In Person Activism

This is a long and rather personal text about why I feel depressed and how I am slowly coming to terms with my depression. Why did I post it here? I believe there's quite a few more people out there who are depressed because they feel alone in a world that is fucking depressing and who need to know their feelings are valid, and that whatever imperfect way they can find to express them is valid as well. I believe we should start talking about what makes us sad and angry, we should go public with our despair. This entire mess is connected and we are not mentally ill for feeling bad about it. I publish this relatively long, unfiltered and unpolished rant because it's better than silence. Hope to see you out there one of these days, in all your glorious rage and grief!

1. Depressed, alone, silent

I've struggled a lot with depression lately. For pretty much three years in a row I had subdued the depression with weed, but lately I've started feeling my feelings with unfiltered intensity and it has been insanely hard. Monday was probably the worst day in a long time. I was sitting at my laptop trying to finish a bullshit job. It seemed to be so absurdly atrocious being caught in business as usual typing some manual about how to create more realistically looking virtual worlds while the real world is quite literally on fire. Gaza starving, fascists on the rise, the usual wildfires of summer burning right behind the next hill, and me sitting there writing about ray tracing and virtual glint as if nothing was happening. I couldn't help but cry, and then pull myself together and type a bit more to beat the looming deadline, and then cry some more, and then type some more. It felt like I was raping my soul. I somehow managed to finish the job and then sat in despair for a full day. I thought it must be time to pack my things, return to my home country, ask for social assistance and enter therapy to be turned back into a functional human being. I had tried everything on the anti depression menu: take a walk, meet with friends, be creative ... yet the depression would return every day, this feeling of doom and helplessness, of not wanting to exist anymore.

Tuesday was the same again. I woke up to a world I don't want to live in anymore. More doom in the news, more children starving, more smoke in the sky. But something was different. I had felt mostly grief on Monday, today it was rage. No work to do, no motivation left to take a walk or meet with friends or be creative, so I sat with my rage. I had always learned that under the rage there sits grief, but this was the other way around. And then it hit me: rage and grief were not something going wrong in my brain, they were a reaction to everything that is wrong with the world right now. They are a healthy, normal reaction to what is going on. Screaming in anger against all the bad shit happening is a good thing! The only insanity in me was that I was expecting I could continue doing business as usual, remain silent, wait for it to pass, as I had been doing for so long. I had to express this rage and grief somehow - it is part of my truth and has a right to be out there!

2. You are permitted to express your feelings in a way that works for you

I took leftover fabric and made a Palestinian flag on my old sewing machine - a crude, imperfect flag, but nice and large. The next day I drove to a nearby motorway bridge, and tied the flag there. A tiny, pathetic, one-person protest against silence. Small, uncreative, near zero impact - so why bother? What did it change?

It changed "I don't want to exist anymore" into "I don't want to exist anymore in a world like this and I will speak up against what is happening."

Maybe there is one person passing that bridge who has been displaced from Palestine, and seeing the flag will make them feel less alone and less forgotten. Maybe there is one child asking their parents about it and learning about what is going on. Maybe there is one person seeing it and feeling inspired to speak up as well. The tiny pathetic things we do change nothing big, they are seeds.

They tell others "I feel this, too".

Like last week, when I saw the tiniest of flags on a festival of tens of thousands dancing as if nothing was happening, no flags permitted, no politics mentioned. I hadn't come to party, just got the ticket from a friend who lives next door and who needs us to make sure no drugged up idiots invade her farm. I walked the festival grounds in the morning, scared and sad that there are so many people who don't seem to care, who just fill their privileged lives with distractions. And then I saw that one tree had a small Palestinian flag tied to it, and it planted a seed in me. At least one person had passed here who cared, I wasn't all alone. It was that tiny flag on the tree that inspired my larger flag on the bridge. A small seed, a larger seed, a mass of people shouting "We don't want this anymore!"

So you can't quit your bullshit job because you need to bring food to the table. You cannot drop everything and become an underground fighter. You cannot hop onto a boat to bring actual relief to Gaza. You can't beat Trump, or Thiel, or their powerful international network of evil grifters who keep us poor and desperate. Not alone. Not all of us are born heroes, some of us will feel like criminals for tying a flag to a bridge. But we can say "I see this, too". And others will hear and see you and feel less alone, and maybe gain the courage to say "I don't want to exist anymore in a world like this." Saying it out loud even in the quietest of ways so others can hear it is the first step towards building a world we want to live in.

3. We are many and we will be more

The next tiny pathetic step is community. The grifters have us glued to social media, where we doomscroll and feel vaguely connected, but never seem to meet in real life anymore. We have to return to real community, to meeting in person, to being physically present. I heard of a few friends who meet on a field to bang pots as a form of protest. Another pathetic tiny thing that changes nothing - or does it? They meet on a field in the middle of nowhere because many of us are here as foreigners in a very conservative region and we are afraid to make too much noise and anger the locals. So we only dare to make a little noise. And yet, this pathetic tiny noise inspired me to raise my imperfect voice as well. Next time I will join them, and at some point we might find the courage to take our pots into town. I also decided to hold a knit-in for peace in a public place - a quiet protest of a few of us, another seed, another tiny croak of us quiet and scared people of softly saying "No".

