Looking around me:
- I started seeing people who support capitalist companies instead of non-profits.
- People losing their freedoms everywhere at high pace.
- No one is taking any serious steps to stop climate change.
- A lot of non-profits had seriously down scaled their operations in the last 5 years, most probably more non-profits will get hit hard this year.
- On a relative scale, no one is fighting to change any of this.
Do we have any hope?
Yes. Get off the goddamn internet for a while.
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
- Mister Rogers
I’m not going to give them my fear
- AOC
Hope is what we have in the face of adversity. Do not accept defeat. There is so much worth fighting for.
Sustain and nourish your hope.
The best thing that can happen to your opposition is you losing hope. Losing hope, losing the ability to imagine a different, better future drains you from even making the attempt. Making you hopeless, paralyzed, complacent is part of the oppositions strategy.
This rapid horrific change is still proof that change is possible.
Consciously nourish your hope. Consciously combat the attempts to make you hopeless.
Stop looking at the monster until that’s all you see, and you’re locked, frozen to the ground.
Look between the monsters’ feet. Look at all the people gathering, organizing, helping each other fight these skyscraper tall monsters.
If you won’t hope, there is no better place to find it than in community with likeminded people. Turn your dispair into action. Look at people around you. What do they need? What is a small thing that you can contribute right now. A small thing. Go do that. Believing that your actions matter and your contributions make a difference is a muscle you need to train.
Small things can be: Put up stickers. Talk to your neighbor. Looking up groups in your area. Bring food to someone who needs it. Help someone with groceries. Check in on a friend. Look into mutual aid programs in your area.
Every little kind action matters. It’s an antidote to dispare. Both for you and the people around you.
Consider how you can use your skills.
Help people away from META and on to the fediverse like Lemmy. People in my area are setting up hang outs where they help each other migrate platforms.
A lot of activists aren’t necessarily skilled with tech or social media. Is that something you can help with?
What do you do for work? No matter what you do, those skills are directly transferable and needed in your community.
Genuinely - There’s SO much super easy, practical stuff needed in your neighborhood, in your community, in your movement that would be SO easy to pick up and make SUCH a big difference. The biggest need is more hands. Always. You don’t have to know how to help. It becomes apparent SO quickly as soon as you step in the door.
There’s still a lot of work left to do. Keep fighting, cause there’s a lot worth fighting for.
The 30s and 40s seemed hopeless too.
I choose to hope and I’ve been remembering Tolkien to help
Absolutely timeless wisdom.
I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
And it helps to remember that this ksnt just some chump writing this. Tolkien got sent to fucking WWI and fought in the trenches. He saw some bad times and if he believed in the common person, maybe I can too. Even when they’re willfully ignorant assholes sometimes
Exactly. The man saw horrors we pray the world would never see again, and still somehow, he came home and finished one of the greatest legends ever told about the indomitable power of fellowship, hope, goodness, and love, against the machinations of ever-hungrier evil and darkness.
He faced the abyss and found light where others would have emerged only with cynical disillusionment and despair.
He fought for a belief that there was still good in people. He wrote the story about those who wanted to turn back and lose hope only they didn’t.
Those are the stories that really stick with us.
I’m with you. People can be… Yeah, I can’t really top:
willfully ignorant assholes sometimes
…But we can be the light even they can’t ignore.
I need to get back to listening to the audiobook I was doing instead of a reread. Its so ridiculous that one of the worlds villains uses LOTR as his naming scheme.
Its so ridiculous that one of the worlds villains uses LOTR as his naming scheme.
100%. This deliberate villain-for-lulz flaunting of his lack of self-awareness is one of the most irksome annoyances of our era.
I figure it’s gotta be the muskrat y’all are talking about. how does he use LOTR for a naming scheme?
Actually no, not the guy who tries to name everything (and everyone) “X”, but one of his fellow Mordor-mentality’d ilk, an entirely unoriginal and stupidly rich aristocrat spawned from the same pits, Peter Thiel .
Most famously, founder of, I kid you not, “Palantir”, a big-data information analytics and surveillance company…with military contracts and ethics that mainly revolve around “How much line go up tho?”
Would certainly get Saruman’s approval, but I have no freaking idea how he got the Tolkiens’!
