America has it’s shit together, that’s why we’re able to build a concentration camp over night, why we have a pedophile in charge and why we can just casually kidnap a head of state without anyone batting an eye. This isn’t morons blundering around, this is winning a chess tournament by clubbing the rest of the competition to death. It won’t get better if no one tells us to stop.
Meanwhile, I get reminded every day that it’s my fault personally for letting a nation I had no choice in being part of turn into something so disgusting. As if I need only to get off my couch and blast my way through these blundering Nazis like an 80’s action film. I’m told to protest and participate as if my lack of presence was the sole thing that held back the marches and my congressman hadn’t blocked my phone number for calling to complain.
As mentioned below, my spouse is a first generation American with brown skin in a Republican state. If any attention is drawn to us, her, her parents, her autistic brother, the lady that cuts my hair, the grocery we visit down the road, half the parents in our neighborhood, I’m the only person in my community that isn’t currently represented in the ICE victim pool. If I rock the boat every single person I care about gets a plane trip to a foreign prison.
Every day it gets worse. Eventually, it won’t be plane rides, it will be ditches. Even if I don’t attract the attention of the government, it’s cultists yell racial slurs as they drive lifted trucks past my community. They gnaw at the bit for a chance to cut loose and remove this stain from their white city. They look at me with contempt in the stores for betraying the white race to love a brown woman.
I’ve seen the local protests, 10 people with signs on a busy intersection a mile from the courthouse. The police point and laugh as commuters throw drinks at them from their cars for thinking that human rights belong in a red state.
What the fuck do I do? What can I, standing here, actually do to change anything? There isn’t a single action that I can take that does not threaten to burn down my community and leave my child an orphan, and even still I’m here asking how I can solve this problem.
You can’t solve the problem on your own and that’s the point. Instead of just driving past those protesters go join them. Invite others to go with you. Start a new organization of some kind in your community or volunteer with an existing one. Do whatever is in your power to do.
Victory over fascism is not something that can be bought from Amazon. It requires active participation. The action is less important than the participation. Just pick something and do that until you find something better.
That something better is what I’m begging for. I’ve stood and chanted, signed petitions, called representatives, stood in the rain to vote, taken every person I know to the polls, and the fascists still sit in office. I don’t need a prettier protest sign, I need someone to put a wrench in my hand and tell me the bolts that need tightened. I need someone with a plan that isn’t just “tell them we disaprove.”
I get that you also don’t have a better answer, that’s ok. This isn’t so much an argument about how as it is an extended scream into the void. I’m here, I’m willing, someone please fucking radicalize me already!
Not to lash out at you specifically but why are USians so stubbornly focused on the interacting with politics along the corporate party approved pathways? Even as others tell y’all it’s always back to voting, polling, petitions, campaign rallys.
Join an actual worker’s party or volunteer that time towards community outreach orgs rather than the popularity contests of millionaires funded by billionaires. Again, not to go off on you specifically but I’ve seen this aimless despair all over Lemmy, like everything you could possibly do is useless and, like, yeah, but only if you stay within that framework. That’s what the framework was built to do.
I can’t speak for all of us but in my area there aren’t any of those in my area. There are 4 community outreach groups in my area, two of them are churches and the other two are “non-denominational” shelters that are run out of churches. Try as I might, I’ve never found a worker’s party, I don’t think those are a thing here in the us. Outside of that, there’s a ton of volunteer options in my area if I want to help the homeless, stray cats, even the elderly. I love those, they’re great work, they don’t fix this.
I already do what I can for local politics, it isn’t making a difference, but maybe in 10 years we can get a mayor that isn’t going to raise tax on poor neighborhoods. I do wish I’d gotten into this 20 years ago, it’s on me and those like me for letting it get this bad, but guilt is about as useful as the few things I can volunteer for.
And what you expect other people to do? What am I supposed to do from the other side of the world? Nothing I do will make any change to your paedophile regime. In fact, why should any other country help you? What if your warmongering country attack my country? Why the fuck should others clean your own country’s mess?
