One Small Thing

On Building the Third Places

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

About a year ago, I put together an active shooter plan with my eldest son’s teacher.

We were standing around after school, talking about the latest shooting, I don’t remember which one, because there were and are and will be so many.

“I don’t trust the cops to keep our kids safe,” I said to her. “If there’s a shooter, I want to know.”

“I’ll text you,” she said.

The plan, I told her, would not be to get my two kids out. The plan would be for me and any other parents who would be willing to join me to look for the shooter. At worst, we might distract him long enough for the kids and staff to make it out; at best, we might be an obstruction, we might tackle him or take him down, even if it meant we all get killed in the process.

My son’s teacher nodded sagely.

“We’re lucky our room is near the back of the school,” she said. “We can let you in.”

I’m not a fool, reader. Neither is my son’s teacher. What she is is very good at her job, and I appreciate her humoring me. I’m painfully aware our plan is not realistic. I live ten minutes from school, and the likelihood is, by the time I arrive, it would all be over.

I’m also not a hero. Every parent I know would rather risk their own life to stop a shooter than to know that a roomful of children were massacred because they refused to go inside.

Of course my plan sounds ridiculous. But for now, this is the plan I have because the situation is dire, and there are few other options, and because I must plan something, no matter how ridiculous or absurd, until I can figure out something that has a chance of succeeding. I cannot rely on the police. Data does not support their claims that they are capable. In fact, data shows that police officers subdue shooters less than a third of the time. And gun violence is already in my blood and my bones. Active shooters are regular characters in my dreams. I know the reason, in part, is because I had a cousin who survived Columbine; and while her story is not mine to tell, the experience of watching a mass murder play out on TV and waiting for hours to know whether your family member survived it left its fingerprint upon me. Even today, my mind remembers all of its whorls and ridges.

I also dream sometimes of my sons, trapped in a closet somewhere, squeezed under a desk. I dream of them trying to keep quiet in the dark. My dreams are dominated by my eldest son, who has Down syndrome, the kind of person who is most vulnerable in an emergency, who is most likely to be loud when he needs to be quiet, who is most likely to drag his feet when he needs to rush. And this isn’t because he’s unintelligent or disobedient or ungrateful. It’s because chaos and emergencies are difficult for everyone, but they are disasters for disabled people like my son, who cannot always understand the urgency of silence or the rigid rules of an emergency. I dream of him struggling to get free of his teacher’s arms, screaming in frustration at being restrained, while a shooter edges closer and closer down the hallway with a gun.

But I also know that this dream is about all of our children.

And because I dream of these things, I put together a ridiculous plan. What else can I do? The government has given us nothing. It has done nothing to stop school shooters. It’s left us to fend for ourselves. Our country is a place where only the able-bodied and the privileged have a chance of survival, and though many of us are in denial about it, the majority of us are profoundly vulnerable in a crisis and ill-prepared for the crises to come.

I wish this was just about school shootings, reader, but you know as well as I do that it is not.

Between the pandemic, the climate catastrophe, the genocide in Palestine, and the state of the American experiment, we are in the midst of a dissolution - of empire, of public health, of empathy, of protection from the ravages of nature. And just as with gun violence, our government does nothing. In fact, in many cases, it does worse than nothing. It dismantles our protections. It funds the tools of massacre. It enshrines the kind of power that is usually reserved for kings in a country that supposedly wanted nothing to do with monarchical rule.

This is where we are now. I know you don’t want to think about it. But the truth is, our situation is dire. There are few other options. I, you, we have got to plan something, no matter how absurd, no matter how ridiculous, until we can figure out something that has a chance of succeeding.

And no matter how much you may want this to be true, voting will not save us.

No one is coming to save us.

As I argued in my new book, voting in this country is one tool that we have long used, and while it still has some measure of power, its efficacy has been profoundly dulled by gerrymandering, the stripping of the Voting Rights Act, our antiquated electoral system, candidates who refuse to listen to their constituents and who refuse to accept election results, and other methods of disenfranchisement - because when you undermine the only established system we have for choosing the people who lead us, that is indeed disenfranchisement. Voting is also a single act on a single day. What are we going to do with the other 364 days of the year?