I don't want to exist anymore in a world like this. But rather than desperately trying to be a "functional human being" in a dysfunctional world I will bring my crude flags noticed by nearly nobody and bang my pathetic pots in a field to invite others to join me. I will bring what I have available and what I feel brave enough to use because even the tiniest croak of protest is better than silence. There's only a few of us today. There's many more like us who do not want to exist in a world like this anymore. They will join us once they don't feel so alone anymore. We are many, and our feelings of despair are valid!

Sorry, it's in German, but hey, it's the full documentary. Not sure if a full English version can be found somewhere, it's really worth watching - quite uplifting, about why we should eat the rich, and about those who are still trying and sometimes succeed.

I joined the Kansas City Food Not Bombs eight years ago and it has been life changing. They do great work, of course, but it has also connected me to so much other activism in the area and helped me build a community. I was so hopeless and atomized before joining FNB and learning about mutual aid.

http://foodnotbombs.net/info/locations/

cross-posted from: https://50501.chat/post/453625

If we're going to effectively fight Trump and the rise of fascism, we have to act together, and show up in numbers!

Check the website map to see events happening near you: https://goodtroubleliveson.org/#attend

You don't need to sign up there or give any information, in fact, it's better if you don't. Just find the address, grab some snacks and water, a sign if you can make one, and show up.

If you have a printer, bring some union pamphlets to hand out and tell people about the General Strike. Spread the word if you can, share this image, and let's stand up together in solidarity and make some Good Trouble!

As I seem to encounter quite a few anarchists who just love to produce word salad, here's some grandmotherly words of advice. When you want to create a better world and you do so by writing, learn how to write in a way that is accessible. The people you are trying to reach might not have time to work through pages of word salad. The language you write in might not be their native language. They might not have any academic education. They might be dyslexic or have a short attention span.

It is tempting to use long words and sentences. You might be concerned that if you write in a simple way people will think your message is not true, or that your philosophy lacks depth, or even worse that someone else could think you are stupid. But in the worst case people will think none of those things because they can't be arsed to read beyond the first few words of your text in the first place, and will immediately move on to something more easy to read. Also, there's a big difference between Trump-level populism and accessible texts with substance.

Accessible texts with substance point towards some activity people can do in real life, some change they can bring about by doing a specific thing. Nobody cares if Anarcho-Capitalism or Anarcho-Coprophilism is better, but you can convince people to buy at a small grocery instead of a big supermarket. Don't tell them they should engage in mutual aid - instead give them ideas about how to help their neighbours.

I'm as guilty as the next person when it comes to posing as a smartass - but I try to fight it, because talking to each other to be heard is better than being very clever while nobody understands what we actually want to do.

Tldr:

The revolutionary idea at the core of the concept of mutual aid is that those who have a problem can solve it themselves by working together.

I live in an area where most of the unhoused people in my city stay.

It has started getting insanely hot. People are going to die.

If I load up my little buggy with an ice chest and water bottles, what would be the best way to get people water?

I’ve thought it might be good to wear some kind of church’s shirt or something - I know that police tend to fuck with people who help the homeless, especially in my area.

I’m too broke to give out sunscreen or other sundries but are there other things I should carry with me too?

I get if the answer is “just do it” - just looking for advice if other people have done this.

I have heard that putting sugar in my fuel tank may lead to my vans not working anymore. This is an outcome I am looking to avoid.

I use these vans to transport children, who I usually pick up from sites about a few miles out. I would be really miffed if those vans were disabled in such a way that they were not able to make it to those children.

Are there any other actions I should avoid taking with my vans? I really wouldn’t want to cause damage to them in such a way that they would fail before the children got inside them.

Cross-posted from "For Saturday protests" by @seahorse@midwest.social in !ohio@midwest.social

Inpatient rights don’t seem to be on anyone’s radar. The only organization I know of is MindFreedom, which organizes letter writing and phone campaigns to try to protect people from forced medications and electric shock.

In the Southern US, it is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But I don’t hear about protests at hospitals and troubled teen facilities. I don’t hear about people pushing for things like a patient “bill of rights” in care. I don’t see a recognition of the ways that psychiatry is weaponized against harmless but “deviant” behavior.

Children in care especially seem to be utterly voiceless. A “troubled teen” is automatically assumed to be a liar, so any allegations of abuse can be (literally!) dumped in the paper shredder.

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A reminder folks: people engage in this kind of radical protest because it works:

Results of two online experiments conducted with diverse samples (N = 2,772), including a study of the animal rights movement and a preregistered study of the climate movement, show that the presence of a radical flank increases support for a moderate faction within the same movement. Further, it is the use of radical tactics, such as property destruction or violence, rather than a radical agenda, that drives this effect. Results indicate the effect owes to a contrast effect: Use of radical tactics by one flank led the more moderate faction to appear less radical, even though all characteristics of the moderate faction were held constant. This perception led participants to identify more with and, in turn, express greater support for the more moderate faction. These results suggest that activist groups that employ unpopular tactics can increase support for other groups within the same movement, pointing to a hidden way in which movement factions are complementary, despite pursuing divergent approaches to social change.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29115119

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