Watching the politics tag fill up with exhausted liberals talking about how they're too drained to keep resisting and no one should blame them for that and like. Yeah, you're right this sucks and you shouldn't be forced to do it to be treated as human and you shouldn't need to be able to be on and in activist mode all the time either and ALSO
I've been doing this since 2002. My mother did this from 1981-2015. My auntie marched in Alabama during civil rights and my childhood minister has been in resistence since the Vietnam war and has shown no signs of stopping as she collects civil disobedience arrests across all 50 states like badges of honor.
And you all are burnt out after 8 yrs of some of the biggest (and therefore LEAST DEMANDING ON YALL PERSONALLY) movements we've ssen in decades because you feel too poor and tired???????
My mama would go around to every grocery store she had friends working at in the valley and collect all the food they were gonna toss, then host educational salons where she fed everyone in the neighborhood and performed innoculation work. She was a single mom raising a deeply disabled child ALONE on a salary half that of her male coworkers you think she had money? You think she had TIME????? NO!
If you are tired now, I'm sorry to be harsh, but it is BECAUSE YOU DID NOT LISTEN when you were told you needed to settle in for the long haul. You DID NOT LISTEN when organizers shared with everyone their practices around self-care, specialization, community care, and communication, and you spent the last 8 years burning the candle at both ends in person and online with no regard for the actual WORK only for your own fear and feelings of reassurance.
This will never sustain change. I'm sorry. I truly am. I never wanted this for anyone who came after me and I have so much grief that it's here. But I also do not have time to force yall to fucking listen to us when we talk.
Stop trying to assert that only the wealthy and energetic resist. Anyone I see doing so will be bitten repeatedly until fucking dead.
If you're reading this and thinking "that' s all great to hear, but I still don't have the energy/capacity for [blank]" I want to tell you that you're doing this wrong.
Not every action is for all people. And that's not only okay but good. And you may need to either broaden your definition of what work needs to be done, or remember that a movement takes all kinds.
Personally, I realized early on that protests are not for me. I admire the people who go to them, and I will not join. This is not a moral failing on my part. My work is the behind-the-scenes work - I make phone calls, write letters, volunteer in small non-public settings.
We all need to play to our strengths if anything is going to keep going.
Take five minutes to do this for me. I'm serious - stop scrolling and do this for me:
List causes, movements, or situations you think are important. This can be everything from "anti-racism, broadly" to "the bridge in my town is vulnerable to flooding/climate change" to idk "my local paper needs to remain independent". Anything.
Think of all the different angles that are needed to support some of that work.
Do a quick internet search for places and people in your area who are already doing this work.
Combine what you learned in 2 and 3 to figure out what the least exhausting, most sustainable way for you to get involved in is. You may want to combine this with a "which work is most necessary" metric, but don't have to. Pull up your calendar, and schedule it. It can be as simple as "email X organization asking if they need help with backend computer work." It can be anything. But pick something and make your plan.
This!!!! Being realistic and honest with yourself about WHAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY CAPABLE OF is so important. This is - in no small part - a cornerstone of the idea of diversity of tactics! No single one of us is capable of all things, even if we only do them one at a time, and it will always be the act of networking our skills, capacities, and resources to create more than what any one of us can do alone.
The isolationism and hyper individualism of the hegemonic power structure doesn't immediately vanish when you set your mind to community organizing! You need to learn how to stop thinking of yourself as one person doing things you have sole authority over, and start learning how to be a part of a web of action and systemic dual power! It's hard and scary to do under pressure! And I believe in yall to be able to do it anyway!
These are all such important skills!! I have absolutely none of them! I would be an unmitigated disaster in all these roles and every time I'm forced to try anyway because I'm still the closest we've got I die a little inside! Please keep sharing yalls niche skills here, inspire each other! Motivate each other! Network!
We need preservers, too. Preserve and archive information. Art. Culture.
Yess!!! So many of the people I love who taught me this work were archivists or preservationists, not for museums or major institutions, but for individuals and families! The ability to maintain/repair/update old images or possessions to new mediums in order to preserve access is so fundamentally critical to the work of maintaining cultural existences!
Take photos! Write notes and dates and names on the back! Maintain and preserve the content of old books and journals! Learn who else is doing similar things for equipment or objects! Network!
and if nothing else, simply making your opinion known is a great way to help. Even whispers sound like screams when you put enough together.
Truthfully, one of the BIGGEST pieces of community organizing I do is just. Conversation.
Not even political conversation. Just normal social bonding activities and topics!
I bring spare herbs and eggs to the neighbors and ask after their kids and grandkids. I show up at the market and shittalk the weather with the folks staffing the stalls. I tell cashiers I like their style and ask if they remember where they got any of the pieces. I wave to the neighborhood children when I'm out with them and teach them how to cue my dogs with treats so they can safely pet the furballs. Whenever I swing by the 24hr diner in town, I chat up the waittress who always seems to be the only person working the floor, and I ask after her health and if she's getting enough time off her feet because I can tell no one else does.