Should/could the US population do more to get their batshit crazy government in line? Abso-fucking-loutly!
Should the sane countries of the world do more to push back on us and check our power grabs? Also Abso-fucking-loutly!
Why is any consumer anywhere outside of the US purchasing any of our shit? I recently saw a graph on the global sales of US liquor and most countries had like a 10-20% drop in sales and only Canada went hard with a 60-80% drop (apologies, I’m pulling this from memory so it’s pretty vague).
The only answer is that there is no action you can take that will assure you of that. If you do nothing, it is certain to happen should they succeed. If you do something it is possible that will happen and we succeed in stopping them. Or that we all die in the fires together.
Or we could stop them and you will all live. That’s is the best case, but not guaranteed. What do you want to work for? Your family is in danger now. Currently.
This is a beautiful sentiment that I’ve already passed. I want better, I want to be part of making better, but I do not know how to do that and apparently no one else does either because every time it comes up I get this this same answer. Where is our MLK, where is our Malcolm X, where is the map I need to be more than scared and alone?
I reached out to see if there’s any active members in my area. I’m already another warm body on a stat list for so many things, I don’t have faith in that going far.
I don’t need a slogan to chant, I need a general to follow.
This attitude of the Americans emboldened my theory that they are 100% willing to send the rest of the world into extinction just to protect their own comfort.
Well as you’ve explained at length, there’s nothing that can be done and you (and those who think like you) are consumed with fear. To you, there is no hope so why bother. I don’t have anything else to say to say on this so have a good day.
If you have given up on trying to fix where you live (which may be totally reasonable), then move to somewhere with likeminded people. Once you’re in a safer place, then you can speak out and fight for what you believe in.
America has it’s shit together, that’s why we’re able to build a concentration camp over night, why we have a pedophile in charge and why we can just casually kidnap a head of state without anyone batting an eye. This isn’t morons blundering around, this is winning a chess tournament by clubbing the rest of the competition to death. It won’t get better if no one tells us to stop.
Meanwhile, I get reminded every day that it’s my fault personally for letting a nation I had no choice in being part of turn into something so disgusting. As if I need only to get off my couch and blast my way through these blundering Nazis like an 80’s action film. I’m told to protest and participate as if my lack of presence was the sole thing that held back the marches and my congressman hadn’t blocked my phone number for calling to complain.
As mentioned below, my spouse is a first generation American with brown skin in a Republican state. If any attention is drawn to us, her, her parents, her autistic brother, the lady that cuts my hair, the grocery we visit down the road, half the parents in our neighborhood, I’m the only person in my community that isn’t currently represented in the ICE victim pool. If I rock the boat every single person I care about gets a plane trip to a foreign prison.
Every day it gets worse. Eventually, it won’t be plane rides, it will be ditches. Even if I don’t attract the attention of the government, it’s cultists yell racial slurs as they drive lifted trucks past my community. They gnaw at the bit for a chance to cut loose and remove this stain from their white city. They look at me with contempt in the stores for betraying the white race to love a brown woman.
I’ve seen the local protests, 10 people with signs on a busy intersection a mile from the courthouse. The police point and laugh as commuters throw drinks at them from their cars for thinking that human rights belong in a red state.
What the fuck do I do? What can I, standing here, actually do to change anything? There isn’t a single action that I can take that does not threaten to burn down my community and leave my child an orphan, and even still I’m here asking how I can solve this problem.
You can’t solve the problem on your own and that’s the point. Instead of just driving past those protesters go join them. Invite others to go with you. Start a new organization of some kind in your community or volunteer with an existing one. Do whatever is in your power to do.
Victory over fascism is not something that can be bought from Amazon. It requires active participation. The action is less important than the participation. Just pick something and do that until you find something better.