I’ve been thinking about loneliness and community and planning for the future for years now but more concretely since December, when I wrote about the scarcity of third places, the kind of places we need to feel empowered and in community with others during a time of profound uncertainty, fear, and isolation. I’ve been struggling for months to figure out where we can gather, how we can feel less alone, what we can do together that doesn’t require us to constantly spend money or constantly risk our health. Because we need this, especially now. We need community that isn’t based on transactional exchange. We need to figure out what to do without creating more clunky bureaucracy that sucks up our money and time without ever making progress on the change we seek. We need to build empathy for one another again. We need to acknowledge our profound vulnerability, our interconnectedness, our dependence on one another to survive.

And what I think is that perhaps the best space isn’t a space at all. It’s a very simple pattern of action.

For several years, I’ve been using a technique to get through the most difficult things in my life. From my divorce to my dissertation, from unemployment to the completion of my novel, from my son’s diagnosis with Ds to a family member’s sudden death in a car accident, the only thing that’s helped me through is to do one small thing, one day at a time. Occasionally, I have the energy for One Big Thing, but often, I do not. So it is One Small Thing, every day, to move closer to closure, to financial repair and employment, to a book or to a Ph.D., through the stages of grief. For so many years, it felt rudimentary, significant only to me and like nothing worth sharing, but it was also the only thing that worked.

For the past few months especially, I’ve found this practice is what brings me the most comfort and consistency. Every day, I figure out what one One Small Thing I can do to build community and to try to plan for an uncertain and perhaps unimaginable future. Some days, it’s a donation to an org supporting Palestine, or it’s showing up to support a protest or other action, or it’s a reading assignment. Some days, it’s an action or donation for reproductive justice. Some days, my One Small Thing isn’t national or international but local. Maybe it’s putting together a care package for a friend who has been sick or taking out the trash for my neighbor. Sometimes, my One Small Thing is something I apply to my writing, because I cannot survive this without creating art, even if the work sucks and it feels impossible to get a word down.

One Small Thing is without fail the one thing that makes me—a single mom who lives only part time with her children, who works from home, and who, for a number of complicated, necessary reasons, has lived a very spartan, isolated, solitary life for quite a few years now—feel connected with the world. It is the one thing that makes me feel like I’m still part of a community, even if I don’t see another person for days.

Maybe you think that, just like my school shooter plan, this is ridiculous too. I know I’m not an organizer, and this isn’t some novel or revolutionary plan. It’s not even that creative. But this isn’t about inventing something new. It’s about doing something sustainable. It’s about surviving. One Small Thing makes it possible for me to survive. I think it will help me continue to survive if things in this country and this world become as bad as I think they may and all the little mechanisms of capitalism that we use to distract and deaden ourselves disappear. It is one of the things that allows me to practice the discipline of hope every single day, because contrary to the way this may sound, I am hopeful, and I do believe we can build something better than what we have now. But it will start like this: small, with the communities we build and then connect to one another, with the actions we take each day.

I also know that some days it’s hard for me to even think of One Small Thing, so I’m starting a list on my website of One Small Things that you can choose from if you find yourself exhausted or running out of ideas. It’s a work in progress, so please leave a comment here or email me at meg.pillow@gmail.com if. you have a suggestion of something to add. I’ll also be doing a separate post soon on some One Small Things that have helped me through challenging writing projects. And I’d love to hear and read about your One Small Thing on social media if you’d like to tag me and share, because that too is one of my sources of community.

I know this isn’t the kind of third space that we’re all wishing for. I’m working on a bigger idea, something long term, but it will take me a while to plan and put together. This is what I have for right now. I hope it makes you feel closer to other people and gives you a little solace until something better comes along.

Thanks for reading.

And as always, dear reader, I’m right here with you.