There’s a peculiar form of blindness that comes from prolonged safety. Like a frog in slowly heating water, people who have known only stability become incapable of recognizing existential th…
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.
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.
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:
https://events.pol-rev.com/