36. Where we go from here with guest Darcy Totten

[00:00:00] Darcy Totten: Every crisis is an opportunity. And when things totally fall apart, there's a moment in which you can completely reimagine how things are done, how you've always done it is no longer working. So now you get to do it totally differently.

[00:00:14] Kristina Bas Hamilton: let's all take a deep breath, shall we? We have 21 days left until election day, November 5th, 2024, which makes this a perfect time to share with you my compelling conversation with guest Darcy Totten, recorded some time back and finally ready to publish. Darcy is a leading voice on the rights of women and girls in our great state and a member and longtime advocate for the LGBTQ community.

[00:00:51] Like me, Darcy came up a Gen X activist, which really just means that we've seen some things and we have some thoughts. And in today's episode, we get real about these unsettling times that we're living through politically, socially, emotionally, and the very real crossroads in which America stands between two very different futures.

[00:01:13] We live in our very own upside down. Where different parts of the state, the country, even our own towns live and see very different realities. Darcy and I get real about the weight of this historic moment. And then we go beyond that and recognize the light that shines at the end of the tunnel.

[00:01:33] You know that cliche, in crisis there's opportunity? Well, maybe, just maybe, that's exactly where we're at, and if that's the case, then what do we do now?

[00:01:44] Pull out your chair, plug in those earbuds. I'm your host, Kristina Bas Hamilton, and it's time for another episode of the blueprint for California advocates podcast.

[00:01:54] welcome Darcy Totten. I'm so pleased to have you here to talk with me today. You are one of my Twitter friends that then became an in real life friend, which I love.

[00:02:06] We had a conversation a while back that has stuck in my head and I thought this is a topic I really have been wanting to talk about on the podcast.

[00:02:14] And so I'm so happy you agreed to come on.

[00:02:17] Darcy Totten: Thank you for having me. Hi everybody. My background is in crisis management and some grassroots organizing. I ran a crisis communications firm for a while called activism articulated I am also a pretty dedicated volunteer, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule these days, and I'm particularly interested in supporting the LGBTQ community of which I am a member. I'm on the board of the local community center. We're one of the largest in the country.

[00:02:46] Kristina Bas Hamilton: I'll start with rehashing the conversation that we had. We've got instability on so many levels politically. We have people in our federal and state and local governments who I would say are full on fascist ideologues, who believe in really scary and terrible things, and they have come to power over the last five years in a way that scares the shit outta me.

[00:03:13] I know from speaking with a lot of my colleagues and just people in general, there's just this uneasiness, there's this feeling that we are not right and that things are not going well. And you know, for those of us who know a bit about history is definitely like sounding all sorts of red flags for how things go really freaking bad in other places.

[00:03:36] So I want to speak to the conversation where I was sort of lamenting and we were I guess trying to make each other feel better about what the state of affairs

[00:03:45] And you said something that, that really rocked my world cuz I kept thinking about it . I think I said to you, how do we get past this? What do we do? How do we fix this? And the answer you said is community. And it sounded so simple that I immediately was like, Okay. Like, love, right?

[00:04:00] Like love is the answer. Like, what does that mean? ? Um, And I wanna go back there because it has not left me because I, I, it like keeps hitting me how profound that is and how we need to invest in community building. So I'll stop there and, and open the door because I'd love for you to share your sort of background thoughts on why you got there.

[00:04:22] Darcy Totten: I wanna start just baseline with every marginalized community. I, in my experience has been through whatever circumstances forced to survive in this way. Yes, the queer community has, has relied on itself to maintain safety in a world that has explicitly challenged that safety over and over.

[00:04:45] This is true for communities of color. This is true for disabled people. This is true for any number of folks who have found themselves in a position where the sort of over culture in America has explicitly attacked that group of people that this is sort of the starting point for surviving, surviving that.

[00:05:07] And through that process, a lot of these communities have actually transcended survival and are thriving and have built big, beautiful, incredible parallel systems. And it is something that we know about ourselves and I think is now time that we start figuring out how to. Push into the dominant culture as a tool for us to actually build something sustainable in this cultural moment that we're in.

