It’s been over 100 degrees for much of the day in New York City. The streets have that stunned, surreal feel of extreme weather. Your body and mind feel radically distinct. It’s a good moment to not think but experience what it means to live in the contradiction. There’s a sense of mourning among Occupy ranks as the possibilities seem to recede, even as others open up. Mainstream liberals are freaking out as they realize that in an advertising dominated election Mr Bipartisan is going down. Can you feel it?

There have been the usual quips about global warming–this is, after all, only the first day of summer. It doesn’t go anywhere. You may or may not be aware that this is the second day of the Rio+20 Earth Summit. It’s supposed to commit governments to action on the environment. Having wasted months if not years of preparation, the NGOs have withdrawn from the proposal process already. Absolutely nothing at all will come from this gesture, other than another round of appeals for donations.

The arrest of Mark Adams and the stresses of activism have produced a wave of anxiety in OWS. And then this appeared

Direct communication no. 1 is meandering across the Internet, hanging outside subway stations, being handed out at meetings. It rallys the moment.

Our work now focuses on how to undo this mess.

The problem is not the internal question of tactics, momentum or depression. The issue is that we live in the intense contradiction whereby, to take a not random example, any debt incurred by a bank must be made whole for the public good, while any debt incurred by an individual at the behest of one of those banks must be restored by them for both the public and the private good.

Occupy taught us that our best work is mutual aid in the widest sense. What is that sense? It is what we can call the right to look, the common, democracy to come, whatever. The direct way to put it, which I would not usually say out loud, as it were, if the blood were not boiling in my head, is love. By love I mean when I give to the other what I do not have to give. It is not, necessarily, simple. How can I give you the gift of ending your debt? Excluding the paternalistic charity of monetary exchange, that is. There’s a complex philosophy and anthropology that meets at this place. Another time, I’ll get to it.

For now, I’m depressed, anxious, overheated. By the way, Obama is not going to win. That doesn’t make me happy either for all his endless disappointment. I’m also hopeful. Because hope is hard, not a crappy slogan. We’re all working at it because that’s what mutual aid, or Occupy, or even that other thing, really means.