I got into it this week with the usual tired bullshit that “America” had normalized violence against women and gun violence particularly, based on a lack of wall-to-wall TV coverage of one such incident recently.
I am so heartily sick of this cynical dudebro mentality that nobody’s having the right revolution right now. Ain’t nobody here stopping you from getting in the streets and you don’t know shit about what work other people are doing.
— Allison Hantschel (@Athenae) February 1, 2019
We’ve talked before about the very hard work anti-gun groups are doing on the state level, and how it plays into the NRA/GOP to throw up our hands and say NOTHING HAS CHANGED OR WILL EVER CHANGE. But spin that out and apply it to our current “political climate,” which is a polar vortex wrapped in a hurricane season plopped down on top of a wildfire.
It seems like every week there’s a new Monday Morning Resistance Quarterback who knows just how the wars should be won, if only everyone around him wasn’t such a worthless pussy. Why isn’t America in the streets, he cries from his Twitter feed, which he presumably isn’t updating from said streets. Why isn’t America shutting down the banks, the immigration camps, the military bases, the schools?
Oh, I DUNNO, BRO, maybe because whenever America does that shit (like they literally, in recent memory, called it OCCUPY WALL STREET in case you missed the memo) there’s an army of cynical assholes JUST LIKE YOU talking about how giant puppets are counterproductive to the cause and shutting down busy intersections is just going to make people mad.
And we have A FEW THINGS GOING ON RIGHT NOW. Should America shut down the streets over immigration jails or mass incarceration or police violence or school closings or sexual abuse or Trumpism in general or the banksters again or Russia or all the stealing and screwing and general wtf-like conduct of government on every level? Who gets to pick what’s big enough to be mad about today?
Mostly, though, quit critiquing everybody else’s damn actions. Quit measuring their outrage and deeming it insufficient to your standards. We have for maybe the first time in history the ability to be painfully aware of all human struggles everywhere at once. As somebody who used to mainline misery, you gotta learn to triage and yours might not look like mine.
Nobody else is ever gonna do your thing. You have to do your thing. It’s hard and thankless and infuriating and you are screaming into the wind and one celebrity can get a thousand people in the street to, I dunno, bring back Crystal Pepsi, but bitching people out for not caring about what you care about is not going to get them to care about it.
A.