In Person Activism

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"Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them." -Tim Snyder

A community for sharing information about ways to get involved with real world activism to make the world a better place.

Spend less time arguing about politics on the internet. The world is in trouble. Get out there and try to help.

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How to be Outraged: A Flowchart (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Source: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39008450

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nice flowchart. I will ask, as I asked last time I saw something like this posted: where is this elusive "help" I'm supposed to let someone give me?

This shit is so patronizing. Oh, are you in trouble? Just let someone help! Of course, when the person who posts things like this is asked where this help is supposed to come from, they have no answer. Because this is just you feeling good about doing literally nothing.

This is not praxis.

You want to help? Leave the fucking flow chart on your hard drive and offer a trans woman a job. Offer someone who's afraid of being targeted by ICE a safe place to stay. Do something. Because this? Putting it on people who need help to just "let" people who aren't lining up to help help them? It's bullshit. You know it's bullshit.

So unless you've got some remote work for me or want to pay my rent, save it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I mostly agree with you, however, I think it's still good to point out to people that resources and help do exist and that there is no shame in using them. I know plenty of people who qualify for food stamps (or have in the past) and refuse to get them due to stigma. I've heard people with no food say they can't go to a food bank because "that food is for people who are worse off than me" even though they are skipping meals and starving.

Directly pointing out "if you need help and help exists, use it" is important and helps destigmatize those options imo

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They're not pointing out existing resources, though. They're just vaguely pointing at the concept of resources. This is literally less helpful than telling someone to get good.

What would actually be helpful is pointing out resources that do exist, but also acknowledging that not all of these resources are going to be accessible. Food stamps are great. There's even half-decent rental assistance in some places, but the wait lists for it tend to be extremely long and often depend on you already having lost your current place to live.

What to me is frustrating and absurd is that this is some feel-good bullshit that doesn't help anyone. It vaguely promotes the idea of going out and helping people, but the people who post this stuff aren't willing to help the people who show up in the threads when they post it. These threads are also ineffective at connecting people who want to help with people they can actually help, case in point.

They are literally anti-praxis. It's a way to do nothing and feel like you've done something, which dissipates your feeling of having a need to do something. The person who posted this clearly feels like it's helping, or they wouldn't have posted it. It's a substitute for actually pointing people at resources or encouraging anyone to help specific people.

But if you're going to sit here and tell me that if I need help, just go accept the help? And not provide anything beyond the concept that help exists somewhere? That is utterly useless. If you want to say there's help, either link to that help or be that help.

Sure, there are people who don't take the help that exists, but there are far more people for whom the help that exists is utterly insufficient to help them meet their needs. It won't keep a roof over their heads, it won't keep them in stable employment, and it won't protect them from the hateful people who are actively organizing to make things worse. We live in a world where people on visas are being pulled off the streets by plain-clothes ICE agents who don't show badges, ushered into unmarked SUVs, and quickly whisked away to distant locations. We live in a world where people are being fired from their jobs because someone thought they were trans and harassed them in a bathroom, and where people are being arrested and thrown into prisons that don't match their gender because of which bathroom they used.

People who hate us and want us to suffer are actively organizing to do it. They're not talking about it, they're not pretending that it's possible, they're doing it. And if the people with the capability of helping don't help? The people who have stable jobs and disposable income and literally zero threat to their personal well-being? If the best they can muster is fucking hopes and prayers? That's not going to be enough to turn the tide against the people who want to hurt us.

Verbal support isn't enough when the forces of oppression and bigotry are taking actual action. It requires material support. This is not that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They're not pointing out existing resources, though. They're just vaguely pointing at the concept of resources.

I've gone through quite a bit of this in the past few years. "There's programs out there that can help." Best case scenario, is someone includes a link before you're on your own. But most of the time, it's as you describe: they have a vague concept of "help available" but no actionable information. It's frustrating to be left navigating a system where programs may or may not exist, means testing/form filling seems tailored to weed out the folks that need it the most, etc. And that was before the current slash and burn of the US government (which funds many of the state-level programs that constitute "available help").

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

People who say there are programs to help have never tried to use these programs.