The Need for Roots: Mutual Aid by Beth Bartlett

In those first few days after the holidays, when the togetherness, warmth, and happy times with family and friends came to an abrupt end, a song my son used to sing as a small child kept running through my mind:

Keep Christmas with you all through the year.
When Christmas is over, save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments, hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you all through the year..

The simple glee of my 21-month-old grandson finding ways to scoot and slide down the small icy slope in our backyard was enough to keep the grief over the loss of my sister and my recent loss of my dearest friend at bay.  But in the days after their departure, as I spent time with my friend’s family planning her memorial gathering and visited another dear friend who has chosen to enter hospice in her final days of a terminal illness, coupled with the hooded ogre of the approaching Project 2025, saving Christmas cheer has had its challenges.

But my son found a way.  He and his wife decided they didn’t want the precious times to end, and within a week had decided to pull up stakes from their home 150 miles away, found and signed on to buy a house just five minutes from our home so that the precious moments could continue.

In our youth we’re told to cut the apron strings, spread our wings, try out new vistas, seek out new identities and opportunities away from the homes that had defined and too often confined us. In my day, I probably needed that break to find the feminism that was just beginning around the country when I first moved a thousand miles from home to the unknown hinterlands of Minnesota, but I missed the closeness of my parents and brothers’ and sister’s  families and would return to Michigan every summer, and was lucky to forge deep friendships in my newfound community. My son, too, needed to prove himself intellectually and professionally, traveling thousands of miles away in pursuit of an education and a career, and finding his own way in the big city.

Yet if there’s anything the latest election has told any of us, it is that we need each other more than ever. Tired of the anonymity and isolation of cookie cutter houses, strip malls, and miles upon miles of freeway separating friends, my son chose to come home.  Home to friends and family.  Home to manageable distances. Home to communities where neighbor could rely on neighbor. Home.

In addition to the nationwide People’s Marches Women’s March is holding on January 18^th, in preparation for what may lie ahead in 2025, Women’s March launched its Digital Defenders Project to fight back against disinformation online and has been holding trainings by Project South and Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund to show how mutual aid networks can provide collective care when the system fails, and it seems that governmental systems of care are being poised to be dismantled, and even turn hostile. These organizations are based in Black radical traditions of caring for each other and building parallel infrastructure when the external systems ignore and fail the needs of the people, creating aid organizations that can respond to both man-made and natural disasters. Further, they are not just a defensive reaction in response to difficult times but also seek to enact a liberatory vision of what is possible.  

The concept of mutual aid also has its roots in the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, a biologist who countered Darwin’s theories of survival of the fittest with the examples of bees and ants and other species whose survival depends on their cooperation with each other – their mutual aid.  He argued that we humans are far more like the bees in that we are social creatures whose thriving depends on our working collectively toward living the good life.

A biologist like Kropotkin, but focusing on plants rather than animals, Robin Wall Kimmerer arrives at the same conclusions – that our mutual flourishing depends on the “gift economy” of plants, — where “wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.” It nurtures community bonds “that enhance mutual well-being,” “organizing ourselves in a way to sustain life  . . .  where the economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and “all flourishing is mutual.” [i]

As the political situation in this country becomes more and more akin to that of Germany in the late 1930s, I’m particularly moved by Simone Weil’s arguments in her The Need for Roots written during that time, that, in her words, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” and that we have roots “by virtue of [our] real, active and natural participation in the life of a community.”[ii]

As we move into a time designed to set us against each other, when it seems the aims of the state will be directed toward the ultra wealthy to the detriment of the poor and working classes, we will need each other more than ever.  We will need to stay connected to each other, rooted and to participate in our communities, to be able to provide solidarity and aid during what could become difficult times. We can become the alternative to those who want to promote division and an environment of each one for themselves – an alternative which instead believes in the goodness and caring of people to help each other out, whether in times of need or out of a general belief in good will. 

Isn’t this keeping Christmas with us all through the year after all, by promoting a spirit of generosity and good will toward each other and embracing our rootedness in community.

We can do this. In the words of 19^th century feminist Margaret Fuller, “I believe, that at present, women are the best helpers of one another.”[iii]

Sources

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century.  In Joel Myerson, ed., Margaret Fuller: Essays on American Life and Letters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

“Keep Christmas With You (All Through the Year), Sesame Street Music.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “The Serviceberry.”  Emergence Magazine. October 26, 2022.

Mass Organizing Call: Building Mutual Aid Networks

Weil, Simone.The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind.  Trans. A.F. Wills.  New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.

Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements.  Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962.

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[i] The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer

[ii] Weil, The Need for Roots. 41.

[iii] Fuller, Woman, 205.