Apocalypsis Limite
Hope for a dark time. Action for the apathetic.
ICE agents are attempting to goad citizens in blue states into using their second amendment rights, which would kick off martial law and a whole civil war and I’m in my red state kitchen washing dishes.
The US wages a coup on Venezuela before dropping bombs in not just an effort to steal resources (oil, gold, etc.), but to further distract from the fact that our President isn’t just in the Epstein files, but essentially is the Epstein files.
The ethnostate of Israel continues their bloodthirsty genocide on the Palestinian people and I have to meal plan a week’s worth of dinners.
Fellow white liberals have spent the entire time I’ve been plugged into politics (since roughly 2006) swearing that voting for increasingly weak-willed and right leaning Dems will save us—that the right vocabulary will save us, if we just say the correct jumble of buzzwords maybe every far right extremist will spontaneously explode!
And now the shock of what’s happening is kicking in for those of us who thought it could never get that bad. The boot heel on our backs had always felt like lying under a weighted blanket and we were fine beneath that warm press of our privilege because it was more comfortable than trying to wiggle out from under the systems that keep us all down—even those of us who benefit.
The pressure of the boot heel has increased to the point that even those previously comfortable beneath it have started to squirm, they’ve now realized we’re being crushed to death.
But what too few people are talking about is the two missing elements. The keys to actual liberation.
Action and hope.
We cannot have one without the other. Without hope, we have no motivation to act. Without action, there is no hope for us to withstand the innumerable threats of fascism. These bullies with all their agitation and their slave catchers (IE: ICE) and their insistence upon their bottom line mattering more than your life and the lives of your loved ones and neighbors rely on you giving up hope. Of lying down to die. To let it happen. To remain complacent because it’s not yet happening to you.
We cannot give up the ghost. We cannot hand all the power they want over to them without a fight.
The first thing that always comes to mind in times of unrest and political uncertainty is obviously protesting and demonstrating. This, of course, in invaluable. Getting out there and getting your hands dirty is a very important action. Boots-to-ground actors help spread awareness. After all, a lot of people would have had a hard time believing ICE shot an innocent white woman (one of the biggest crimes in the minds of most right-leaning Americans) if it weren’t for Rene Good’s neighbors filming her being antagonized, shot and denied medical care on scene.
People have even made handy posts about what shameful actions protesters should avoid if they want to remain good sheep for the slaughter.
And this, of course, is where hope begins to dim for a lot of people. Not everyone is capable (for many reasons) of marching in the streets. We can’t all be everywhere all at once, despite perhaps our attempts to do so via social media—we cannot attempt to film and de-arrest every citizen being unlawfully detained, obviously.
But that is the beauty of direct action.
There is no real ‘male loneliness epidemic’, but there is a real pan-gender loneliness epidemic pushed upon us by tech companies and social media moguls alike. A nation divided is a nation defenseless. Those same algorithms I bitched about in my last post are the same algorithms built on getting you to distrust your neighbor. An example from where I live (IE: a big city in a flyover state): If you think you have less in common with your new neighbor because you’ve always lived in the city and they’re a country bumpkin but you’re both white, I need you to stop lying to yourself and do some real work.
And that real work is getting to know the people around you. The people you live next to. The people whose eye contact you avoid when you take your trash down to the curb.
As I was saying to my partner just last month (copy and pasted from where I shared this conversation on my bluesky account): Bunny and I discussing imperfect allyship the other night and it’s really cemented to me that I’d rather someone phrase things poorly but show up for me in meaningful ways than know all the latest buzzwords. Opposite is also true. Rather you 5150 me thinking it’d help me in a crisis situation than for you to EVER call me ‘neurospicy’ under any circumstance.
You never know who the imperfect but actually safe people are until you get out there and get to know them.
I refuse to dedicate too much time to ranting about how the fact that so many white liberals swear that there is power in numbers when it comes to running to the polls or showing up somewhere with lit candles to sing Kumbaya but not when it comes to building community in the face of division sewn by oligarchs will always blow my tits completely backward. So I’ll leave it there and quickly digress.
The point is, there is so much we could and should be doing right now and all you have to do is listen to those in the know and then fucking act on it.
This is a starting point.
Town Hall meetings. Following these steps outlined by Ben Sheehan to attempt to get ICE defuned. Making a little free library. Inviting a neighbor over for coffee. The snowball effect starts off with something small, always. An avalanche can be triggered by a single loud shout. Whether the shout is fueled by grief or joy is up to you.
Either way, time to open your mouth and let it rip.