I’m 24, and I’m lucky because none of my friends have died. This should not be something anyone has to say, but here we are. Not everyone I know is as fortunate as I am. It’s not every couple months, but a few times friends here in NYC have had a call from back home, saying that someone from the neighborhood or from high school passed away. People get in car wrecks, people OD, and people die from treatable illnesses because they didn’t have healthcare. Or sometimes they even have coverage, but the insurance is so shitty, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes they get sicker and die hoping the problem will clear up on its own because they’re trying to save money. Every story is different, but in another way they’re all the same.

I never know what to do in those moments or how to comfort people who are grieving. The best I can do is try to act like how I’d want other people to respond the day it finally happens to me.

There wasn’t a moment when I started ‘being political,’ whatever that means, but there was a moment when I started calling myself a socialist. In 2016, as I watched Bernie get crushed, I started to realize just how broken our democracy is. But at the same time, I saw just how close we came to actually making some serious change. It was around that time that I got into Chapo and began spending waaay too much time online (I can admit it). I started exploring ideas that were a lot more radical than anything I’d ever been exposed to before, but which also made a lot more sense. Online communities were a kind of antidote to all that hopelessness that came after Bernie lost and Trump won, and the same crushing hopelessness I felt whenever I heard about someone else dying because they didn’t have enough money to buy their own life. But as much fun as it was making new comrades and dunking on chuds I could see how toxic online could be. I could see new patterns of viciousness emerging (or maybe they’d always been there), and I always knew that I was in a way a part of it all too.

I’ve never been an ‘organizer,’ but I don’t think the left can work if everyone in it is only an organizer. I didn’t try to unionize my workplace because my boss is an app and my workplace is the road between pizza joints and people’s front doors. I didn’t join the DSA, because I guess I’m busy enough just making ends meet, and I don’t know what I could really bring to the table. But I did sign up for a Medicare for All canvassing day this month, which I saw on the Chapo Twitter feed, because what I do have is a lot of experience knocking on strangers’ doors, and I’d like to bring something even more important than a pizza.

So today I was disappointed, but not surprised, to get an email from the organizers saying that the event had been cancelled. Disappointed because this is a campaign that means a lot to me. It could save the lives of people who might otherwise die, myself included. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose my Medicaid, which is starting to look pretty likely, and I fall from my bike or get hit by a car, or if I just get sick. Maybe I’m selfish, but I’m pretty invested in the things that could literally save my life and the lives of the people I love.

But I wasn’t surprised, because I saw the whole damn thing go down online.

If anyone ends up reading this and you haven’t already heard this story then I should apologize, because this is all awful petty bullshit and there’s absolutely no way it won’t leave you dumber and sadder than you were before. But someone’s got to tell it, and someone needs to show exactly how destructive some of the politics I’ve seen in the last couple days can be, and what their affect is on people who are trying to get engaged. Because this is bullshit.

Screenshots via Twitter

The event was to be held at Mayday Space in Brooklyn, which is (according to a later statement) a ‘ a people of color led collective with deep community roots and radical praxis.’ It’s also where NYC DSA hold regular meetings, along with other groups like the Socialist Feminist Working Group. I don’t know the place and I’ve never been, so it’s possible that it might be a disability deathtrap, but I doubt it. On the Facebook page for the event, someone asked (quite reasonably) how it might accommodate people with disabilities, and got a quite reasonable and thorough response from one of the organizers (I couldn’t find a full screenshot online, but it went on for a lot longer than what’s shown). And then it got weird.