hope — by flightlessblrbs

There’s a dog barking outside. Nothing feels like home, and nothing will feel like home. I am uprooted.

This is what happens when Christian nationalists show up outside your house and your neighbors are on autopilot and can’t be bothered to shake out of their own freeze state to help their marginalized neighbor.

Were it not for a cluster of people who helped us fall back, we might be dead. I’m grateful to still be here to fight. But my life has been profoundly changed. I feel like a ghost in my own life.

Where others are sharing stories about spending time with families during the holidays, still adhering to the continuity of seasonal traditions, I can’t see my future anymore. I don’t know how to plan out the remainder of the year, let alone know if I’ll live to be fifty.

I have great hope that people in the United States will, in the end, stand up to and run out the fascists, but I worry very much that people won’t move fast, bold, and strategic enough to save many targeted people’s lives in time (including mine).

How many people has this regime killed thus far? What is the headcount? How easily we “lose count” when we’ve become accustomed to turning our heads the other way.

Pink Floyd was wrong: we’re not “comfortably numb.” We’ve become terminally unaffected. We have been told our feelings are our weakness, but it is our lack of feeling that keeps us from intervening— and it is our lack of feeling that will enable even more innocent people to die.

That’s the most tragic part of this death machine: if enough people moved themselves to act, this would already be over. This will not be solved with an election or mass protest but by mass coordinated resistance and mass-collaboration with our neighbors to ensure no one gets left behind— that no neighbor is expendable.

I don’t want to be a hashtag or a news story among a fire-hose of depravity.

I refuse to accept that people are more willing to restack information about an atrocity than act to stop the atrocity. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard: “But what can I do?” from a person who demands it of me like a hall-pass. I refuse to give any person a pass.

There is always something you can do. Always.

Related, I do not begrudge that people might make money and a name for themselves when reporting on the suffering of others. That’s the grift of the war economy: it’s the only thing that ever trickles down. If it bleeds.

But it is past time to simply report on what’s happening without also acting in the world, and encouraging others to act in the world. We are witnessing a wave of genocides, ethnic cleanings, and mass atrocities unfold before our eyes. I don’t give a good goddamn about anyone’s subscriber numbers or where they are on a venture capitalist’s leader board of writers. Your newsletter is not a “community,” not in wartime. Responsible writers would do well to mobilize their readers to get involved in their own communities, instead of keeping people in online, trapped in closed communication loops while insisting they’re changing the world.

Suffice it to say, when there’s a war on our democracy, journalistic standards adapt to meet the time. Neutrality is complicity. Roll up your sleeves, journalists.

I’m maybe not on here for the same reasons other people are, which is totally fine. Different strokes and folx. I’m certainly not hiding my face, I could give two s***s about being known. I do give a s**t about getting my life back. I do give a s**t about you loving the stranger.

My posts feature calls to action and getting offline and organized in your communities, because it’s the only way this ride ends. We cannot read, share, like, and subscribe our way out of this.

But if I could charge subscribers in any currency, I’d charge subscribers in weekly acts of solidarity in their communities.

We will not stop the fascists unless and until there are more organized civilian “boots on the ground,” than there are fascists on the ground committing harm. This requires being active in our own communities and engaging in mass-cooperation to care for and shield one another from our abusers.

We outnumber them, yes. But that doesn’t mean s**t unless we also out-do them.

It’s not as if this goal is out of our reach. Our numbers are vast. It’s whether those of us who feel safe enough can be bothered to get offline and into their communities.

The wildest part is people want some magic bullet— some sweeping scandal, fast-food heart-attack, supreme court case, or a military moral epiphany to stop this. But the answer is way simpler than all that: it’s you and me and everyone we know coordinating with each other to restore our democracy. I said simple, not easy.

Organizing against fascism is hard. Living in fascism is harder. Choose your hard.

We are living in historic times.

Someday, trees willing, a wide-eyed child will interview you for a class project. She will ask what you did to stop the demented felon and child rapist from abducting your neighbors and abetting a third world war.

You can either lie to her and hate yourself to sleep, or you can get out there now— while the course of history is most malleable— take risks, and make sure you have one hell of a true story to tell that little kid.

That’s why I’m still choosing to stick my neck out. That’s why I will learn my new community and get involved here, even though I am heartbroken and homesick: I owe it to my students to be a safe adult, no matter where I am.

Being a safe adult means doing everything in one’s power to stop the harm.

So no, I’m not terribly invested in subscriptions. I want solidarity.

I don’t want money: I want you to get offline and organized in your neighborhood.

The sooner this happens, the more people’s lives you will save. What you do right now affects the course of human history, including whose voices live long enough to tell their stories of this time.

That’s why I’m telling mine now. Just in case.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit muppetgender.substack.com