Do not bring body bags to the end of the world.

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When I was twelve, a woman who lived down the street taught my Sunday school class. Her lessons were the first time I recognized the space between what I was taught at home and what I was taught at church. Around the dinner table, my parents talked about a god with enough love to sustain everyone. At church, my teacher talked about a god who used scarcity to sift people.

I decided my parents were right and my teacher was wrong. There was one complication. Her lessons were taught from a manual published by our church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I tried not to think about what this meant.

One Sunday, our teacher taught us a lesson about preparing to survive the end of the world. Righteous people who heeded the words of the LDS prophets would be spared. Our prophets taught that each LDS family should be ready to sustain themselves through the catastrophes leading up to Christ’s Second Coming.

Each LDS family was supposed to have one year’s worth of food storage. She read from a list of suggested staple foods - oats, beans, wheat, dehydrated potatoes. The cans of food could be stacked in the garage, the basement, or, if space was tight, under our beds. Our teacher told us she parked in the driveway so her family could fit two years of food storage in the garage. She’d also made her additions outside of the church’s suggestions,

“For example, every year I add to my supply of contractor trash bags. The Second Coming will be preceded by wars, natural disasters, and increasing everyday violence. Eventually, our systems will be overwhelmed. Emergency services will be disrupted. Our town and neighborhoods won’t be spared. We will need to help dispose of the dead. Big black trash bags are economical body bags.” 

Before she ended the lesson, she asked us what we had in our food storage. A couple of kids raised their hands - wheat, a wheat grinder, honey, rice, beans, textured vegetable protein. She wrote their answers on the chalkboard. 

I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, afraid my panic would spill out on the floor. No one had ever told me the world was going to end. I wasn’t prepared. 

Over dinner, I told my parents about the lesson. I started sobbing around the time I got to “textured vegetable protein.” Why hadn’t they told me the world was going to end? We didn’t have food storage. Why weren’t we ready? Those black trash bags would be used for our bodies!

Once my parents pushed through their initial reactions - she taught you WHAT - they told me the end of the world was a metaphor. 

“But, Meggi, let’s say the end of the world was a literal event. God wouldn’t ask us to store body bags for our neighbors, God would ask us to store extra rice for our neighbors. We are not here to dispose of each other, we're here to care for each other."

I was still a kid. I am not sure how my parents addressed the issue at church. I just know there were no more lessons about body bags. 

As an adult, I can evaluate this moment while standing outside of the context of my childhood panic. I understand now that a White woman with shelves full of food for her family and body bags for her neighbors is a pretty literal representation of how White women have historically hoarded care resources.

I’ve also developed a greater understanding of this teacher, and all the women like her, who frightened me over the years. She believed what she was taught. She was trying to keep her panic from spilling out on the floor. I am not excusing her - she’s not mine to excuse. But I can see better when I remember complexity. 

I no longer attend the LDS Church. But I do believe in the end of the world. I believe the world ends over and over again. And I know that righteousness has nothing to do with who is spared.

When we say “the world” we’re not referring to a single planet. We mean the filaments of information, relationships, and culture that weave a collective experience of reality. When enough filaments snap, the world blows apart. This happens all the time. 

Sometimes the world disintegrates over generations - the last breath of the last Etruscan. Sometimes the world collapses - the Bronze Age cracking under the stress of drought, famine, and fire. Sometimes the world is demolished - every genocide is an engineered ending of the world. 

A lot of people feel like we are at the end of the world. It's possible! Donald Trump’s second term might be part of the world ending, or it might not. I won’t ever know. Neither will you. The end of the world is like starlight - we can only see it through a great distance of time and space. Still. I keep thinking about that childhood Sunday school lesson on preparing to survive the end of the world. 

LDS Church claimed food storage could make a household "self-reliant" enough to survive the end of the world. And like, I get the appeal! What if survival was just a matter of storing a year’s worth of textured vegetable protein? That would be so simple for someone like me. And there's certainly nothing wrong with having some long-term food storage! But I understand that the self-reliant single-family household is a White supremacist disruption, engineered to extract value from care. The myth of American Individualism can’t help us survive what its practitioners have wrought.

My parents were right. We can't be here to dispose of one another, we must be here to care for one another. But how?

The answer includes a radical reworking of philoxenia - an ancient Greek form of hospitably. Phileo means a love that responds to a person’s value. Xenos means ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner.’ 

