The miner coughs black into the sink at dawn, rinses it down the drain. Under bare bulbs, he listens to a radio preacher claiming prosperity sits just beyond struggle, if you have the heart. His lunchbox, empty and metallic, echoes hollow when snapped shut. But he goes out into that velvet-dark morning, believing the old promise: lungs for a paycheck, time for a rented dream.
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We're offered a false choice every day—a dichotomy polished to mirror-sheen clarity: your lungs or your livelihood, poison or poverty. The Trump administration upped coal production with one hand and erased miner protections with the other. "Jobs," politicians cooed soothingly, as glossed with certainty as an Instagram infographic: but the bait was bad from the start, coal dust turning lungs brittle as paper, paychecks evaporating faster than influencer apologies.
This contradiction isn't an aberration—it's built in. Yet too often, movements become custodians of battered institutions, endlessly patching cracks instead of imagining what lies beyond crumbling walls.
Where is our daring?
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The miners of the Black Lung Movement refused this scripted fate in the 1970s. Think clinics born not in sterile hospital rooms but in church basements and school gyms, miners testifying not meekly but with defiant, ragged breath: "Our lungs, your profit—no more." Cancer Alley in Louisiana didn’t beg politely either; residents fused poison rivers, worker neglect, and racial violence into an unmistakable indictment. Pain, once silent, became the noise of possibility.
These aren’t feel-good stories of momentary benevolence; these are blueprints.
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Forget broad coalitions—polished press statements and cautious steps up prescribed ladders of engagement. Instead, gather intimately. Assemblies where miners sit shoulder-to-shoulder with nurses, teachers next to undocumented workers, sharing fragile slices of honesty until distinctions blur. Imagine creating local arenas where you reclaim definitions—not just employment, but dignity; not safety regulations handed down from bureaucrats, but health as community-designed survival.
How might our politics change if miners decided what “healthy air” meant, if nurses and teachers rediscovered solidarity not in moral platitudes, but in shared air, water, children’s lungs?
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The old “enemy script” keeps us atomized, scrolling bitter threads of division. Labor vs. environment, city vs. countryside—the system relies on these battle lines to quell collective anger before it metastasizes. Yet who truly profits from these manufactured binaries?
Pause that feed. Swipe instead to concrete acts that fuse pain into collective refusal. Picture mine workers blocking entrances, air monitors streaming pollution data live, impromptu people's tribunals putting coal executives and neglectful regulators in public witness stands. Tactics not ceremonial—no more speeches relegated to empty Sunday squares—but palpable disruptions that ripple outward, shifting the rhythms of daily life.
"Movements," I've argued, "must wobble"—unstable, unpredictable as a beat dropped precisely off-tempo, transposing shop-floor militancy into environmental struggles, factory-floor solidarity flowing through health justice assemblies.
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We needn’t beg for half-measures; we must dare to construct autonomy itself—health clinics, community energy farms, worker-owned utilities clustered defiantly in spaces abandoned by the state. Protest as complaint is over; protest as institution-building begins now. It only takes a militant minority, maybe a persistent few percent to hold ground—to turn out-of-breath resignation into contagion. Contagion, crucially, doesn't ask permission to spread.
Badiou whispers through the screen-glow of our restless nights: refuse resignation, reject endless, losing defense. Demand a world beyond this binary, organize not for survival’s crumbs, but for control. The exploited bodies of miners must become bodies in revolt—reclaiming what’s theirs because it's already within grasp.
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So, ask yourself: Today, knowing only a fraction of restless bodies on the edge could jostle the needle—could tip us into transformative possibility—what will you build?
Don’t just tell us you’re angry. Tell us what the new air feels like in freed lungs. Tell us what happens next.
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