There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.
My plan is to keep resisting, keep writing posts harshly critical of MAGA. Eventually they will come for me and send me to the new 30,000 capacity facility in Guantanamo.
There, I will continue to rabble-rouse among my fellow inmates, until they put me in solitary.
Then my plan will be complete, and I will finally get some peace and quiet.
If they kill Social Security, this is my retirement plan.
I think one of the biggest contributors to American complacency in this is the slow decline of communal relationships over the last half century.
If you’re an average person and don’t interact with your neighbors often, know things about each other, and have similar concerns and interests, how do you build momentum to even start? How do you go from barely knowing someone to a whole group of people going out and marching together?
So even if people started to act, the starting point is getting to know people… THEN convince them to join. It’s no longer “I believe in this and I know Bill does too.”
Now combine that with the fact that more than half of the country is so overwhelmed existing that they don’t know this stuff is happening because they’re politically disengaged or unaware from just keeping the lights on.
That means meeting your own community, building rapport and support, AND educating them on what’s happening and why it’s important. All of that before you even hit the streets.
The fact that any mass protests like the ones in Vermont are happening at all is incredible.
We need to be building up these relationships ahead of time and from now on. (Which as an introvert is repulsive)
Obviously, we can coordinate with online communities and meet up, but there’s a big missing piece with our local community immediately around where we live that has died off.
Rant over…but for my online community friends, I’m down for a protest in Phoenix or DC if we have to go. LFG
The Americans won’t stand up for themselves because they don’t have spines. They’d rather accept the new status quo, that being fascism, from the comfort of their couches than go outside and make some noise.
Well, certainly true to some degree. There’s also the issue of police brutality, “counter-protests”, and the fact that peaceful protest in the US does fuck-all because corporate and government power structures are beholden only to shareholders and not constituents.
If peaceful protests don’t work that leaves only one option.
And no, that option is not “do nothing.”
Yup, what this entire situation is mainly showing is that americans are Big pussies. In any other western country you would get huge strikes and manifestations for only 1% of what is happening in the US. But nah, americans are just sitting on their fat ass, like cows looking at the train passing, the very train that is going to send them to be butchered…
Land of the free? Lol, nah, Land of the pussies!
Fam it’s so frustrating… I have a group of friends that everytime that bitch I ask them what they’re doing… Nada. They just wanna bitch and moan… Hell even the ‘lazy’ protests to Amazon and target boycotts are too much for them. As a brown dude, I feel so disappointed… Like I’ve been seeing this happen for years and have been vocal - now that it impacts y’all it’s too much to bear?
Fuckouttahere
Jefferson to John Adams’ son in law, 1787 -
“Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order.”
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation/
Mood.
I can’t blame Americans though, the last mass protest movement fizzled out just like Occupy because billionaire-owned mass media gets to decide which protests are valid.
