Excerpt From "No One Is Coming To Save Us"
Usually I put these in the announcement posts, but this zine is long as hell (56 pages!) and I had a lot to say about it in the announcement post, so I've given it it's own space here. Because this zine is so long as well, I've been able to put a whole chapter here so you can really get a taste for it. Let me know what you think if you take the time to read it! Here's an excerpt from the zine for your reading pleasure:
It’s No Fun Being The Cassandra
"You’ve probably heard the myth of Cassandra, right? She was the priestess of Apollo who was given the gift of prophecy, only to be cursed to have no one believe her predictions. She desperately tried to warn people of the downfall of Troy in the Trojan War, but no one believed her, and so Troy fell as she predicted.
If you’re a leftist, a history student or professor, or just someone who’s lived through it before and has been paying attention, I imagine you’ll find a frustrating amount of affinity with Cassandra, as I have. I’ve been yelling into the void that Trump was clearly a Nazi since 2016, an election I take no responsibility for since I wasn’t old enough to vote yet, and I have been desperately wishing I was wrong ever since.
I had hoped everyone saying I was overreacting was right, I tried to not let thinking about fascism consume me, and I spent years telling myself to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, only to have that feeling replaced with a dawning horror that has only grown since. I was right, Trump is and was an out-and-out Nazi, a white supremacist authoritarian who will stop at nothing to gain power and reshape the world to benefit people like him over all others, and being right fucking sucks.
I really wish he was just your average republican asshole politician like everyone tried to say he was, because god that would be a hell of a lot easier to deal with. So now we’re here, at the moment I’ve been trying to prepare myself for my entire adult life, and it seems like nobody has any idea what to do.
The democratic party has been all but dead on arrival, rolling over and letting Trump do anything he wants, including allowing through his openly corrupt supreme court picks, functionally neutering both of the branches of government designed to check the executive.
This is quite literally the worst fear of the founders of our government, the entire point behind having a three-branch governmental system, and in a matter of months it all has seemingly crumbled to ash. So, being a good little leftist, you decide to take direct action and get out there and protest, only to find that the protest movements have been neutered and sanitized too!
Anyone who was at the No Kings protests can tell you, it felt more like a pride parade than a protest, with people seemingly competing for the funniest sign more than they were pushing for change. And despite all the preparation you did and all the energy you felt on the way there, you went home again, and realized that all you accomplished is that everyone in your city went on a walk together. Fascism wasn’t pushed back, it wasn’t even challenged that day! Nothing was disrupted, the protests were permitted by the government and logistics was planned with the local police, making it impossible to truly disrupt anything. You look to places like Paris who know how to actually fuck shit up when the times call for it, and you wonder how they get people to do that. How do they get them past their fear of police violence?
And that right there, is the kicker. Americans, as a people, are deeply, deeply afraid. Copaganda has been rampant in our country for longer than I’ve been alive, so much so that every person in this country knows exactly what cops can get away with doing to you, and exactly how much your life can be ruined if you’re caught. We’re all so terrified of being shot for trying to do what’s right, for trying to raise hell in the face of fascism, that we’ll sit quietly and let it happen to us and to those around us; because at our core, we don’t want to sacrifice what we have.
Life in America, even as people are being disappeared off our streets, is comfortable. The status quo of the people hasn’t been disrupted yet. If you want to ignore the rise of fascism, it isn’t hard: Starbucks is still open, you can still go to the movies, the Switch 2 just came out, and if you try hard enough, you can convince yourself that nothing is going wrong at all.
So when Cassandra comes up to you screaming about fascism, the death of democracy in America, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and how if we don’t act now it’s gonna be too late, it’s easy to brush her off and go about your day.
I think a lot of people believe that when fascism “really” comes they’ll know it, because that beautiful status quo will finally be disrupted, and everyone will then have the implied permission to raise hell in response.
But ask yourself this, how far do they have to go before you start breaking the rules? If you’re waiting for them to start dragging people away to camps, they’re already doing that, and I can assure you if and when they turn those camps into death camps they won’t be announcing it. Are you waiting for them to march troops into your town to round up political dissidents? Because I’m sure there’s a lot more you can do now than you’ll be able to do then. Or are you just waiting, like so many other people are, for it to happen to someone you know? Will you then finally accept that fascism has come to America, when it shows up at your doorstep?
I hate to say this, but it’s more true now than it ever has been: If you’ve ever thought about what you would have done if you were alive during the holocaust, when the Nazis rose to power and started disappearing people, you’re doing it right now." -Excerpt from "No One Is Coming To Save Us" by Jay of Ink & Iron Zines
"No One Is Coming To Save Us" is available right now on my shop!
This excerpt is probably the piece of my own writing that rings in my head most often, and it's only gotten more relevant since I first wrote it.
