The world is full of forces that want you to believe the physical world is a problem to overcome — food delivery apps, cul-de-sac developers, automobile manufacturers, vitamin-hawking podcasters. Always the drive toward greater convenience, more atomization, a sense of security so total we forget the vulnerability of our flesh. But there’s also always the nagging proof that we’re interconnected. A virus, say.

Six years ago, we stayed inside for months, for the sake of public health. But then a man was lynched, and we found ourselves back on the streets, looking at each other again. The grief I felt watching — again — a video where the state executed a black person gave way to a certain ecstasy outdoors. It’s not that George Floyd’s suffering could be redeemed; rather, that enough of the public wanted to make a new world, one where lynchings no longer happened, that they risked their health to be outside demanding it. I hope it’s not disrespectful to say that the uprisings had the feeling of a carnival. A state of exception. We were a mass moving to the sound of thousands of voices chanting and singing in unison, wanting something better. In moments like that, I can’t doubt the existence of a public. I know it’s there because I can reach out and touch it.

That summer in Minneapolis, I saw diapers, formula, and food — both stolen and purchased — given out for free. I saw a public in which desire and need counted more than money. That is part of what protest can do: show the gap between human relations as they exist and as they could be. I went back to Tucson, where I was living, and joined a counterprotest against a pro-police rally. I wore a dress, wrapped a keffiyeh around my head, and ran through the crowd while playing a clarinet until some Blue backers pushed me against a car, called me a faggot, and got me arrested. I sat cuffed and baking in the back of a police car, while my new comrades, strangers until that afternoon, updated my fiancé. Three hours later, I was released with no charge. We went back to the street.

In the years that followed, where mutual aid networks and broken windows ought to have been, there were, spectacularly, increased police budgets, cut SNAP benefits, and the intensification of draconian state violence. Had there been networks of militant, organized labor in place in 2020, maybe the last few years would have gone differently. Take Egypt: by 2011, three decades of corruption and neoliberalization by the Mubarak government had left the country a carapace. Totally stagnant. The pyramids were tombs not just for pharaohs, but for the whole country. The January 25 Revolution, which ended Mubarak’s reign, was partially set off when the police beat a man named Khaled Said to death. The rallying call went out: We Are All Khaled Said. 

The public sphere emerges on a different plane than the purely rational. It involves a leap to the plane of heaven, where all beings are one yet manage to maintain differentiation, though it incarnates in shared physical space. When the body of another, just like yours, is brutalized, you encounter physical proof that, in the eyes of the state, there is no difference between you and him and me. Fine then, the protestors said, let’s create a state where there really is no difference between you and him and me.

Many in the Western press insisted that what happened in Egypt was a “Twitter revolution” and pumped the supposed value of social media for “democratization.” But it was not tweets that brought the Mubarak government down. It was syndicates and unions, students and my grandmother, mobilizing in Tahrir Square in Cairo, across Alexandria, and throughout Suez. The Egyptian press called it a muzahara (مظاهرة) , or “demonstration,” rather than a protest, because the people were demonstrating their numbers and their willingness to go on strike. Mubarak supporters and protestors clashed in Tahrir Square, activists burned down police stations, and organized labor understood that they — not the government — were the ones who kept things moving. On February 9, thousands of workers, including the Suez Canal operators, went on strike. Two days later, Mubarak fled Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood won the election the following year, only to be brought down in a coup by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, under whose rule Egypt continues to languish. The optimism of 2011 seems like a luxury now, as massive inflation and ballooning debt make daily life nearly impossible. 

In the United States, many workers still don’t understand themselves to be workers, and there is no single artery, like the Suez, that can be clogged to stop the whole organism. A protest here, for the time being, can only be an opportunity to lift the veil and show that we are “every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,” as Walt Whitman wrote. Work must be done to create the structures that can reintegrate this scheme, and prevent the backsliding that occurred in Egypt. It will take time, raised consciousness, and tireless organizing, but the masses — we — will win, because we know what we learned on the street, in those instances of being a public: that it can all be made otherwise.