[00:05:33] I think that one of the things we're seeing, you mentioned Twitter earlier, that one of the things we're seeing is the this cost of digital connection that social media brought us was also. Sort of deep segmentation, the ability to use digital communications tools to divide people on purpose, which folks have done for years now, but also the the sort of fundamental lack of a shared reality, which is one of the I'm not gonna say it's a, like, it's a necessary ingredient, but it seems to be part of the soup from which most fascist movements have grown out of historically is a, is a lack of a shared understanding of being in it together.

[00:06:15] There's a sense that there's an us and there's a them, and the them are the problem. And if we could get rid of the them, everything would be better. That's right. And unfortunately, one of the things that the factionalization of the last 5, 6, 7, 10 years maybe has done. Is that sort of everybody in one place or another feels that way.

[00:06:36] That is not just a sort of rising fascist thing on the right wing. Yes. Right. We see that on the left too.

[00:06:42] Kristina Bas Hamilton: The essence of us versus them is fear. And it's for some horrible reason, really easy to make people afraid.

[00:06:51] It's much easier to demonize a community you've not been exposed to that you don't think you know anybody who's a member and that you believe what's told to you about it.

[00:07:00] Especially if it's repeated a thousand million times. Actually, I feel like I just read this article over the weekend about the power of repetition, just repeating messages over and over comes

[00:07:11] Darcy Totten: 1 0 1

[00:07:13] Kristina Bas Hamilton: so if you have a fascist extremist right wing movement that is really knowledgeable on how to do that, right, like if you listen to Donald Trump,

[00:07:22] I would say mostly upper class white liberal folks is this, he's so dumb, he's so stupid. And I would in my head be like, well, if he's so stupid, he's the president right now.

[00:07:36] Right? Like, who's stupid here?

[00:07:37] Darcy Totten: You're hitting on a thing. that I thought as soon as you said the said, what you said about fear, right? Fear is one of those issues. So like any, any family therapist, right, like marriage and family therapists write articles like this all the time that, you know, when they see a couple, the one sort of.

[00:07:59] Thing that tells them that that couple is headed for divorce is not any number of things that you would expect it to be. It's when two people are have contempt for each other.

[00:08:09] Hmm.

[00:08:09] Darcy Totten: And I, and I feel like it's really important to add the contempt factor here on a massive scale. Fear is a tool being used by some of these people.

[00:08:17] But so is contempt, so is making fun of people. Right. Or so is calling them names and inventing terrible nicknames for them all of that is contemptuous.

[00:08:30] Kristina Bas Hamilton: Right, right. And easy to dismiss. But in this case I was like, but, but he's, he's clearly not that stupid.

[00:08:37] He is a master communicator and prop. and he understood and maybe taught the rest of them or, or I don't know, but the power of repetition and just saying the same shit over and over again. Same even words, . Right? And you know, this, this, so then you're demonizing and you've created an us versus them in, in worlds in which there's not a lot of exposure to other people.

[00:09:05] Going back to social media becomes like, almost like social media is just sort of this tool that just the express lane to get us to division. That we're at, right?

[00:09:14] Darcy Totten: I mean, we were already on that lane with like infotainment as a business Right.

[00:09:19] For through the end of the eighties and through the nineties, cable TV news filled that role. It just kind of got fast tracked with these platforms that let regular people participate in that. Yeah. Using what they had internalized from watching it on tv.

[00:09:36] Right.

[00:09:36] Darcy Totten: And I I go back and forth on this because I think that it's also the most powerful communications tool we've had ever.

[00:09:45] And that's not all bad, right. These platforms have brought us the ability to democratize communication and information in a way that. Never possible before.

[00:09:57] Yeah. And in so doing, have highlighted why we had, you know, editors and press codes of ethics and a sense of expertise and also all the ways in which those things failed us before too. So I, I do think that there's maybe gotta be a much bigger reckoning this is like the grossest but truest phrase around crisis management, right?

[00:10:19] Which is that every crisis is an opportunity. Mm-hmm. . And particularly that when things totally fall apart, there's a moment in which you can completely reimagine how things are done. How you've always done it is no longer working. So now you get to do it totally differently.

