So what do you expect anyone to do about it? Sure, journalists can write and write.
All we have is voting and that is off the table until 2026. If it still exists.
I don’t mean to be rude but the call to action of this article is nothing more than “be afraid”. Being afraid doesn’t stop this.
Historically, just being vocally disapproving is helpful. A huge part of gleichschaltung is normalizing atrocity starting with basic shit before moving into killings.
You have direct action. Or, to rephrase, you only have direct action and not much time to act before everything goes to shit.
What sorts of direct action do you think could be viable?
Strikes and hard boycotts are incredibly effective. There are other less favourable options too, but you should probably start with the strikes and boycotts.
How do you go on strike against a government if you are not a government employee? And what would it even mean to boycott your own government?
You hurt their donors. You strike at your regular job but it only works if the majority do it or in key industries. It’s why the US has worked so hard to dismantle and discourage unions. Unions give the people power they can leverage.
Hard boycott is to stop consuming products from companies that donate to the administration. Dont buy them. Find alternatives where you can and go without when its not a necessity. It’s really really hard but its the most powerful non violent method available
It looks to me, you are looking for excuses to not do anything. Yes, doing anything at this point is risky. Doing nothing is even riskier. People are already dying because of what is happening. Those usaid medical cuts, have already killed people who literally depended on them to stay alive (like affording O2 tanks). The FAA cuts have killed people, but most of those were blatantly obvious. I guarantee immigrants will die or be murdered in gitmo due to this administration. Hell, the manchurian mango is already calling himself King in his social posts. And. It. Will. Only. Get. Worse. It definitely wont start magically getting better, especially given a good portion of the dem party leadership is upset that progressive groups have been “annoying” them by trying to get them to do their jobs and actually be the opposition party and to actually DO SOMETHING.
That sinking feeling you may have that nobody is doing anything about this is literally because the people who’s job it is to stop shit like this from happening are just sitting on their hands and letting it happen. Only a small portion of the elected DC officials are actually doing shit. So yea, we are all that stands in the way now. So, do you want to live in a free country or are you going give up and become a collaborator?
Idk to me it read as if they genuinely don’t know what to do or how to help. I have only heard of a few protests going on. Other than protests, organizing, and boycotts, I’m personally not aware of what else someone could do.
Trump and company aren’t going to stop because of protests. They have money and power.
So, ultimately, it comes down to threats or violence. But people have to get uncomfortable enough(things have to get bad enough) for them to get to that point. Nobody wants to get to that point, so all other options will have to be exhausted beforehand unless something causes escalation of the situation.
Genuinely, what is the appropriate word for this?
In history, retrospectively I believe it was a “collaborator”. But that to me does not evoke a sense of currency or anticipation of what is to come, which would be more helpful to us now.
Likewise the article suggests “complicit”, but I have roughly the same problems with that.
Ultimately this smacks of “those who are not with me are against”, which itself is vaguely similar to “the ends justify the means”… which is both obviously true and yet obviously so very not at the same time, presumably the difference lying in the circumstances where each applies or not.
There are people who voted against this. Then there are people who voted for it, but not for what will come as a result. Does it matter, in the end?
Thus I can’t quite think of the right word, I guess bc the variations and nuances and subtleties paralyze me there in trying to come up with one. As I imagine is true for the nebulous “them” as well. Not that we should let that stop us, mind you: like Ukrainians fighting off the Russians, perhaps compassion is something that you offer when you can but not at the cost of doing what needs doing in the meantime.
And maybe that’s why the word I am looking for is so hard to find: perhaps it doesn’t exist at all, except in retrospect?
I don’t know the word any more than you do, but a lot of catastrophes in previously-comfortable societies were enabled by a large amount of indifference by the people who if they’d been spurred to action would have been able to stop it.
Solzhenitsyn said that so many times, in the Gulag, he played it over in his head what he and people he knew should have done to resist, but they didn’t do much of anything.
You are right of course, so what I say next is on top of rather than instead of that: those people could easily be said to include you and me. Like Bernie Sanders, who devoted his entire long life to fighting this… did he do “enough”? Is AOC doing “enough”, by “merely talking”? Obviously Luigi tried, but it didn’t work so was it “enough”?
It’s so easy to get caught up in what others should or should not have done. What agonizes me these last few days, keeping me up at night, is what I should be doing. Which is not so simple as simply “fight back”. If someone is both robbing a home and that house is also on fire, it is not enough to stop the one - you must also stop the other. So like, I’m no climate change researcher, but I can only imagine the hard choices they must face: “should I play along, and try to do something about the climate, or… just resign, or what?” People that do aid work, if they are somehow still there, should they continue to do aid work, bc it helps people who more desperately need it? What about people working inside the system - like tax season is coming up, should they quit or sabotage things so that people don’t receive their refunds or what?
Okay so none of this is truly “sleepwalking”, but it could look like that, from the outside? Someone making their own determination about whether they did “enough” is one thing - and ofc it’s never going to be enough - but I could easily see someone labeling what someone else as done as not being “enough”, and it’s a slippery slope from there to McCarthyism.
Maybe - probably - I’m not helping here, bc there legit are people who not only are “sleepwalking” but I have actual family members and friends who are outright cheering it on. And no amount of quibbling over whether something is enough is going to compare to actually rooting and even asking for it to happen.
So to me, “sleepwalking” seems both to not go nearly far enough, and also to potentially go too far (in practice if not in theory), and in general it just seems not all that helpful to me to understand things.
As compared to watching such material as e.g. https://youtu.be/uqsBx58GxYY. Which ironically could lead to a charge of sleepwalking itself, bc staring intently into something as it happens is merely another way to excuse oneself from actually doing anything at all about it.
those people could easily be said to include you and me
IDK about you, but it definitely includes me. Like you, I don’t really know what to do.
I went to a protest. I talk about it online. Mostly it’s just watching it all burning, though. I feel like I need to be doing way more.
There’s this:
