November 6, 2024
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
While we have a diversity of opinions within our community, last night’s election has been very difficult for many of us. It can be a hard thing to walk into the classroom or join a meeting with colleagues or students on a day like this. But we aren’t alone.
Now more than ever, I am grateful to be organizing alongside colleagues who are ready to face whatever comes next with empathy and courage.
For a couple centuries now, people who recognize the power of community and human connection as a force for good in the world have called this “solidarity.” Solidarity is a recognition of the reality that we are bound up in one another, and that those relationships imply responsibilities to each other. Solidarity does not mean that our issues are all exactly the same, or that we’re experiencing hardship or oppression or exploitation in the same way or to the same extent. It means that in the struggle to overcome those things, we need one another. And that there is joy in the communities we will build within the struggle.
Regardless of the outcome of this election, it was going to take real commitment and careful organizing to build healthy and just futures within our communities. As a result of this election, we’ll be organizing within a different political context. Our work will have to adjust. We know that labor unions and higher ed will be under attack, as will many members of our communities.
We need each other. We did yesterday, and we will tomorrow.
In solidarity,
Ben Cushing
President, FFAP
Sociology Faculty