[00:10:35] I, I keep kicking around the idea of how would you make a company a private company like Twitter, a public good, which it clearly is, how do you, you know, give it to the corporation for public broadcasting and give it to the world? Right? And the problem is really that we don't think that way, right? We don't understand multi-billion dollar businesses as things you.

[00:10:57] Give to people it's inconceivable. Yeah. Right. I don't imagine that the, whatever handful of billionaire men who own the world's communication systems Right. Are going to be easily convinced that it's to their benefit and everyone's benefit.

[00:11:14] Right.

[00:11:15] Darcy Totten: To give it to the people.

[00:11:16] We have to give people the ability to communicate with each other without being subject to the whims of a private owner.

[00:11:27] Kristina Bas Hamilton: So I sent you this article that I'm gonna reference in the show notes cause I think it's a great segue. So this article is called The Super Rich Preppers Planning to Save Themselves From the Apocalypse. It was published in The Guardian and it is written by Douglas Rushk.

[00:11:44] The point of the article was that he had been hired by these billionaires to come and, you know, talk to them about this like bunker they were building for the apocalypse, which on its face is laughable. He talks about the absurdity of what they were trying to do, but that this is actually common in billionaire land

[00:12:03] Darcy Totten: I love this article because this was the clearest, cleanest map for why that approach doesn't work, right?

[00:12:11] He gets brought into the top secret out in the middle of nowhere, conference room to walk these guys through their questions and their questions within an hour. You know, he, he's describing that they all go straight to, how do I keep security forces loyal to me because I know that security will be my greatest challenge.

[00:12:33] And their suggestions we'll just say the range is deeply disturbing and one apparently included something along the lines of electro shock. Collars on their guards, crazy. So some of this is like the stuff

[00:12:46] Kristina Bas Hamilton: you read in, these, in these kind of books in like

[00:12:48] Darcy Totten: a seriously dystopian novel.

[00:12:50] It's, they all have little mad max vibe, right? But, but that's what falls apart, right at, at some point that individualist concept, this me against the world thing that I will protect me and mine by any means necessary, will require forced subjugation of other people. There's no way around it. Without community, that is where you land.

[00:13:14] It is the thing that America as a country has got to really look at itself about this idea. It's us versus them. It's me versus you. Sooner or later, no matter what your logic train lands you in some place where one person has to exert power over other people to force them to go along with their version of how they want it to be.

[00:13:39] Kristina Bas Hamilton: So then w how do you not do that ? Well, I mean it's sort of what he suggests and they, the article is great cuz it sort of explains that they can't wrap their heads around this concept. And his suggestion was, well if you're really, really nice to your security guys now, before the apocalypse, they'll be loyal to you later when there is one.

[00:14:00] Darcy Totten: And they just couldn't grasp that that might be true. That's kind of interesting for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it's an argument for why billionaires probably shouldn't be in charge of strategy for all of us, because in their very unique circumstance mm-hmm.

[00:14:13] You don't get to be the guy who owns almost everything by being friendly with people and assuming that they're gonna be nice to you. Right. That's a, there's what, like 800 of them total. Right? It's a small, probably very unfriendly world for them. Right? Like there's, there's a trade off to having all that money and stuff. You don't get community. Yeah. You can't trust anybody ever.

[00:14:39] Yeah.

[00:14:39] Darcy Totten: So they're gonna build strategies that reflect that worldview. Yes. Right. That aren't, that are about no trust and A sense of having to sort of take things by force and hold them by force.

[00:14:51] That's not who I want designing our survival strategy, public policy. Right.

[00:14:58] Sociologists and anthropologists have done an excellent job of articulating this for a long time. That in more communal based or organized society, the ability to count on your neighbors becomes a critical survival skill. And neighbor doesn't necessarily mean the person you live next door to.

[00:15:16] Right. It is perfectly acceptable to like, Hate the guy in the apartment above you who stomps around at four in the morning you don't have to be friends with people in your direct proximity. Although that's part of it, it's a good idea to have some of those.

[00:15:29] Right.

[00:15:29] Darcy Totten: But it's also just about having community.

[00:15:31] That's something queer people have always done. . That we have when isolated or alone before social media, we would flock to cities where we knew there were other people like us. We built thriving bars and nightclubs across the country so that people had a location to go where they could find the other ones of them.

