How To Break Stuff Vol. 2

The Monkey Wrench Gang

These are dark days, on the edge of a dark age. I pray I am overreacting, and that what we face is another four years of incompetence and fear. But I worry things could get much worse.

In that spirit, I’m re-launching this newsletter.

Repair and DIY is about self-sufficiency — making what you have work for you rather than buying something new and throwing something out.

That kind of self-sufficiency can get coded as right-wing: the rugged individualist; the doomsday prepper.

Here’s the thing though — if you can do something for yourself, you can do it for your neighbor. Neighbors helping neighbors is the foundation of a community, and community is the foundation of solidarity.

We don’t know what’s ahead. But making our communities able to sustain themselves, helping one another out in times of need, and being able to function semi-independently from the big industrial complexes that seem bent on bending the knee all seem pretty important in a functioning democratic space.

Doing-it-ourselves, I truly believe, also makes us participate more fully in the world. In the past few years there’s been a lot of talk of a crisis among the young men of our country — and some talk that that’s behind this rightward swing.

I don’t believe in the notion that working with tools is a “masculine” enterprise. But I do think working with your hands on a physical problem is a phenomenal way to “touch grass,” and build a hell of a lot of confidence. So I’ll take all comers here.

This place might get more philosophical, but I also want to make it more practically useful.

So let me know what you want to see here.

Look out for one another, and watch this space.