't surprising, because RFK Jr. has been saying horrible things about Autistic people for more than 20 years, often on national television with little or no blowback from anyone outside the Autistic community. What was surprising was the alliance that formed in the aftermath.

First, you're going to need a little background. Back in 2004, when I was first diagnosed with Asperger's in college, there were two big national organizations that focused on autism: the Autism Society of America, which was mostly based around local chapters that helped parents of autistic kids meet each other and find local autism service providers, and Cure Autism Now, which raised money for research into the causes of autism with the express purpose of eliminating it. The ASA chapters were largely funded by the members themselves, and mostly ran on shoestring budgets and people's bosses not minding if they used the office photocopier. Cure Autism Now, on the other hand, was founded by a wealthy NBC executive after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. Not only was he able to throw lavish fundraisers and attract money from philanthropists, he was able recruit celebrities to parrot their talking points, push autism-as-nightmare storylines into NBC shows, and ensure that CAN's events received media coverage from NBC news.

For a more personal example of the difference between the two groups, I used to go to ASA chapter meetings all over the greater Chicago area. The parents there really liked hearing from Autistic adults, because they could ask us questions that their kids couldn't answer, and we could offer them insights into why their kids might be acting out in certain situations, or strategies that had worked for us in solving certain problems. When I tried to go to the Chicago chapter of CAN, on the other hand, they literally had hotel security escort me from the building, because "We don't want your kind of people coming in and confusing our parents."

So as you might be able to imagine, the relationship between CAN and the adult Autistic community was extremely bad. Autistics being who we are, we spent years trying to explain to CAN and their supporters why the narratives they were pushing about autism were hurting the very people they claimed to care about. And then, Autistics being who we are, we got super mad about it. We started protesting CAN fundraising events, and contacting corporate foundations that were giving money to CAN. I and one other Autistic friend personally picketed a two-thousand-person CAN "Walk for the Cure" event in Chicago and got slapped by multiple plastic water bottles for our trouble. (Protip: thousand-to-one odds make for an extremely harrowing protesting experience and are not recommended.)

Eventually, the Autistic community decided that we needed an organization of our own, to act as a counterweight to CAN's political and media dominance. This led to the founding of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, or ASAN. It never had anything close to the kind of funding that CAN did, because the Autistic community has disproportionately high rates of unemployment and poverty, but we all did our best to chip in $20 when we could, and eventually as more Autistic people were able to find jobs in tech (and more programmers started realizing they were Autistic), ASAN was able to grow into a small but financially stable nonprofit.

Time passed. Attitudes shifted. CAN got enough bad press from their fights with the Autistic community that they merged with several other organizations and changed their name to Autism Speaks, though it took them until 2016 to drop the word "cure" from their mission statement. Autistic women and people of color at ASAN started speaking out about how they'd been treated by the white Autistic men who controlled most of the leadership positions. Very messy but necessary drama ensued.

For those who aren't familiar with the phenomenon of Autistic "injustice intolerance", the best way I can explain it is by comparing us to beavers. Beavers build dams to block streams and create lakes, which then allow them to build dens in those lakes with underwater entrances that most predators can't reach. One of the instincts that helps them do that is a hatred for the sound of running water. When they hear the sound of fast-moving water (which would indicate a leak in or threat to their dam) they immediately try to slow it down with branches, mud, or anything they can get their paws on. Scientists (who can be real jerks sometimes) have done experiments where they used speakers to play running water sounds at beavers in the absence of any leaks in the dams, and when the beavers couldn't find a way to stop the noise, they were often willing to abandon established dens in order to get away from it.

Autistics with injustice intolerance are basically beavers for unfairness. When we see unfairness happening, we have an immediate, overwhelming need to make it stop. Unfortunately for us, very few of the injustices of modern life can be eliminated by covering them with sticks and mud. (Not that there aren't days when I'm tempted to try.) It's a big part of why so many of us end up in the organizing and activism world. We can't just sit by and let injustice happen any more than a beaver could relax next to a burbling brook. And just like beavers are crucial for minimizing soil erosion and maintaining healthy water tables in the natural ecosystem, Autistic injustice intolerance has an important role to play in a healthy social ecosystem. We're the ones who will point out the unfairness that no one else wants to talk about, and work our asses off to get it fixed.

But just like beavers can be driven nuts by a recorded stream that doesn't actually exist, injustice intolerance can be triggered by situations that feel unfair but actually aren't. In the case of the white men leading ASAN, they felt like they were being unfairly targeted for their race and gender, when in reality they were being told about the ways that their behavior had hurt the people they worked with. The injustice intolerance they felt at the feedback ran smack into the injustice intolerance felt by women and people of color who had been suffering in silence for years. Fireworks ensued, and when the dust cleared there were two new Autistic orgs: the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network, and the Autistic People of Color Fund.

So why have I spent 1000+ words telling you this whole story? Because this week, in response to RFK Jr.'s asinine comments about autism, the autism community issued a joint statement condemning the misinformation he promoted, and Autism Speaks, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network, and the Autistic People of Color Fund all signed on. If you'd have asked me a year ago, I would have said that you couldn't get all four of those organizations to sign onto a joint statement saying that water was wet. But we are living in the weirdest timeline, where David Brooks quotes the Communist Manifesto, and Autism Speaks and ASAN can talk to each other without spontaneously combusting. So maybe a popular front really is possible. Maybe we really can come together to beat the fascists. Or at the very least, cover RFK Jr. with sticks and mud until he stops making that annoying noise 😆

Recommendation Corner

If you liked that glimpse into the history of the Autistic Rights movement, you might like We're Not Broken by Eric Michael Garcia. Garcia is an Autistic journalist who has been active in the community for a long time, and the perspective he brings is a valuable one.

You might also like Stories of Autistic Joy by Laura Kate Dale (and others). It's a collection of stories about all the parts of autism that don't make it into the mainstream autism narratives, and that Autistic people wouldn't trade for anything in the world.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter! Extra bonus points this week, it was a long one 😂 With this week's nails, I've officially swatched all of the nail polishes in the display shelves in my room. Technically, I have another ~200 polishes in boxes in my closet, but we're all just going to pretend that we don't know that. I'm looking forward to getting back to playing with color in a more deliberate way, and playing around with more elaborate nail art for a while. I do want to swatch the closet-box polishes eventually, but it's not like there's a deadline.