[00:15:51] And that serves a lot of purposes, but safety is one of them. Building community is a, is a huge safety tool.

[00:15:57] Kristina Bas Hamilton: The man who wrote the article comes to the same conclusion that what these people are seeking. Is the, they're not, it's not capable for them to find it, because the only answer is community and these people that is not in their worldview.

[00:16:11] Right? And it's only in community building now that we create a world where there's not scarcity, desperation, people willing to do extremist things because their personal situation is so bad. And that in taking care of all of us as a whole, we ensure that we ourselves live in safe, healthy communities

[00:16:38] I wanna shift into the tactical, , what do folks do after they listen to this

[00:16:43] Darcy Totten: interview?

[00:16:44] The first thing to do in an untenable situation where we were talking to say, a bunch of billionaires who are convinced that the apocalypse is ny, and what that means is hordes of angry armed mobs trying to steal their stuff, which is actually not too far from reality.

[00:16:59] By the way, , well, maybe, right? Like the antidote to that is you don't accept their premise. That's their concept of what they think will happen based on a variety of things. Oh, okay. You just, you just, you just poked the pin in my balloon and I like that. Okay. . So don't accept the premise that that's what the apocalypse looks like.

[00:17:18] If to them, the apocalypse looks like a bunch of individual people out for themselves who are hungry and starving and in need of resources and going to steal from them.

[00:17:27] Maybe, or maybe you guys are like camped out in your bunker all alone and lonely with your, you know, electr shot collared security guards and the rest of us have a farm.

[00:17:36] We don't have to do it that way. There's no requirement that we devolve to desperate individualists that in fact, the evidence is better, that if we don't do that, we all stand a better chance of survival.

[00:17:51] Kristina Bas Hamilton: When I worked at the union, I would say this, um, when I had membership meetings, if you go to the Capitol and you just walk around you'll notice there's a bunch of lobbyists, and when you start finding out who these lobbyists represent, you realize that every industry really, every sort of powerful.

[00:18:10] Is organized together. You'll find that they form associations and they form groupings and coalitions. They don't call them coalitions, but power is also organized collectively for its own self-interest.

[00:18:26] And what makes unions radical And you know, to me, like a fundamental component of democratic society is that is how working people organize themselves.

[00:18:38] The concept is organizing yourself into a collective because the group will always be more powerful than the individual. And that concept of, you know, we as human beings have always formed into groups to protect ourselves, right? Like there was probably, you know, all sorts of security systems that, you know, early human beings created to protect themselves against predators or whatever.

[00:19:01] That's the essence of society. That's how society organizes itself.

[00:19:05] That goes along with what you're saying around the answer being the collective over the individual every time.

[00:19:12] Darcy Totten: So here's the next part. The Better collective is more diverse, right? Yes, yes. Bipartisan coalition is gonna have better luck than one side or the other. Ramming it through. This is true for your neighbors, your neighborhood, and who's in it. When I think about my neighborhood, I live in a really diverse neighborhood. I have there is.

[00:19:34] Gay couple, an old woman two dudes who's home is mostly abandoned, but who mow the lawn, like armed to the teeth with great regularity there's like, I don't know, many, many families on the other side of us sort of living in this really amazing fun house of kids.

[00:19:51] And then I'm two blocks from a park that is mostly unhoused people sleeping there. Hmm. So if you are living in this neighborhood as a queer person, the go-to is to make friends with the gay neighbors, which we've done. , but we've made friends with all of those people, including our unhoused neighbors in the park.

[00:20:11] So push comes to shove mm-hmm. when things go a little awry. Mm-hmm. , we are all on one team. Right. We've lost power for hours not that long ago. And, and you know, my wife's checking on the older woman next door and I'm checking on the kids and we're all making sure everybody was able to get what they needed.

[00:20:29] Kristina Bas Hamilton: I I love that you told me that before because I was thinking, so if the older woman next door who listens to Fox News all day long, who believes that L G B T Q people are you know, all the bad things. I'm not even gonna repeat the words. Right. All these bad things is actually now like, well they're not so bad.