Philoxenia was a system of mutual obligation that turned each household into a way station. When a stranger knocked on your door, he became your guest. As a host, you offered a meal, shelter, and safe transport to the stranger’s next destination. In return, the guest was courteous and provided information gathered from his travels. 

The ancient Greek world ended a long time ago. It’s impossible to observe all of its light from here. But we can see how this institutionalized relationship made sense within its historical context. Trade and travel were common. But there were few systems connecting one place to another. Hospitality became infrastructure. 

To the average Greek, philoxenia was a practice that extended beyond the scope of a social contract. The Greeks believed travelers could be gods in disguise, knocking on doors to test the virtue of each potential host. When a person unknowingly hosted a god, they demonstrated theoxenia. When a person unknowingly turned away a god, they risked the god’s wrath. This belief reinforced the infrastructure that allowed trade. But it reinforced other things too - like the dehumanization of people who were not free men.

Philoxenia was an obligation that could only exist between free men. Of course, the work of philoxenia was performed by people who were not assigned the value of full personhood. If their guardian welcomed a guest, women did not have the right to refuse to accommodate. They did not even have the right to speak. Telemachus told Penelope to shut up - and so she did. In wealthy households, enslaved people grew the crops, made the food, served the meals, and suffered their enslaver’s wrath. Children only grew into people who were owed care if they grew into free men.

A stranger could become a guest by knocking on a door, but no mechanism in Greek culture turned women, children, and enslaved people into humans with rights. Of course, that didn't stop them from being humans with rights! It just kept many people from recognizing each person for what they were - equally and inherently valuable people.

The ancient Greek world grew out of the collapse of the Bronze Age. Philoxenia may have developed to help people survive the end of the world. It also framed the world that followed: A world where men who might be gods shelter other men who might be gods and call it love. A world where liberty required the dehumanization and exhaustion of women, children and people deemed ‘natural slaves.’

If this all feels a little familiar, it’s because these filaments still bind the world we are in now. 

Still, I find my perspective illuminated by a system of mutual obligation that turns each household into a way station. I’ve written about this on and off for years. But I feel an increasing urgency to understand the practicalities of creating real-world infrastructure out of love. Not phileo! A different kind of love. A love without hierarchy or dignitas. The kind of love we call care work. I’ll be thinking this through with you over the next several months. I want to have some practices in place before Donald Trump takes office. 

I must emphasize that I am not sitting here dreaming up something new. Care work as infrastructure is older than Homo sapiens! Neanderthals who could not help their babies survive did not dispose of their bodies efficiently - they buried them with flowers. They buried their children with care. I stopped trying to discover new things a long time ago. I spend most of my time trying to understand the things that seem to exist outside of - or maybe in defiance of - time. 

Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair. - Mariame Kabe

If you’d like to think about care work as infrastructure, I’ve got some reading for you! Pretty much everything Mariame Kabe has ever written. But especially the book Kabe co-wrote with Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You. 

Here are two ways you can get this book!

Download it for free! 

Let This Radicalize You is published by Haymarket. Haymarket consistently publishes work that challenges me, expands me, humbles me, hopes me. (If we can be humbled, we can be hoped? Maybe?)

True to form, Haymarket is greeting the end of the world with great care. For the next eight days, they are giving away a collection of invaluable books for free: Ten eBooks for Getting Free. I've read three of them: Elite Capture, Hope in the Dark, and Let This Radicalize You. Each is excellent. I can't wait to read the other seven.

Let me give you a physical copy. 

Fill out this form!

There is something about holding a book, marking it up, making it a part of your physical world. I wish I could buy thousands of copies of this book and send one to each of you!

Instead, I can treat five of you to a copy of your own. (It's a start!)  I'll purchase the books through Matter, a local Black and Woman-owned bookstore for "revolutionaries, designers, and other thinking persons." And yes! You can Shop at Matter no matter where you live!

If you'd like me to send you a physical copy, please fill out this form with your name, email, and your physical address. This is open to all subscribers - free and paid. I will dispose of all the information once the five recipients are randomly selected.

Pocket Observatory is utterly dependent on the support of readers like you. If I've given you something to think about for a day, a week, or a month consider making a one-time donation so I can keep writing! Buy me a pen, or a used book, or 48 minutes of childcare!