Openings out of fought closures

A thought, following the library study-in this weekend (and what to me was remarkable, namely a self-constituting group that formed out of a disparate collection of a couple hundred, a group that recognized our numbers, composition, and potential force, and asserted ourselves through mass argument, a channeling of palpable excitement at the prospect of such an emergent formation, and the clear-eyed recognition of where we stood and how we appear).

It's one thing to struggle to close off and hold a space against those who may try to enter and remove you. It's a whole other, and far more powerful, thing to insist on not closing that space but to hold that space open to others, to be enough of a mass to assert not just the capacity to shut down but to use better. The endpoint is not barricades, human or objects, capable of withholding. The point on the approaching horizon is to hold out - and to take hold collectively - without needing those barricades.