[00:20:50] They checked on me during Well, and, and lemme

[00:20:53] Darcy Totten: be clear, I am married to a black, like non-binary person who is six feet tall and is often. Having to struggle with perceptions of themselves as being threatening. Mm-hmm. , but like, that's who went to check on them. . Right. The sweet old lady. Next. They're besties.

[00:21:12] Kristina Bas Hamilton: I love that.

[00:21:14] Darcy Totten: My partner's the only one who went to check on her. Like, that's the other thing, don't assume other people are taking care of that. Chances are they're not.

[00:21:22] Kristina Bas Hamilton: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:23] What I'm hearing from you is almost like, okay, so let's organize ourselves, but do it in 2.0, right?

[00:21:31] Like, not how it was done in the past , in terms of like, organize yourself with other people who look like you, .

[00:21:39] Darcy Totten: Or gonna organize yourself with people who are different from different you. That's, yes, that is, and that is the hardest thing, right?

[00:21:46] I don't wanna gloss over the fact that there are lots and lots and lots of like, complicated experiences that people have that make it very difficult for them to feel safe in really diverse communities. Right. Especially if they have been subjected to extreme marginalization and oppression.

[00:22:04] You know, one of the things we did badly in social media world was we relied on the concept of moderation so that people could sort of get to a certain part and then we'd cut them off, but they could be awful up to a certain point, and then we could be mad if people didn't cut them off or what, what have you?

[00:22:20] Kristina Bas Hamilton: So I wanna go back and, and just reiterate something I said earlier you've been saying, which is that marginalized communities have been living with fear and threat to their existence for centuries. People have been living this and have figured a lot of this out and we should learn from communities that have been at the forefront and uplift them and follow them. And I just wanna be real about that because like I feel like we pay lip service to that, but not necessarily really understand what the hell that even means.

[00:22:58] Darcy Totten: I think a lot of people don't understand how much of that is action oriented, right? Like I'm listening to as sort of maybe, right? Like people say that I'm never sure if that's totally accurate, right? Like if you're listening to the one member of a community that you know, you're not really listening to that community, you're listening to a person, right, who is a member of a community, right?

[00:23:22] Like you have to have. Degree of interaction with the community to be listening. Yeah. And in addition to listening, then there's a participation

[00:23:30] Kristina Bas Hamilton: component,

[00:23:31] Darcy Totten: right? Like Yeah. And it's an to the way a lot of people live. They sort of don't understand it. I'm trying to, so like lots and lots of people in my sort of bigger social network are deeply reliant on things like crowdfunding to manage basic life stuff.

[00:23:51] And that is for a variety of reasons that. Doesn't like vibe with everyone in the same way it does for me, right? Like they sort of don't understand the idea of mutual aid networks that rely on different people, sort of paying forward whatever they have at all times consistently.

[00:24:10] Mm.

[00:24:11] Darcy Totten: Mm-hmm that like, that's the part, right?

[00:24:13] You can't write your like annual Christmas check to whatever charity you support and be like, I do that.

[00:24:19] Right?

[00:24:19] Darcy Totten: Because it's not attached to an individual person that then knows you, that you know, that you like, develop a relationship with part of what solidifies those networks, right? Like there are people in the world that That I don't know personally that I've never met in person whose groceries I've paid for, or whose kids I've babysat and I've never met them.

[00:24:40] Right. Like just people who need things. Yeah. Who will ask for them and you show up. Yeah. And what happens is when you need things they show up. Right. That way of living was really common for queer people in the era I grew up in. What I keep hearing now actually from younger people that I know is that it's not common now.

[00:24:58] I wanna be really conscious of the fact that some of these are specific to an era or an age, and they're unique in that way, that like Right, right. Young queer people will have different survival skills than middle-aged ones, which are different from the, you know, gay men I know in their sixties and seventies and eighties.

[00:25:15] Kristina Bas Hamilton: For the person listening, do you have some advice suggestions on how they can start being action oriented towards building community?