Here’s a quick article just listing how profoundly the guy misses the point with his LOTR
inspiredblatantly plagiarized naming scheme, over and over again, wrecking the good name of a fictional world we hold dear as a contrast to this ridiculously stupid timeline.(Don’t care much about the article, it just lists the companies and their primary functions in one spot.)
https://qz.com/1346926/the-hidden-logic-of-peter-thiels-lord-of-the-rings-inspired-company-names
And of course, he’s a major player for the Republican machine, because why not? (He’s apparently got a husband too, which is even more LeopardsAteMyFace.)
Dude really, actually, got super into Lord of the Rings, made his whole life about pursuing neverending wealth and power, contributes to the military industrial complex, starts ventures about unnaturally extending life, likely contributes massively to climate change, and decided to make the world look more like the one Frodo saw in Galadriel’s mirror in Lothlórien.
If you asked him, I’m sure he’s the Good Guy™ in his story.
Freaking LOL. It’s all too stupid to make up.
What artifact do we gotta throw into the fires of the NYSE to implode all this nonsense and save
MiddleEarth?
So in about 20 years our lives could start having a fraction of the comfort and joy we had until now? Sounds awesome
Every person who isn’t a little removed that rolls over is hope.
There is always hope. It just depends on how much effort you personally are willing to put in to help change the things you’re seeing. There are several movements (50501 and Indivisible are two that immediately spring to mind) with millions of members that are currently fighting to change things. Get involved.
If different groups of people want different things for society, in most cases only one of those groups can get what they want.
It’s good to push for what you want. But living means accepting that things cannot always go your way, and that sometimes things are going to go in the way of other people.
Is up to each one how much they want to pressure, invest and fight for making things their way. And when to give up and accept that something is going to go other way and find ways to cope.
I write this because what I’m lately seeing is people destroying their own mental health over some recent events. And that’s not a healthy way to face the world I think. People have limited energies, and pushing everyone to fight all the time is devastating for some.
Maybe reflect if you are causing despair in others or if you are feeling dread by current state of the world. Reflect how much of what you are feeling are forced and how much is in your own control. And for all that’s in your own control try to be happy.
At least that’s my humble advice.
It took thousands of years to rid the world of monarchy, it will take a long time to go post-capitalist.
Progress is inevitable. Just as most monarchs have fallen, capitalism will fall.
There are people out there taking action, go find some. Collective action is always stronger than individual action. If you don’t currently have a community that is engaged, consider joining a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Unitarians in the US and Europe resisted the German Nazis by creating documents and providing refuge for Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust. Many congregations today have active social and environmental justice groups, often focusing on local action with low barriers to entry. Nobody is expected to believe any particular scripture, but UUs have a common set of principles, the first being everyone has inherent worth and dignity. The sermons at my congregation lately have been about trans visibility, rising to the moment and processing the chaos, which I’ve found inspiring.
Sounds like The Satanic Temple with more Jesus, but that’s a compliment of sorts — except the Jesus part. 😅
It varies a lot by UU congregation. Mine has more focus on Earth based traditions, as in we’re celebrating Earth Day this Sunday instead of Easter. Although we’ve been known to celebrate the high holidays from several major religious traditions.
As long as there are people like you desiring hope, Hope will never die.
Be the hope. You are not alone. Be loud. Others feel the same way and feel alone.
Remind each other there are still good people left
Personally I don’t think the problem is a lack of good people. Some people are good, some bad, most are in between (or rather both). The problem is rather that we are, collectively, dumb.
Be the hope. You are not alone. Be loud. Others feel the same way and feel alone.
But this is clearly all true and important.
You phrase this as if non-profits are an alternative to capitalist companies. Do you know of many non-profits that sell things? We belong to our local coop and shop there, but the groceries themselves are all made by for-profit companies. IME, non-profits are primarily service or charity oriented.
Is love to hear about a non-profit alternative to Amazon, or a non-profit cell phone maker.
Yes. Things will get better. We don’t know how quickly that will happen, but it will happen. Meanwhile, take care of yourself and do what you can to take care of the people around you. The whole MAGA movement is based on fear and hatred. Being decent and doing good may be the most effective way to resist and, eventually, overcome it.
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Symmetrically alternative recipe that I recently heard (from a French academic): “hopeful pessimism”. The idea being, roughly, that while it’s delusional to be optimistic, hopefulness is by definition subjective and therefore valid. And indeed quite sensible given that we can never know the future and therefore it really might turn out to be better than expected.
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It’s still better than the 1930s, low bar that it is.
But possibly not better than 1855, unironically.
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