Category: Uncategorized

weeb-potato:

When your friend does something stupid in public and you can’t stop them:

theunitofcaring:

When news outlets interview people who are not going to vote, they usually talk to people with some kind of ideological reason. But as far as I can tell, most people who don’t vote don’t fail to vote because they have a principle against it. Most of them fail to vote because they’re stressed and inexperienced at navigating bureaucracies and they don’t feel informed and they don’t feel deserving and they don’t have any time.

None of those are problems that you solve by telling people to vote but more angrily than you told them last time. 

If you’re a U.S. citizen, you deserve to vote. Democracies don’t actually rely on citizens to be perfectly informed. “Everyone votes, and if you think things are on the right track they vote for the party in power and if they think things are on the wrong track they vote for the party out of power and if they want a divided government they vote for a divided government” is enough to make our system work. But indifference isn’t enough to make our system work. 

You can look up your polling place here. If you don’t have a good way to get there, check if Uber or Lyft is offering free rides to the polls in your area.

One of the powerful things democracy can do is aggregate everyone’s gut. You probably have a gut feeling about whether the last two years have made this a society you are more proud of, or a society you are less proud of. Even if the only thing you feel competent to evaluate is that, you are competent to evaluate that, and that matters. 

A lot of things are awful right now. But they’ve been worse. We clawed our way here from there, and we’ll keep working on it. 

If you don’t see how you’ll be logistically able to vote, feel free to message me, I can try to break it down into smaller problems and look things up for you.

catvincent:

surelytomorrow:

moniquill:

rubyvroom:

Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa?

Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now? 

On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…

And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.

We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.

As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.

I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.

… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.

Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.

This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.

No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.

Have a related article with self-care tips for activists.

Purity is one of the worst, most harmful myths humans ever invented.