Cynthia Tarana

Last week, as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed (as I do way more than I should), I nearly fell out of my chair when I came across a post from Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas Senate and gubernatorial candidate, 2020 presidential hopeful, and founder of Powered by People, a Texas-based voter registration and community organizing outfit. The post featured several photos from a voter registration event at the University of Texas in Austin. One of the volunteers in the photos was my friend Nick.

As I read the very flattering post I was dumbfounded, not by the flattery, which I knew was well deserved, but by my own ignorance. I had no idea that Nick had been volunteering as a deputy voter registrar with Powered by People. Yet there he was, my good friend and the reluctant “leader” of our writing collaborative, The Chaos Section, quietly doing the work.

How did I not know this? Am I too absorbed in my own shit right now? Am I such a crappy friend that it never occurred to me to ask what he’s been up to on the ground in Texas?

Nick and I met years ago in DC at a protest, of course. We bonded over our mutual love of Hunter S. Thompson and writing. Somehow he convinced me that my writing was good enough to post on the “blog” he was starting, but more importantly that I did indeed have something worthwhile to say.

We have been friends ever since, his family becoming ours and ours, albeit much smaller, his. We speak often. He and his daughter just stayed with us in New York last summer for almost a week. But one of the things I have learned to love and admire most about Nick over the years is that he is not one thing. He writes essays designed to fire people up and gets them published at outlets with real reach… and I know for a fact that he hates whatever personal attention comes with it. Ask him what his favorite part of getting published at a place like HuffPost is and he’ll tell you it’s the readers it sends back to our site, to read his friends’ work. And then on top of all that, he goes and does the quiet work too, knocking on doors and registering young voters as one of thousands of unpaid volunteers, without announcing it to anyone.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people like that. The ones who don’t operate from ego (or at least, who try not to). The quiet workers.

I myself have been examining how much I have done and still do for ego. It’s a bitch, and it has ruined more good intentions than almost anything else I can think of.

I think often of our good friend Tim, who had been living abroad, mostly in South America, for many years with no plans to return. When most people were looking to leave after Trump was elected in 2016, he felt compelled to come back with the intent of teaching in the inner city. He’s been teaching ever since and is now in Crown Heights. He’s the kind of teacher that his kids not only love but feel genuinely inspired by. He didn’t announce it. He just went and did it.

Over the holidays we were having a lively conversation about all the protests that had been popping up when one of our friends, who had been going to a lot of them, made a bit of a flippant comment (one that I had made myself more than once earlier in my activism): “I’ve been out there, where have you been?” Ah, the gauntlet thrown.

Tim didn’t seem offended, and I didn’t say anything. Political talk, alcohol, tyrants, and passion will sometimes get the better of all of us. But sometimes it takes another person to hold up the mirror and show you how pompous you yourself have sounded.

What has been said by many revolutionaries, including Assata Shakur, is that theory without practice (and vice versa) ain’t shit. Visibility, especially in places like Long Island, matters. But you have to go beyond being visible, and the sad truth is that’s where a lot of people stop.

History requires people who will push further, not just with words or signs but with actions.

Years ago I was at a Civil Disobedience action with Veterans for Peace, talking with one of my mentors, Mac Bica (VFP Long Island Chapter President and Vietnam veteran), about the importance of direct action and how it’s only one tactic among many. When Mac came back from the war he went about doing both the quiet and the not-so-quiet work: becoming a professor of philosophy, writing books on peace, and becoming one of the strongest proponents of the argument that moral injury is, in fact, an injury. I have no doubt that his activism played a vital part in that finally being recognized by the VA as a legitimate condition.

I think of my friend Rose, always the first to tell me how awesome she thinks I am, who has been doing the quiet work of feeding underserved communities here on Long Island for years. She’s a retired social worker with a debilitating back injury that required rods and screws, and it was the only thing that ever slowed her down—and she was still faster than most. Never looking for credit. Never working from ego.

I do believe people are motivated in different ways, and perhaps that’s why I have always felt more comfortable being loud. Both my husband and I have always responded best after being shamed, by each other. Something Gen X may have gotten wrong, but I’m sure others from my generation can relate.

After losing my mother I had put on quite a few pounds, and he jokingly said I had “grief bags.” That was it. I was motivated purely by “fuck you” energy. Before you judge him, let me say I have used the same tactic on him.

We can’t control what drives people into action. But what we can control is our desire to dictate which parts of it are “right” versus effective, because there is no right or wrong when it comes to changing the narrative. There is only change.

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Cynthia Tarana is a heavily tattooed ex-con with no college education and very bad punctuation. She lives on Long Island, NY where she pays extremely high taxes, likes to drink, rage against the machine, and shop at the GAP. She is a regular contributor to The Chaos Section. Follow her on Bluesky.

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