Published 2024-11-06
I'll just say it -- November, as a month, sucks approximately every 3-4 years. Doesn't matter who gets elected, we end up with "winners" and "losers" and a full half (sometimes more, sometimes less) of the US feels like the entire world is going to collapse.
Yes, our world is in dire peril. Yes, we have leaders who are making extremely short-sighted decisions that affect individuals' life-and-death stakes daily. When we do get bills and laws passed to make changes, the supreme court... makes incredibly opaque rulings based on very little established law and perspectives that make law professors cringe or, at the least, scratch their heads.
All of this matters. All of this is important. What I'm trying to remind myself of, is that we all cannot vote once every four years and expect things to Just Work. We must be politically active, all the time. We must constantly fight for the betterment of our jobs, our personal rights, our local, state, and federal representation -- all of it. It's exhausting, but it's the only way to make it work. Looking at leaders like Jennifer Briney, or Molly White, or the 5-4 podcast, I'm going to start spending more time reading and understanding laws-as-written, writing websites to track these sorts of things, and generally investing more in building awareness for myself (and, if I can, everyone else).
All that said, you might lose friends over your politics. You might have to re-evaluate who you work for. You may need to re-evalute what party / parties you belong to, where you live, what roles you hold in your groups, all of it.
None of this is a Bad Thing. We are social creatures and, twisting the 1960s second-wave-feminism quote, "the political is personal." For all that people want to "keep politics out of it," when your existence and your health and your freedom are on the line, there cannot be a divide between the personal and the political.
Relevant quotes for inspiration:
Richard K. Morgan in the Altered Carbon series:
The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don’t pray, don’t wish, don’t buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don’t give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of ... whatever. Face the facts. Then act.
Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They’ve all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it’s not. It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow. And no one ever does that, because they’re all too fucking scared of losing their conning tower moment in the historical process. If you tear down one agglutinative power dynamic and put another one in its place, you’ve changed nothing. You’re not going to solve any of that society’s problems, they’ll just reemerge at a new angle. You’ve got to set up the nanotech that will deal with the problems on its own. You’ve got to build the structures that allow for diffusion of power, not re-grouping. Accountability, democratic access, systems of constituted rights, education in the use of political infrastructure.
From Peter Watts' blog:
Edmund Burke once said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. I think that begs a question.
If you do nothing, what makes you any fucking good?