Discover Top Posts Tagged with #survival toolkit

or: yes it's bad, no we need not despair

#us politics tag #survival toolkit #people can have “good ideology” and not be good people to be around

Since the election was called for Donald Trump, the collective stress levels have risen so high that the tension in the air is palpable. Two

"In this moment, we have two months before the ship sinks lower and rather than wallowing in fear or operating from fear, I believe it is a time to get grounded, recalibrate for our coming reality, and to start planning. We have enough concepts of their plans to know that it’s probably a good time to draw closer to our communities in our geographic regions. If you don’t have one, it’s time to see how to become a part of one. It’s time to start moving away from social media because if even a fraction of what has been promised comes to fruition, a lot of us online will need to reduce our visibility.

As of right now, I am not planning to stop what I am doing but for my safety, I will be moving more of my work to Patreon and shifting how I post on these platforms. Given that I have been written about in publications and written for publications, I can’t exactly distance myself away from my work. But if you are a civilian, so to speak, it might be a great time to scrub your profiles and go low.

Start thinking about how you might live if money gets tight, reducing expenses, saving if possible. These aren’t bad ideas.

Ultimately though, don’t stop living. Instead, embrace life; embrace your people. In the days since the election, I have gathered with friends to break bread, had numerous long phone calls, and even Zoomed with my sisterhood of Black women. All of which calmed me down and got me back to reality. In this moment, I am okay, I don’t know what’s ahead but if I spend all this moment worrying about what might happen, I am not being present and, frankly, I am missing out on living. If the worst comes to fruition, I suspect I would regret spending our last days of relative peace worrying incessantly, when none of those worries can do anything.

Personally, I think self-care at this moment is reducing your time online. Fear is big business. The number of writers and creators I follow who are feeding us a steady diet of Big Fear has grown and the line between information and preparation and straight-up fear mongering has become extremely thin. Yes, there are historical markers that provide clues as to how this might all go down and being aware of them is useful but consuming them to the point where we are unable to function and plan is not helpful."

#us politics tag #survival toolkit #this writer is a decades long organizer #don't scare yourself to death but understand that people who know what's going on are taking this threat seriously #and begin to act for your long term survival and that of communities you connect with

#us politics tag #survival toolkit

Power analysis and power mapping visualize the relationships between different stakeholders, which can include and a

If you're doing work on an issue, or even just trying to comprehend the different elements involved in how things might go on an issue, doing a "power analysis" can provide insight. This guide provides a lot of ways you can use the tool to organize. I'd say it's also useful for coming up with more accurate analysis of a situation as you try to navigate and understand the situation we're entering.

It emphasizes two things that -- to put it very politely -- the "online left" struggles with: 1) comprehending that people are on a spectrum of agreement with you and that's okay - you can do good together without being in 100% ideological agreement! and 2) comprehending that power matters and you need access to it in order to make change.

Prof. Kent Wong, who has worked against tremendous odds to organize and support workers (documented and undocumented) in LA for decades, has used and taught this in his work.

I had to teach on the day of Trump's first inaugural - the spirits of the students were in despair and justified anger. I ended up changing my lesson plan and teaching Power Analysis and talking to them about things they want to see happen in their world.

I hope it will be useful to someone. I guess sharing it is now a Trump inaugural tradition for me 🫠 lol

#survival toolkit #us politics tag

Listening to a leftist podcast and they're like (paraphrased) "when we say 'get involved in community,' we don't actually mean most ideologically focused communities because, uh..."

"A lot of those suck"

"Yeah. They do."

"Yep. If you find yourself in a group that's, say, sad that Bashar al-Assad had to flee Syria--"

"Get out of there!"

"Absolutely!"

And I just laughed and laughed. In trauma.

Anyway. In an uncertain time, it's important to get good info and not end up falling into toxic community spaces. The episode had some good advice: