The World Is Yours
from the they-can't-kill-us-all dept
Forgive me for this digression. I know it’s usually left to Mike Masnick to lift us up from our collective doldrums when things seem even more hopeless than they did last year. His New Year’s posts are never wrong. There are always silver linings, even if the filigree is more difficult to detect with each passing year.
This isn’t about Mike or silver linings or the as of yet unfulfilled promise of the New Year. This is a post written by a die hard defeatist and cynic who generally views each passing moment with increasing levels of defeatism.
But I’m wrong. Mike is actually right, even if my spirits often pretend they’re anchored to the ground like so many pre-oh-the-humanity German-built dirigibles.
I will tell you why I’m wrong. And it’s embarrassing. I have plenty to say about lots of stuff but I rarely convert my words into action. Recently, however, I did. And it has made all the difference.
At the request of my oldest kid, we attended the recent “No Kings” rally in Sioux Falls. I was clad in my finest Da Share Zone anti-ICE gear:
He was wearing my protest alternate, a Black Sabbath-inspired bit of rhetoric sure to piss off white Christian nationalists:
Suitably suited, we headed to the protest with a friend of mine and his wife.
Long story short, it was life-affirming. It was exactly what anyone who feels they are losing hope needs. I feel I’m pretty good with word stuff, but I think Will Bunch absolutely nailed it in his post-No Kings column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Quoting Marlon Brando’s mantra in The Wild One (“What are you rebelling against? Whaddya got?”), Bunch moves on to quote real people engaged in protests against something both nebulous and evil… and finding solace in being around people just like them.
“You feel less isolated when you see everybody here, and then they feel less isolated,” Nancy Harris, a 62-year-old retired mental-health crisis counselor from Prospect Park, told me over the steady car honks from supportive motorists. “And I think it just motivates people in general…just putting good vibes out into the universe.”
There’s more. Here’s a 75-year-old protester who not only knows what’s at stake, but knows why you should never give up:
“I’ve been going up against the establishment my whole life,” said [John] Coia, speaking for a generation that grew up exercising its all-American right of free speech and, now in old age, is determined to keep using it while they still can. I asked him what was the last straw with Trump that convinced him to join “No Kings.”
“There is no last straw,” he said over the car honks. “It just keeps going. There’s a new straw every day.”
Both of these things can be true.
You can find hope in being with people who share your beliefs. You can also feel the fight is never-ending because the current administration just won’t stop being abjectly evil.
But the first thing is what matters: the government may never stop being evil, no matter who’s currently sitting behind the Resolute Desk. And people who want the government to serve the people and be less evil will always exist. The ebb and flow of these constants may shift the prevailing narrative, but it can’t undermine the actual truth — something Mike highlighted in a recent post about the horrors perpetrated by the administration in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Here’s the quote from the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer that Mike highlighted in a long, must-read post that pointed out everything that’s right about America, even when everything seems to be going wrong:
The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.
This is where we come together. Until recently, I believed that “coming together” was just a meeting of the minds. But that’s just preaching to the converted, which doesn’t really do much, even if my “converted” are objectively better people than the MAGA “converted.”
What really matters is that people are resisting in increasingly large numbers. We often consider the word “community” to be a cliche because that’s how the government uses it (for example, “Intelligence Community”). We view it with the same (healthy!) suspicion as we would statements delivered by company officials claiming they treat employees like “family.”
It never means anything until you’ve actually experienced (firsthand) a good one. “Family” isn’t a compliment if yours sucks. The same can be said for any “community.”
Unlike families, you can choose your community. You don’t have to align yourselves with empty mouths spewing even emptier platitudes. You just need to go out and see for yourself. Sure, I’m my own anecdata in this post. But trust me, if things feel hopeless, all you really need is the company of people who do this day in and day out, despite the table being stacked against them.
I’m sure many (if not nearly all) of you have already had this experience. My greatest regret is that I put it off for so long. No one who truly believes in the cause will care one way or another about your day-to-day devotion. They’ll welcome you and stand beside you. Participation can be its own reward. And you’ll leave feeling more inspired to be the change we need in this world.
I just wish I had done this sooner. The world is ours. Let’s go take it.
Filed Under: corruption, evil, no kings, trump administration
Comments on “The World Is Yours”
Yup
Wearing my shirt, I AM ANTIFA
In Sequim, WA, I was out with 1000 pissed old guys/gals.
I sang the 2019 folk song “The Liar Tweets Tonight” by Christine Lavin and The Callithumpians to about 2/3 of them. Resist.
While protestring at a busy intersection, a guy in a lifted truck covered in the sort of stickers one might expect, yelled out to heckle us “You’re not going to change anything!” and without missing a beat the guy next to me calmy but very loudly replied “I’m here because I’m confident enough to care. Now drive away, coward.” and I saw that heckler’s ego just melt away. It was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
You lost the election.
You’re also against the law being enforced.
I want you to feel worse.
Re:
You know what’s equal parts funny and sad about your comment?
I don’t want Trump voters to suffer.
Don’t get me wrong, I want them to feel bad about the choices they’ve made. Trump is fucking over the whole goddamn world right now. The people who put him into office should feel bad about that, especially when Trump’s decisions screw over his own voting base. But those people shouldn’t have to suffer from his decisions. Like, they shouldn’t have to worry about whether they’ll have to skip a meal to pay a utility bill.
That isn’t to say they shouldn’t suffer social consequences for their decision. Right-wingers being shunned by “polite society” for making life worse for tons of people, both in the United States and abroad, by way of voting Trump into office. But they should still have access to all the necessities of life without having to worry about giving one of them up to afford the other.
Also goddamn, dude, nobody here has ever said Trump lost the election. Why are you so angry about “your” “victory”?
Re:
Y’all are black-bagging Native Americans to concentration camps. Miss me with this bullshit.
Re:
Your regime is constantly breaking the law. As such, your supposed reverence for the law is demonstrably performative. You’re a bad-faith liar.
I can admit I have been without hope for a few years now. Whenever I speak to people about trying to build a small business and help the local community, it is largely responded to with complete indifference. Whenever I talk about technology in general, I’m frequently looked at like I’m an idiot. I’ve run numerous experiments to increase my websites presence only to see very little in terms of results. I’ve invested money into advertising and it’s starting to look like I might as well have burned that money in a fireplace. I’ve tried being out and meeting people only to be greeted by empty rooms with four walls. My family is dying out one member at a time.
I only continue doing what I’ve been doing because I don’t know what else the heck I’m supposed to do. I’ve been given platitudes many times over the years like, “there’s someone for everyone”, “it’ll all work out”, and “success is just around the corner”, yet despite my strides to keep going, I’ve gotten no shortage of emptiness after.
So, forgive me for my skepticism that things are ever going to get better. I’ve been told this sort of thing for well over a decade now.
Re: Tim's burst(?) of optimism helps, but . . .
(Puts on poker face) I see your decade and raise you five decades.
Hell yeah. I have been to every No Kings, Ice Out, etc. protest in my area in the last year. Anyone who thinks protesting doesn’t matter needs to attend one of these events. They matter. Protesting matters. Every time, I come away with renewed will and energy to keep resisting and speaking out against this evil, stupid, soulless regime. There is a collective optimistic energy that cannot be denied. It is especially encouraging to see the handful of MAGA counter-protesters (when any bother to show up) against the thousands of us. It puts into perspective how far we outnumber them, despite the domination of the daily news cycle with the latest Trump atrocity.
Thank you. And please thank your kid too.
What I find I enjoy most is making eye contact with passing motorists and waving at them with a big smile. Coastal California is a pretty easy crowd, so people tend to respond positively.
Interesting. I can definitely relate to some of what you’re saying, but I also often find protests depressing, since they rarely engage in any actually meaningful direct action, mutual aid, or anything that challenges power in any way. My brain might just be wired to be even more depressed than yours.
Re:
The protest is the challenge.
Millions of people across the entire United States stood up and declared that no, they don’t like the fascist sitting in the White House. Given how that fascist and his underlings would love to turn any dissenters into bodies meant to fill either prisons or morgues, standing up those assholes is a direct challenge to their power: “You want us to shut up? Fuck you, make us.”
But more to the point, a protest is also a place to find like-minded people and set up future actions such as mutual aid events/programs. That’s part of what makes large protests like the No Kings protests special: With so many people attending them, you would have to actively avoid socializing if you didn’t want to find a few people with whom you could collaborate on mutual aid and other direct actions. There’s also something hella special about seeing so many people, even some with whom you might disagree on other issues, standing together and saying in one loud voice that they will not let themselves or their neighbors be disappeared without making some fucking noise about it.
Don’t take any of what I’ve said here to mean that all we need to do is protest. That would be foolish of me to say or believe. But a protest is a good first step, especially for people who are new to doing political activism and such. That’s how we should look at protests: not as the endgame, but as the beginning of something better. The revolution is not an event, but a process—and protests are a good place to start that process.
Re:
They inspire more people to take direct actions. This is how political rallying works.
People who don’t even vote because they don’t think it counts see other people who would vote the same way, and get up and vote when the timw comes.
People ignoring everything because they are too busy, or too depressed, are reminded that there are problems and that other people do care.
The powers that be and their ilk clearly take it seriously enough.
More protesting inspire even more people to join the next protest. And at a certain point, when enough people are protesting, narratives start shifting. Elected officials start noticing that they may not survive the next election if they do notchange their behavior.
The more people protest and the longer it goes on makes it easier to sustain a culture that is actively enough against bad government that more people stay engaged long-term and outcomes begin shifting.
Just look at what a minority of loudmouths did to shift this country to Nazi territory – even before they started getting funded by big money.
But yeah, you gotta begin playing the messaging long game like the far right has. And protests are part of that.
You guys have too many straw men that you regularly fight in your mind. I am not a Christian, but I am a nationalist as I understand what borders do – keep highly disparate sets of rules and cultures that absolutely don’t get along or have the same standards apart. I notice that you set aside rules when it gets in the way of what you think is holy. For instance, the more mass you’re controlling on a highway, the more important it is that you understand what you’re doing, understand English / road signs, and generally have higher competence than other drivers. Officials from states with people of your beliefs do not agree.