Strength in Solidarity: May Day protests against Trump take shape in Maine

The slogan “Strength in Solidarity” won the vote to lead Portland’s International Workers Day protest on May 1st. About seventy people took part in the April 12 organizing meeting, including teachers, electrical workers, nurses, graduate student workers, LGTBQ+ activists, Gaza solidarity organizers, and political organizations like Maine DSA, Indivisible, and many more. The Maine May Day coalition meeting aims to build immediate mobilizations while contributing to a long-term united front to defend working peoples’ rights against the Trump blitzkrieg. 

The Portland effort is part of a larger picture. On April 17, over 1300 people participated in a national conference call spearheaded by the Chicago Teachers Union to organize May Day Strong protests in hundreds of cities across the country. [Note: Maine May Day sites will be listed starting later today.] Meanwhile, the Maine Education Association and Maine AFL-CIO affiliated unions are calling for rallies in multiple towns and cities across the state. 

[Read next: We need an anti-Trump united front in Maine]

Unfortunately, our social movements and unions are not yet strong enough to stop Trump in his tracks. This means we’re going to suffer losses and casualties, even as we increase our ability to fight back. Scores of immigrant workers are being detained and threatened with deportation in towns across our state. Bowdoin College faces threats from Trump for solidarity actions carried out by Students for Justice in Palestine. Free school lunch is at risk for more than 100,000 public school students. Transgender people face an orchestrated backlash, striking at the core of their basic human rights. Federal unionized workers have been illegally terminated and Trump wants to outlaw their collective bargaining rights. Cuts to Medicaid will lead to more hospital closures. Not to mention the impact of massive tax breaks for the rich, the slashing of environmental protections, and the very existence of our—already weak—democracy and civil liberties. The message is clear: if you stand up for basic civil liberties, you risk financial catastrophe and police repression.

Meanwhile, the Maine Republican Party, with Laurel “Doxxing kids” Libby at its head, is raking in millions from far-right groups across the country to ram through a referendum in November to limit voting rights for women, the elderly, the disabled, and—it must be said out loud—anyone that doesn’t look white enough for Libby and her entourage. Their strategy is to break our resolve and gerrymander power for themselves for decades to come in the name of profits for the rich and pain for the working class. They have the wind in their sales and we have to prepare for a drawn out struggle.

In that vein, one inspiration for the May 1st action comes from United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain’s call to begin coordinating contract expiration dates and ongoing actions now in advance of an effort to launch a general strike on May 1st, 2028 to flex workers power. One graduate student union organizer put it this way, “If we want to win, we all need to get strike ready. We need to practice. Not just in our unions, but in our communities, too.” 

Collectively, we took an important step in the right direction when 15,000 people in towns across Maine turned out on April 5 to protest Trump’s wrecking ball. These mobilizations began to change the mood from isolation and disbelief to determination to put up a fight and they are set to continue on April 19. 

There’s no telling in advance how large the protests will be in the coming weeks and months. The ebb and flow of mass social movements cannot be scheduled in advance. However, the history of labor during the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s both demonstrate that the better organized we are in advance, the better we are able to cultivate and sustain opposition. The more we leave our internal organization up to a date posted on Facebook and Instagram—or to small professional staffs managing large databases of passive followers and donors—the weaker we will be. This doesn’t mean we can’t use social media or raise money, but there is no substitute for face-to-face planning between organizations who can democratically represent activists in every workplace, neighborhood, community and school. We’re not there yet. That’s where we have to get in the years to come if we want to beat Trumpism and replace it with something better than what came before. 

Fortunately, we’re not starting from scratch. Maine has hundreds of community and labor and advocacy organizations who have been doing the hard work of organizing for a long time. That work has expanded the rights and social programs we all rely on. Now, much of that is under threat. It’s no surprise that the first groups to stand up were those with the strongest organizations, for instance, unions representing postal workers, federal workers, nurses, and teachers. We have to build on those efforts. To defend ourselves, we all need to expand our circles and build bridges between communities.

[Read next: Sitting down with the Portland Tenants Union]

Final details will be hashed out this weekend, but the outline of Portland’s May Day action is coming into view. We’ll begin at 3:30 on the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine to speak out against Trump’s threat to our public universities. And, we’ll march on the boss to demand the UMaine system bargain in good faith and sign a union contract with graduate student workers represented by the United Auto Workers. The two go hand in hand. 

Next, we’ll march to the Post Office on Forest Ave to oppose Trump’s threats to privatize it and hear from workers threatened with mass layoffs. Then up past Portland High School and the Portland Public Library in solidarity with educators and students opposed to Trump’s destruction of the Department of Education and his attacks on LGTBQ+ and immigrant students. Finally we’ll march up Congress Street during rush hour to the Portland Museum of Art to support funding for the arts and hold a final community rally starting around 5:00 pm. We’ll have a program of speaking out against Trump’s attack and offering ideas about how to deepen solidarity between all the different parts of our movement for democracy and justice. 

We need your help. Please attend the march if you are able. It’s a big state, so if you can’t get to Portland, please support or organize another action in your town or region hosted by the Maine Education Association and the Maine AFL-CIO or any other community group that steps up to stand up. Strength in solidarity. 

[Listen to the Maine Mural Podcast latest episode: Camp Hope in Bangor, Maine]

I write this truth so all may understand the reality of Disability.

Disability is the one category, the one group, the one community that anyone can join at any time in their life for any reason. Disability is defined by people.

People can be born disabled. People may become disabled due to an infinite set of possible factors: Illness, injuries, accidents, disasters, work, play, and so on.

Disability is inclusive by default. People are of any skin color, any gender, any sexuality, any class, any nationality, any ethnicity, any religion, any disease, any illness.

Because anyone can enter into disability, it is inherently intersectional. All Disabled people have multiple identities that describe them and inform how they navigate the world. Thus we have to be intersectional so we can understand the multitude of oppressive systems that overlap and attack from multiple sides.

Disability is creative. Our survival in a world hellbent on making our lives miserable, impoverished, and painful requires us to create our own forms of joy and resistance. We build up mutual aids, underground communities, and organizing using the tools we have.

Disability intertwines with technology in that many of us must use the Internet, our phones, our computers to interact with others. Where we may need devices to breath, to sleep, to eat. Where we may need mobility aids to navigate the physical realm. Where we must use what we have and transform it into what we need. Many of us become cyborgs through our leverage of technology to ease our symptoms, pain, and to help foster our independence and connections. We require collective access, cross-movement solidarity, and a recognition of our wholeness outside of productivity or other measures.

Our needs are diverse, unique to each of us, and thus we burst forth with imaginative and creative ways to exist in spite of the world's ableism. We lead with the most impacted, we pace ourselves, we balance our symptoms with our healthcare with our other work.

Celebrating Disabled means I am recognizing that Disability, the group in which I exist currently, the truth that I am Disabled does not mean I am less-than, but that I am whole even if society refuses to recognize that. My limitations may make navigating our society harder, but it pushes me to declare and demand a more equitable, just, sustainable, accessible society. The creativity of Disabled activists, our ways of surviving despite our limitations, our talents and skills, our personhood is all to be celebrated.

To become disabled is to enter into a world of diversity and creativity.

To become disabled is to enter into the resistance against oppressive systems that harm and disable and kill.

To become disabled requires us to reckon with society's health supremacy lies. To realize bodies are diverse and unique in needs; to realize that everyone is deserving of love, of care, of support; to understand how everyone deserves to have their needs met. Holding onto bigotry harms and potentially kills us, and so that must be exorcised.

To become disabled is to enter into a journey of realization, of truth, of rediscovering who we truly are. We can't hide from the limitations of our bodies and minds anymore. We must bravely face those limitations and find a balance so we can live another day.

Our body/minds are rich and brilliant as they are. As the Disabled, we discover how body and mind are interdependent. How we cannot separate them. We are our bodies, we are our minds, we are both/and.

Disability isn't a cure. It cannot erase bigotry from our minds and bodies. It only redirects our gaze, intensifies the truth of our relations with one another, and whether we walk through that fire more compassionate and loving depends on our willingness to accept the uniqueness of one another, to let go of what no longer serves us. To grieve that former self, to exorcise the harmful socializations society instilled in us, and to open up one's mind and body to one another's truths.

Disabled and newly disabled and formerly disabled all have this chance to explore an alternate view of our reality. To see what has lain hidden under the oppressive systems that alienate, isolate, and exploit us. Some may bunker down within the bigotry society instilled in us, but others break free from that cage and be reborn into a fiery phoenix of relentless hope and compassion.

Our world is changeable. Nothing is set in impervious stone. It all can be broken down and repurposed.

Capitalism, cisgender-hetero-patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism -- these are all disabling systems. They eat up people and spit them out, and only a privileged few escape the jaws of exploitation. Those privileged few fall prey to the greed and power that turns them into monstrous beasts that devour yet more of us in their quest for more wealth, more power, more prestige. They can no longer see us and them as human beings equal in body and mind, and instead see themselves as beyond-human.

They cannot be reasoned with. They can only be stopped. Violence and fear is their language.

