3 Years

"Happy" Anniversary

In Feb of 2022, I floated this idea in the Red Wine and Blue SWEEP group about making little message rocks as a way for us introverts to add what we have to say to the protest messaging going on around us. I came to realize that I simply wasn’t going to do any out in the streets protesting and I needed to stop wringing my hands about it and figure out what I actually would do. I figured any little thing I would actually do is better than all the big things I had to admit to myself I wouldn’t do.

The post got a lot of enthusiastic response, so a month later, I started the Facebook group Liberal Rocks, set up a quick online shop as a way to distribute rocks and said “I’ll figure this out as I go”. I’m usually one to do a lot of planning and very little doing, so this was completely outside my norm.

I didn’t really think it would catch on. I’m one of those people who always has a lot of ideas, but can never really get anybody to go along with them. I’ve never had any kind of following that would make my online words get to anywhere. I kind of announce my ideas out into the void, and everyone just ignores me. But for some reason, this one stuck, and people followed me from SWEEP to see what I was going to do in my own space.

At the time, DeSantis had just passed the “don’t say gay” law, and other laws basically allowing people to plow their cars into liberal protesters. I feared that we were headed down a path towards a Nazi regime that would one day see us unable to speak to each other like the handmaids of Gilead. I thought I was being ridiculously alarmist even thinking along those lines when creating a means of protest. I thought about how pottery survives for centuries and if Offred were walking along the sidewalk with her head down a few years from now, what could I put out into the world that would be small enough that it wouldn’t be found and removed by opposition, but that she might find it few years later to provide hope and inspiration? That’s what I had in mind when I designed the rocks.

Despite feeling the embarrassment of being alarmist, I convinced myself to keep going thinking that it took 40 years for the GOP to see the fruit of the seeds of culture change they started planting quietly in the 80’s. If they could do it and change our culture so drastically with nothing more than insidious messaging and patience, I may as well get started on turning things back around to fix things 40 years from now using the same method. We got here by lies being repeated over and over again in an information bubble with no contradiction until those lies felt true. Maybe I could do the same thing in the other direction. If nothing else, at least people could see a dissenting opinion existed. And why not make a bunch of rocks and find places to leave them? It’s a fun activity! Wheeee!!!!

But the world this project was born from doesn’t exist anymore. In that world, we saw the gloom and doom as a possibility, but deep down felt relatively secure. Everything operated within a system. We looked at the horrible going on and while we hated and feared it, we still had procedures we could rely on to try to eradicate it. We were scared, but still had that sense in the back of our minds that everything would eventually be ok. We thought were fighting to rid ourselves of the rest of the poison that we had already survived the worst of.

I think we all thought that we would win this election and finally put the final nail in the coffin of grievance governing. I started making a different set of rocks leading up to the election thinking I would be changing the tone of the project to match the return of hope and growth. Those unfinished rocks went into a bucket in the back of my closet in case things ever change, and Dark Libby was born to respond to this new world.

I’m not ok. I see the headlines and feel sick to my stomach. I try to think of some way for things to work out or some means of escape and I hold back tears (or not) because I can’t figure one out. At the end of the day, I realize how stiff my body is from the tension I can’t help but hold within it.

In three years, we’ve managed to scatter approximately 58,000 rocks throughout the country. I don’t feel like I’m a part of creating what will be anymore, I feel like I’m leaving behind evidence of what was. I’ll keep going until someone manages to stop me. Either I’m such small potatoes that no one will care what I’m doing, so there’s no threat to me in doing it, or what I’m doing is threatening enough to them to try to shut me down which would prove it’s too important stop. Whichever is true, here I go.

3 years, one day, fifty eight thousand and one.