[00:25:27] So I guess

[00:25:28] Darcy Totten: the first

[00:25:28] Kristina Bas Hamilton: thing

[00:25:29] Darcy Totten: is there's a mindset attached to individualism around money and earning your place somewhere and what someone sort of does and doesn't deserve that you just have to ditch. Community does not thrive with that mindset. That is

[00:25:43] Kristina Bas Hamilton: deep. That's hard for all of us because that is literally like the version of America, you know, bootstrap mentality that we all learn.

[00:25:51] And it doesn't work. Yeah. ,

[00:25:54] Darcy Totten: it just doesn't work. It is not, it is not a strong place to build thriving communities from Right. This Right. Safe communities or communities where people have what they need. If you are preoccupied with whether or not people deserve to have what they need, that's right. You're not gonna have safe communities.

[00:26:09] That's deep. Because to accept that even though you may philosophically understand that you had privilege and that you wound up where you wound up making a good living or having whatever that you had things that other people didn't have.

[00:26:25] Kristina Bas Hamilton: You may intellectually understand that, but you still internalize that. Like you still in the back of your head think it was because I was a good person or

[00:26:36] Darcy Totten: Well, but the thing is, that's all like two things can be true at the same time. You worked really hard. You are a good person.

[00:26:43] You earned your way to whatever, and you had a headstart. All can be true. , all of that is real. The hard part is this sort of reward punishment mentality, right? Yeah. Like, yes, you worked really hard and you got things and that person may have also worked really hard and not gotten the same things

[00:27:03] right.

[00:27:03] Darcy Totten: And they don't deserve that. Right. Like it's the deserve concept.

[00:27:08] Yes.

[00:27:08] Darcy Totten: I you know, I had a really unique life, set of life experiences that sort of make this, I think, a little easier for me to access. But also, you know, I just so I'm adopted and was adopted because my birth mother, who I am close to and who is in my life was I think still was was an addict for most of her life and was unhoused for most of her life.

[00:27:30] And I ended up being raised by you know, Fairly well off middle class people who then sort of, I was on my own pretty early anyways because the queer thing was a problem. So I've, I've kind of bopped in and out of various class, sort of social subcultures and understandings of how this kind of can work at the end of the day, right?

[00:27:56] Like, my life now, my circumstances would be very, very different based on just a couple of variables, right? , there's no, there's no universe in which you know, I get through college in a master's degree if my birth mom raised me, there just isn't, right? There's, there's probably not one where I end up working for a governor.

[00:28:18] not, you know, like

[00:28:19] in

[00:28:20] Darcy Totten: that circumstance. But also by the same token, there's probably a universe where I make a bunch more money and have a lot more power if I were just heterosexual and was able to like eek out the last bit of the network I got raised in mm-hmm. that I didn't have access to because of just who I am.

[00:28:39] Kristina Bas Hamilton: Going back to what somebody should do, so, okay. So recognizing that mentality in ourselves and that it will not work when we try to build community. Yeah. So I you know, a lot of people I know set aside like their charity dollars for the year, right?

[00:28:57] Darcy Totten: They have causes they care about and they give to organizations that they trust, that they believe in. I do that. I also have like a, a, a second account for my yearly giving. That is two people where they're not an organization, they're individuals, they're random. GoFund news I find on the internet.

[00:29:15] They're people with a story and they might be making it up and I'm gonna choose not to care, right. Because it's not on me to vet them. I'm going to throw into the universe what bet I can do to help because maybe, right.

[00:29:29] Kristina Bas Hamilton: Any other words of advice?

[00:29:32] Darcy Totten: Yeah. This is way harder, , so if it's not for you, I understand. Mm-hmm. Spend some time in online spaces that make you really uncomfortable. Mm. And don't talk. Like, just show up and listen.

[00:29:48] Don't skulk, right? Like, not forever. You're not, you're not there to sort of stalk people, but like, go spend a couple of months before you're ready to talk to anybody in places with people who are nothing like you. Mm, absolutely nothing like you. And strongly recommend strongly that this also includes people who are politically, deeply unlike you.

[00:30:11] Oh,

[00:30:11] Kristina Bas Hamilton: gosh, that

[00:30:11] Darcy Totten: sounds like I'll be, but don't argue. That sounds like don't go to fight. Don't go to talk. Don't, don't go to like, figure out what the bad people are doing. Just pay attention and see what's moving that community. Why is this working? Why ? Why is this attracting lots of people? What are they gathering around?

