This post brought something up for me, I decided to talk about this in a separate post because I didn't want to derail the OP.

This is a point that OP made about mutual aid networks, and why they're not a substitute for public policy:

forcing me to be vulnerable to my neighbors' whims for my survival is not justice and it is not liberation.

I feel this. This is how you get toxic cults, hyperconformity, and witch hunt culture.

I might have answered "yes, let's go for it" 25 years ago, when I was 21 and still lived in a big city and still knew other Jewish people besides my own aging family, didn't have chronic pain, and had more economic privilege than i do now.

The irony is that what made me say things like this was not having to actually depend upon mutual aid networks outside of my own family. (And lots of us don't even have that.) It's easy to say "we can all rely on mutual aid" when 1) you don't actually have to do it and and or 2) you're accepted enough to have access to it.

Basically you're saying that only someone totally accepted by an informal group of people, is entitled to survival. If you're a minority or a pariah relative to the space you're stuck in, what then?

I don't like the idea of turning survival into a middle school popularity contest.

Yeah, there’s this attitude that if you’re a Good Person (tm), then you obviously won’t have any trouble finding an accepting and supportive community, and well, *laughs bitterly in neuroatypical*

Yeah

Also, I originally thought I should leave this post alone, but I have changed my mind so I will now add. 

I’ve been in supportive communities full of well-off, approximately or largely neurotypical people which completely, comprehensively failed in a crisis for the simple boring reason that we collectively needed more person hours of care than usual... but we also collectively had fewer to give. And I cannot even begin to imagine how much worse that would have been if we were more marginalized or less abled.

I was a little bit involved in putting on the north east regional Rainbow Gatherings, the first couple of years. These gatherings were generally held in the national forests, which means the mountains. Over and over again, there would be clashes in Council where a wheelchair user would ask for an exception to the No Motor Vehicles rule because their wheelchairs weren’t up to the challenge of the steep terrain. There were always purists who objected to the exception and usually one purist would volunteer to push the wheelchair user wherever they wanted to go. Then after a couple of hours, the person doing the pushing would get bored and just abandon the  wheelchair user beside a trail, forcing them to beg passers-by for help getting back to their camp.

The Rainbow Gatherings were just about the most mutual-aid-based events of their time. They worked so well for most of their attendees that FEMA studied them as a model for disaster response, but there were always these glitches around accessibility. Maybe in a culture that has always had a strong ethic of mutual aid, where people were brought up in it, there wouldn’t be these glitches, but most of us are products of late capitalism. We just aren’t formed for it. We are too used to self-indulgence. We’re not there yet.

arghh tumblr fails forever there is a lot of good discussion and points being made about community, anarchy, and networks but there’re all in different sub-branches of this post 

No one’s survival should be dependent on other people’s [strong and sustained; see example above re: wheelchair users in Rainbow Gatherings] goodwill.

As a Gen Xr with a lot of Gen X friends, I've seen this experiment play out with all of our Boomer parents, and with the seniors my parents are friends with.

Many of them -are middle class [1] in particular, and many never had (and thus gotten burned by) the "let's all live together as a bunch of buds" experience in the 60s/70s. So they may still harbor some utopian ideals about what a mutual aid community and single-generational household will be like.

And they always seem to find out that these community situations rely on 1) none of them actually being too old, 2) none becoming disabled, 3) none of them being poorer than anyone else. Even if they can save money by combining households, there still gets to be a point where they're all collectively too old to provide the kind of support they imagined over the long term.

I'm seeing enough where my mom's friends end up moving away because they have to move in with their kids, and nobody planned for this. (Gen Xrs may be anticipating this issue more than our own parents are.)

If my mom's friends can't even keep a writing or game group going because of this or that person moving away and into assisted living or in with their kids, then imagine an actual mutual aid network trying to survive *every person in it getting old.*

[1] this is important, because it's a middle class specific issue at a point in history where aging middle class no longer have pensions/robust health care/have lost their retirement savings. If poor, they are more likely to already live in a multigenerational household or may have never *not* lived in one. (Or they may have nothing at all... which sucks.) If rich, they can afford assisted living or the support required to remain in their own same-age community.

It’s one thing to volunteer to get someone’s groceries once a week. It’s quite another to help them use the toilet twelve times a day. The latter is absolutely not sustainable on a volunteer model. Someone who is doing that has a full time job, and deserves to be paid for it.

And people in need of care are often not sweet, polite, people. Some of them are. Some of them aren’t. Some of them are in pain, find reviving help humiliating, have other frustrations in their life, and will consistently take that out on the people supporting them. Some of them are appalling, and cruel and verbally abusive.

Those people, the ones who hurl racial slurs at support staff, who make cruel comments, who hurt people, also deserve care. There’s no level of awful a person reaches where they deserve to stave to death or sit in their own faeces for hours on end.

People who will volunteer to spend hours a day with someone who is cruel to them are very rare. People who have the time to do an 8 hour volunteer night shift even one day a week are very rare.

This should be paid work. It’s impossible to provide care to meet essential needs without paying carers. People whose communities hate them, for good or bad reasons, deserve to have their basic needs met, and you can’t do that on goodwill.

my parents have been part of the same church for almost 40 years. They have a close group of friends near their own age, and a bunch of people younger than them who have joined the church at one point or another. they have a phenomenal network for mutual aid, for which as their daughter living several states away I am very grateful.

They also have Medicare and Social Security. Because while a mutual aid network is great for bringing casseroles after open heart surgery, they aren't going to be paying for the surgery or doing the skilled nursing care you need when someone's cracked your ribs open and rooted around in your internal organs.

intergenerational networks of friendship, support, and mutual aid are amazing and I wish more existed outside of churches (I am an agnostic 42yo queer woman - I have plenty of reasons I am not part of a church). but they are a complement to an institutional social safety net, not a replacement for it.