For the Disabled, it is not fear and violence by which we live. It is not our suffering that defines all that we are. Our suffering is but one piece of our stories.

Disability is defined by our rich history, our unique stories, our creative will to live, to find a way to survive, to help one another survive, to speak our truths no matter how vicious others become. To call out the harm perpetuated against us, to demand the healthcare we need to live, to speak truth to our pain and our small joys.

We have persisted throughout history. It is our community, our compassion, our love, our fierce struggle to live that gives us a power the oligarchs and capitalists will never have.

We can defeat the monstrous beasts that exploit, devour, destroy, disable, kill. We can win through the bonds of our diversity, through the truth of our body/minds, through our interdependence on each other, through our support and our demand for justice.

We have won before: won rights, laws, building of technology that aids us.

We can win again.

Not in spite of our disability but because of our Disabled selves.

Americans, particularly white Americans, really need some education on long-form organizing and protests. How protest culture needs to be founded on community care and resilence for long-term resistance.

And such revolutionary work requires building a foundation of community resilence through strategies including street medics, mask blocs, mending and repair libraries, community gardens, mutual aid networks, alternative healthcare options, collective access, transformative justice work, free legal assistance, educating each other, sharing skills, writing and art, and the like.

I can't really sum this up as it's a multilayered topic, but I'll point out past movements that used various community care and resilence strategies in their long-term resistance. Resources at the end.

Civil Rights Movement had built up a lot of community care, educating their people, and alternatives of societal systems for their survival. These were used for some of their biggest actions (Black Panthers and MLK Jr often worked together due to the foundation Black Panthers built).

Disabled and Non-Disabled Miners had built up some mutual aid and distribution of supplies, which is why their wildcat strikes were some of the longest running in US Labor history.

STAR, the trans led revolutionary group, built up similarly before and during some of their biggest actions. They built up housing for each other, food distribution, educating others, as well as disruptive protest.

Indigenous resistance -- see Standing Rock for a recent example -- used mutual aid, community-led healthcare and gardening, cross-movement organizing, housing and food sharing, and other foundational actions to build and continue to build community care and resilence.

The Disabled Sit-in protests and Capitol Crawl had built cross-movement coalitions, such as Butterfly Brigade providing food, Black Panthers offering care assistance, others offering transportation and legal help.

Occupy also built this while it was ongoing. Mutual aids formed (and some still exist today) to distribute supplies and food. Free legal counseling was offered, people shared knowledge together, and even experimented with different styles of decision-making and governance.

Black Lives Matter had built up a lot of this prior from other resistance and tapped it and even expanded the community care strategies in many areas. (Those in my town are still doing this work.)

Yes, the USA turned genocidal and tried to destroy each of these movements, but they failed to stomp us out as many of us survived because of the community built. And many of these movements did win some of their major goals.

A protest with these equitable and often experimental community care foundations is more likely to succeed long-term. It's also a way to build up communities that are resilent and more able to hold firm against the oppressor.

If your praxis does not include these strategies, then that protest isn't ready for the long-term fight. And it'll be more prone to co-option by the state, which will bleed the people dry of our energy for a long-term fight.

And I will always assert that any protest that positions a vulnerable oppressed group as disposable and/or puts them into harms way is actually already co-opted by the oppressors. The protest's message has then been lost, the target the wrong group entirely.

Our goal in this fight against fascism is to build with each other the future we want right now the best we can AND to bring hell to our oppressors.

No one is disposable. Disabled activists, especially those who are multiply marginalized, often say that "We take care of us." That taking care of each other MUST be part of organizing and protesting. It's the best, and historically often the only way to win against our oppressors.

Without community and caring for each other, we won't win.

For more about this:
* Crip Camp documentary
* The Black AntiFascist Tradition by Hope and Muller,
*Emergent Strategy series by Adrienne maree brown,
*Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha,
*From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
* Our History Is Our Future by Nick Estes
* Red Nation Rising by Border Town Violence Working Group and it's follow-up The Red Deal
* White Rage by Carol Anderson
* A Disabled People's History of the United States by Kim Nielsen
* An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Dunbar-Ortiz
* Miss Major Speaks by Miss Major
* Let This Radicalize You by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes
* We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
* Beyond Survival by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
* A People's Guide To Abolition And Disability Justice by Katie Tastrom
* Disability Justice Principles by Sins Invalid
* Surviving The Future edited by Branson, Hudsen, and Reed
* How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong
* The Sea is Rising and So Must We: A Climate Justice Handbook by Cynthia Kaufmann
* Mutual Aid by Dean Spade

And I have a whole lot more recommendations, but that should get people started.