They say the difference between a community and an audience is which way the chairs are turned. Sometime, around this time two years ago, in 2021, Operation Uplift pulled up its chairs in a circle. The exact date is not knowable, because like many great things, it didn’t begin with ceremony, but as a lighthouse in a stormy ocean that brought together weary shipwrecked sailors. Though we ended up here through the Rounding the Earth beacon, the man behind it insisted the chairs face one another. The stage was set for an amorphous entity, one that expanded with more people, more knowledge, more perspectives, and shaped through relationships.
“Community is our greatest technology”
-Mathew Crawford
This is an attempt to speak to who ‘we’ are that make up Operation Uplift, though ‘we’ are made of so many individual ‘I’s that we would be hard pressed to have found each other connected were it not for the dramatic plandemonium that ascended upon civilization. It’s perhaps best to say that we are connected through the solidarity of stepping out of the reality that the main narrative lives in.
Who are we?
“Operation Uplift is an informal network of volunteers… around the world looking for some way to help document, organize, and display challenging truths during the COVID-19 pandemic."
We are statisticians, and doctors, and artists, and nomads, and biologists, and photographers, and activists, and writers, and thinkers, and all sorts of ages and stages of our lives. Some of us live in the countries we are born in, some of us not. Some voted for Bernie, and some for Trump, maybe no one did for Trudeau, although no one asks; it’s just something that comes out naturally in conversation, and anyway, what is ‘vote’? Our beliefs may differ in politics and religion, our bodies may differ in amounts of melanin, but you will not find a bigot or a hater here, even though everyone is allowed and encouraged to be authentically themselves.
Many of us come from communities that reject who we are. We lost friends and family to the narrative. This mourning of prior real life friendships resulted in willingness to revisit all the ideas and beliefs that made us who we are, further stripping us down to the authentic essence of ourselves. Rarely has any one of us met another in real life, although technology has enabled some of our voices (and even faces) to be known to one another, yet there is a sense of trust. And what is ‘trust’ in the reality we live in, but the meta currency of our times, eh?
Around the Campfire
At any given hour, Operation Uplift’s Telegram channel might light up. Being spread around the globe, stuck in our own geographical time zones, it usually doesn’t go too quiet for too long, and sometimes one might wake up to hundreds of messages. The main mission, to document information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and its surrounding narrative in the Campfire.wiki:
“Those of us who have chosen to participate in this project reflect a similar broad range of skills and insights which we bring to this campfire to produce something together that we could not do alone.”
We sometimes fantasize about a time we could gather around a real campfire, preferably in Mauritius, because one of us sends us photos from those beaches, and you thought you had seen paradise! Other photos reveal other slices of our lives: pets, kids, gardens, hospital stays, that ginormous rat one of the husbands shot inside the fireplace. Humor is the natural lubricant of the group chat and through it, friendships blossomed. So much so that they birthed creative projects alongside the Adverse Events and the Spike Girls music collaborations and most notably, the Rounding the Earth podcast.
Here we are, two years later, unceremoniously celebrating our milestone. Or maybe we’ll choose a date and Zoom like normal people. Someone can screen share an image of a bonfire. And share a study recently published. Or a song. Or a story. Or a project…
The Operation Uplift Community