[00:30:32] Right? And the thing is, once you can find one point of shared reality, one thing in which maybe you can all be humans, you can figure it out from there. We all have something somewhere and it can be really hard, especially with people that you are like, Nope, this is bio. I can't with this. Right. So I and it's, you know, it's weird.

[00:30:55] This is actually one of the things that grew out of just being queer at the time and place that I was, because we didn't really have digital communication the way we do now. I have had to talk my way out of so many dangerous situations. I was living in a pickup truck, like driving around Texas, across the country just for years, taking pictures, being, you know, a rowdy, rowdy kid.

[00:31:18] And being able to like connect with somebody that five minutes before was real threatened by my haircut or my outfit. Mm-hmm. was hugely important. I had to be able to figure out real fast how to make that scary person possibly armed see me as a person too. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really necessary. And there's always something, right?

[00:31:43] I wanna also like not be totally Pollyanna about it, right? Like, there's as many instances in my past where I've literally had to fight my way out of something. Mm-hmm. . And so the other piece of that was, And again, I don't know if this is quite true culturally anymore, this feels very true for people my age who are queer. I would, I would love to hear from younger people if this feels true for them.

[00:32:06] Mm-hmm. But there used to be sort of an unspoken rule that you, you know, we, we used to make jokes about gayar, right? Like we could see each other, we could recognize each other. And a lot of that was like little style things, right? It just little flags of existence. Hi, I'm here. But the, wherever you were, even if that person was a total stranger to you, if they were in trouble, then you were both in trouble, right?

[00:32:26] Because we were on the same team. That sort of instant sense of solidarity, what needs to happen now is it has to be with everybody, right?

[00:32:35] You're starting to see it and you're seeing it cluster around the queer community. You're seeing it in the thousands of people who will show up to defend a drag performance from the, you know, proud boys or whoever showed up arms to the teeth because they're mad exist again.

[00:32:48] You have to be able to build those sort of solidarity alliances with people who maybe aren't just like you. Right? Like, if I'm gonna show up that way for any random dude with an Act up pin, I'm gonna show up that way for anybody I see who's in trouble. Yeah. That's that. Like, that's the next step.

[00:33:08] Anybody struggling? Anybody in need of your help? There's a a level to which you just kind of have to show up.

[00:33:16] Kristina Bas Hamilton: This conversation is really impacting me. Again, I wanna acknowledge my own privilege and, we're in a different place where this stuff, you have to do this, we have to do this. Those of us who wanna build a different world than the one we're in or, or get out of where we're at right now.

[00:33:31] This is such a great conversation. Any parting words of advice or insight that you wanna share?

[00:33:40] Darcy Totten: I guess

[00:33:40] Kristina Bas Hamilton: just

[00:33:41] Darcy Totten: you're gonna get it wrong. We're all gonna get it wrong. We are gonna screw this up. We're the most diverse country on the planet. There are lots of people here that are nothing like you, that you might not understand, and when you screw it up, that'll be embarrassing. And the only thing to do is just be genuine in and intentional about trying to build community with people who are different from you. It is the thing that's gonna keep us all alive eventually.

[00:34:08] Kristina Bas Hamilton: So what, have any contact info you wanna share with folks how they can find. .

[00:34:12] Darcy Totten: Well, once upon a time I would've given you my Twitter account. I will tell you I am Sre Mousey, M a u s i e at every social media platform. Come find me, talk to me.

[00:34:22] Kristina Bas Hamilton: Awesome. Do that everybody. You gotta follow Darcy, because her insight is , as you know now. Very valuable

[00:34:29] Darcy Totten: and I'm definitely still on Twitter until that thing goes up in flames.

[00:34:32] Kristina Bas Hamilton: Thank you Darcy. Have a wonderful day. Thank you. You too. Appreciate it.

[00:34:37] If you're finding this show to be valuable, please go ahead, hit that subscribe button, share episodes with your networks and send me your feedback. I really appreciate that. I will link to my socials in the show notes. Thank you very much. And I will talk with you soon.