Good morning friends,
In a union meeting, I asked my colleagues how they feel at the start of each workday.
Burned out, they said. Exhausted. Running on fumes.
Work isn’t the problem, one member said brightly. Everything else is the problem.
I’ve been burned out too. We’ve been burned out too. And it’s not the kind of burnout that a bath bomb and a new plant can solve. It’s the burnout I feel when I situate myself within the context of global warfare, environmental and racial and reproductive injustice, and a global pandemic that is not, and can never, return to normal.
Yesterday a colleague informed me they were removing themselves from a group that I organize. “I just can’t take the despair anymore,” they said.
I felt that in my bones. In the years that I have been part of the Visionary Futures Collective, here is what I have learned: That I need time to feel the outrage and despair that comes in waves in this unjust world. And that I need ways to move those feelings towards action, for myself and with my community.
So where do we go from here?
Here in Tennessee, the crocuses and daffodils are in full bloom. Even the redbuds a few streets down have started to unfurl. It’s the third spring of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s time for rage and it’s time for renewal.
In solidarity
Hannah for the VFC
Postcards of rage and renewal
Postcards of Rage and Renewal is a collective response to the two-year anniversary of the coronavirus lockdown. It is a collaboration between the VFC and the Inkcap Collective. Our goal: to collectively channel and process our outrage towards the inadequacy of the pandemic response and to build our hope for the future.
Participants will receive two stamped and addressed postcards designed by VFC members and printed on our brand new risograph. One postcard will be for rage. One will be for renewal.
Write on or decorate the postcards however you want, and then send them back to us. Based on what you share, we’ll be designing rituals and exhibitions of celebration, mourning, fury, and hope.
Questions? You can email us at visionaryfuturescollective@gmail.com.
Worried about sharing personal information? Read our data privacy policy here.
“what does mean to institutionalize a safety policy oriented around care?”
Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)
SUCHO is a group of cultural heritage professionals – librarians, archivists, researchers, programmers – working together to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions while the country is under attack.
SUCHO uses a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Browsertrix crawler and the ArchiveWeb.page browser extension and app of the Webrecorder project.