No justice, no peace
an essay on upheaval and presence; ritual notes for fixed star Algol
One of the few moments of peace I’ve experienced in the last several weeks was at the student encampment at the University of Virginia, before the police raided it and shut it down.
My friend Meg had made great mason jars of tea for the students; she let me tag along with her to deliver them and scatter olive branches amongst the protest signs.
The encampment was nestled in between large hardwoods on a hill by the university chapel. People studied and practiced yoga, sat quietly together, everything softened further by the spring breeze. Meg and I stretched out in the grass, sometimes silent, sometimes talking about our dreams and worries, our shared interests of healing and healthcare outside of Western industrial healthcare; what magic, plants, and the tarot could do for the body—in pain or otherwise.
A few days later, the university officials surreptitiously changed a longstanding rule about tents on campus. Got the cops to come. Arrests, force, riot gear, you know the drill. Of course, public critique made the important and obvious points: free speech was protected in Charlottesville if the protesters were white supremacists on a mission to harm and harass students, as they did in the fatal “Unite The Right” rally in 2017. No such protections, though, for a small group of nonviolent activists morally objecting to the genocide in Gaza. Even an atmosphere of “almost picnic-like protest,” as The Daily Progress described the encampment, in support of brown bodies in pain was apparently intolerable for UVA and state administrators, including university president Jim Ryan and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin.
“I like that the church is there,” Meg said, when we were at the encampment, gesturing to the chapel’s sunbaked wall. What she meant was that it would look a certain way, wouldn’t it? For university officials and cops to disrupt this occasion, in all of its right meaning, all of its moral gesture. The student bodies, the holy building, the see-everything trees, they all settled in patiently next to each other, signs of more-than-human authority and surrender: “Learn to give as if you were begging,” Simone Weil wrote once in her notebooks, and together, land, and church, and people, were giving, begging, being.
No one was, I think, particularly surprised when the cops did come, though the outrage against their cruelty—just another instance of official cruelty—has been loud, swift, and true. But I’ve been surprised in the week or so since to realize that, over the chaotic months of 2024, I haven’t realized any sense of presence in my life so profound as I did in my brief encampment hours. In one moment at the end of April, I was able to transcend the myopia of my own life simply by saying yes to going to the moment’s right place, to being a body-in-need implicated in the plight of other bodies-in-need, however far away.