That something better is what I’m begging for. I’ve stood and chanted, signed petitions, called representatives, stood in the rain to vote, taken every person I know to the polls, and the fascists still sit in office. I don’t need a prettier protest sign, I need someone to put a wrench in my hand and tell me the bolts that need tightened. I need someone with a plan that isn’t just “tell them we disaprove.”
I get that you also don’t have a better answer, that’s ok. This isn’t so much an argument about how as it is an extended scream into the void. I’m here, I’m willing, someone please fucking radicalize me already!
Not to lash out at you specifically but why are USians so stubbornly focused on the interacting with politics along the corporate party approved pathways? Even as others tell y’all it’s always back to voting, polling, petitions, campaign rallys.
Join an actual worker’s party or volunteer that time towards community outreach orgs rather than the popularity contests of millionaires funded by billionaires. Again, not to go off on you specifically but I’ve seen this aimless despair all over Lemmy, like everything you could possibly do is useless and, like, yeah, but only if you stay within that framework. That’s what the framework was built to do.
I can’t speak for all of us but in my area there aren’t any of those in my area. There are 4 community outreach groups in my area, two of them are churches and the other two are “non-denominational” shelters that are run out of churches. Try as I might, I’ve never found a worker’s party, I don’t think those are a thing here in the us. Outside of that, there’s a ton of volunteer options in my area if I want to help the homeless, stray cats, even the elderly. I love those, they’re great work, they don’t fix this.
I already do what I can for local politics, it isn’t making a difference, but maybe in 10 years we can get a mayor that isn’t going to raise tax on poor neighborhoods. I do wish I’d gotten into this 20 years ago, it’s on me and those like me for letting it get this bad, but guilt is about as useful as the few things I can volunteer for.
Bro is still a liberal after seeing how liberalism enabled fascism.
And what you expect other people to do? What am I supposed to do from the other side of the world? Nothing I do will make any change to your paedophile regime. In fact, why should any other country help you? What if your warmongering country attack my country? Why the fuck should others clean your own country’s mess?
Should/could the US population do more to get their batshit crazy government in line? Abso-fucking-loutly!
Should the sane countries of the world do more to push back on us and check our power grabs? Also Abso-fucking-loutly!
Why is any consumer anywhere outside of the US purchasing any of our shit? I recently saw a graph on the global sales of US liquor and most countries had like a 10-20% drop in sales and only Canada went hard with a 60-80% drop (apologies, I’m pulling this from memory so it’s pretty vague).
The only answer is that there is no action you can take that will assure you of that. If you do nothing, it is certain to happen should they succeed. If you do something it is possible that will happen and we succeed in stopping them. Or that we all die in the fires together.
Or we could stop them and you will all live. That’s is the best case, but not guaranteed. What do you want to work for? Your family is in danger now. Currently.
This is a beautiful sentiment that I’ve already passed. I want better, I want to be part of making better, but I do not know how to do that and apparently no one else does either because every time it comes up I get this this same answer. Where is our MLK, where is our Malcolm X, where is the map I need to be more than scared and alone?
Stop subscribing to great man theory. Learn from the Black Panthers and how they organized.
Join an org like PSL and build the mass movement.
I reached out to see if there’s any active members in my area. I’m already another warm body on a stat list for so many things, I don’t have faith in that going far.
I don’t need a slogan to chant, I need a general to follow.
Nobody is coming to save you, you must save yourself. Nobody is ever going to be more interested in your liberation than you are.
This attitude of the Americans emboldened my theory that they are 100% willing to send the rest of the world into extinction just to protect their own comfort.
That’s the point of getting organized!
Well as you’ve explained at length, there’s nothing that can be done and you (and those who think like you) are consumed with fear. To you, there is no hope so why bother. I don’t have anything else to say to say on this so have a good day.
If you have given up on trying to fix where you live (which may be totally reasonable), then move to somewhere with likeminded people. Once you’re in a safer place, then you can speak out and fight for what you believe in.