Jacob Shrike Roomba @kniferoomba@shrike.club

as for Eucy, all I wish for her is to be reborn somewhere and somewhen that she can make a difference again, in the way she always wanted to. We failed her then, but that doesn't mean we have to fail her forever

all of this is changeable. but change takes patience, and time. Eucy ran out of time, and if we want a truly better future for anyone at any point we're going to have to accept that many more of us will run out of time before we get there. It's hard. But it's the only way

instead, every left project that pops up collapses under the weight of 200 different dreams, "goals", ego-indentifications, and often just straight up grifts, because noone's trying to build material feedback loops that enable more people to participate more fully on the left and actually grow it. why we got so many left wing indie book publishers and zero childcare centers? they're both the same level of unprofitable

and like, you want to actually organize against the landlords? you want a truly resurgent labor movement? you want (and fuck me standing) a "revolutionary party"? first you'll have to do the basic prepolitical work of keeping people like Eucy alive and healthy enough to fight. But work on this problem is few and far between on the American left

because the social-material connective tissue for the organizing people want to do just isn't there. which is the same reason Eucy had to die like this. Our currently existing systems of "mutual aid" cannot provide someone like her with a real alternative to paying over a thousand dollars a month to a private landlord for the privilege of staying alive in Ballard

i remember her vigil. the local DSA put it on. Dozens gathered in pouring rain. A few friends spoke. Everyone knew for a fact that she wanted her death politicized, so we tried to. People talked about going after the landlord. But we'd already tried that.

point is, I saw her amidst the conditions that would ultimately kill her try to reach out for something better, and she did so with incredible compassion and curiosity for the lives of her neighbors.

About a year before this happened I had helped Eucy try to organize the tenants in her building against their landlord. It didn't really come together. None of the tenant organizing efforts we tried in '21 and '22 really did. I could go into some of the structural reasons behind that but that's not really the point of this thread

we all get why she did it. Caught between the near impossibility of raising almost ten grand from an already cash strapped local community and the dehumanizing conditions of being unhoused on American streets, she figured it better to die then and there, and try and take some small piece of the landlords' machine out with her. She almost got one of the deputies. Almost but not quite

Eucy was a comrade, a friend of several friends of mine, and an amazing community presence. She died a year ago today. It was in the news. She had become disabled, unemployed, and thousands of dollars behind on rent during the darkest years of Covid. She made the fateful decision to barricade herself in her apartment on eviction day and engage three King County Sherrif's deputies in a firefight she did not survive