I have no idea at the time if any of these conversations will bear fruit. But it is absolutely fucking critical that I inform you I am a visibly trans dyke with a buzzcut whose built like a brick shithouse even before I put on my four inch heels. I walk around town like this every single day of my life. I have shown up in everything from my most schlubby fuckboi sweatsuits, to my strut "of shame" outfits the night after a hook up, to full on "leather dyke about to go fuck something up", to "farm hand of questionable gender and even more questionable ethics about fucking the rancher's wife and daughters.
It does not matter how I look, people in town light up when they see me. They get excited to talk to me, to hear what I've been up to, and to tell me what's going on with them. Sometimes they even broach topics that they clearly understand we disagree on. I always let them reach across and open that door themselves. I don't affirm or agree with anything they might say before this point that I find inappropriate, but I don't argue either. I use what I learned as a "soft conversation closer" that essentially communicates to others "we can continue to talk, but it won't be about this. If you continue anyway, the conversation ends until we can talk about something else.
But like I said, eventually these people always manage to muster their courage. "[Redacted]," they ask, hesitantly, "have you heard about [insert fascist talking point]? It feels really big and present on the mind lately." And I say "why yes I have, and I agree, it HAS been big and on the mind lately. After all [insert appropriate de-radicalization/innoculation talking point]." And they look confused and repeat a phrase full of buzzeords they assume is a counter argument. At this point, *I* look confused and say "I don't think I understand what you mean. I'm a bit tired today so I might be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're saying [rephrased version of their talking point minus the buzzwords and plus some acknowledgement of the latent dogwhistles and indoctrination they relied on]. Could I ask you to try again and see if I have an easier time following your perspective?"
There is usually a pause as they wrestle with how to respond to this. Three outcomes split off from here
1) they really do rephrase their genuine concerns sans buzzwords and dogwhistles and we get to have a real and substantive conversation about our needs and shared humanity
2) they get angry that I will not simply change my mind in response to hearing their retort. This is a person to whom I say "it sounds like you feel really strongly about this and aren't comfortable with the idea that we disagree. Why don't we set this down for now, after all if anything changes we can always come back to it." And then I refuse to talk about it with them again until they can have the conversation with me without getting excessively angry.
3) they simply decide not to continue the conversation themselves because they either don't know how to or recognize that it would be unproductive in the moment to try.
Now I'm definitely not suggesting that everyone can or should do this. But there are so many ways every day we have to offer a glimpse of our humanity to people who need to know that it exists. If we are comfortably capable of doing this, it can be literally life saving, not just of the person you're talking to, but of dehumanized people in their future who may depend on that person being able to make a different choice than they would make now.
You do not need to be able to debate politics to do this. You can simply be human in other people's presence.
It will not shock me to learn that the isolationism of the world since the early pandemic has likely played a huge role in how vulnerable many people are right now to different kinds of radicalization and authoritarianism, and while I have incredible empathy for how burnt out and exhausted we all are, I cannot help but recognize that this is not a reality that can ever change unless some of us (also deeply exhausted and burnt out) continue to choose to invest in community and connection building regardless of what we may need or have space for. The fewer of us are carefully balancing how we can ensure we are able to continue doing that, regardless of how much or little support we ourselves may have, the more frequently those of us making that call will have to keep doing it. The less rest we will have. The more exhausted we will become. The fewer of us there will be. The more vulnerable our communities will be to the societal forces seeking to harm and destabilize us.
I understand people do not like this post. I've had a fair few comments already about how the opener was "barely salvaged" by other later comments.
But I cannot emphasize enough how much this is coming from love, solidarity, experience, and deeply painful and material understanding of what it has cost me my whole life to be someone who will never get to stop making this choice.
There will never be a day where I can afford to prioritize my own exhaustion over the lives and well-being of the people I have committed to caring for. This is not a role I will ever set down. And if that means I will do that increasingly alone until it kills me, I fucking will. I don't need any single specific person to walk with me on that journey. But it is so unfathomably devastating to see just how many potential walking comrades have decided for themselves that this must be **someone else's** weight to carry, and they will not contribute to it in any way that is hard on them. Do I want people to live like I do? God no!! That's part of why I do what I do.
But you have to understand. If I don't want anyone to do what I do I need to make sure the world is as kind as I can possibly encourage it to be every single fucking day between now and the inevitable heat death of the universe. And if people calling themselves my comrades are actively fighting me on that, making the world crueller and less safe to do my work in, then I can no longer afford to consider them my comrades at all.
OP this is a beautiful, hopeful, amazing post and I hope you know how valuable you are and how important your work is. I bet you do and I'm glad and I hope you're getting adequate rest and food and support. thank you for being in the fight <3
