Ink Tea Stone Leaf

This could apply to pretty much every human being on Earth, regardless of their level of social media engagement, but I digress.

I do spend a lot of time watching the feed go by, because I have a lot of bad media habits, and because I am curious to see commentary on the events of the day from the perspective of all the ordinary folks like me, along with a handful of trusted journalists. This is a bad idea, though, because 90% of what I see is commentary by people who have no perspective, or else an agenda so transparent that I feel frankly  violated by their presumption that I can’t see what they are doing.

This morning I read a comment thread (perhaps the stupidest thing you can do on social media) that was based on a post mocking a liberal white woman for promoting a No Kings protest scheduled for March. The mockery was not from the right, but from the left, the implication being that the event was insufficient and pathetic. “You’re going to wait two whole months to… take a walk outside?” That’s what it read, or words to that effect, though I am forced to paraphrase because I abandoned the post before I decided to rant about it. The comments were full of snarky dunking on all the perceived inadequacies of The Type Of Person Who Attends A Peaceful Protest, which is perhaps the only type of person that so-called leftists on social media hold more in contempt than a jackbooted thug.

One bit of snark caught my eye in particular—again I will have to paraphrase, and I apologize for the secondhand sarcasm, but it went something like this:

“we had to schedule it around Jim’s colonoscopy and Sadie’s dance recital.”

The implications are knotty and complex, but I suppose the point of this joke is something like this: the mark of a true antifascist is putting anti-government “direct action” ahead of any other priority, such as screening for colon cancer, or supporting children in the arts, or being old enough to have a husband who is due for a colonoscopy and a kid who is old enough to dance. If you were really committed to the cause, Karen, you would roll the dice on Jim’s butt hole and tell Sadie to trade her ballet slippers in for a beret and a bayonet.

There is a pervasive suspicion in highly online circles that any form of mass-resistance that is accessible to people who are not terminally online is actually a nefarious plot by the oligarchy to prevent meaningful action, by keeping folks complacent and distracting them from actions that are actually useful. The possibility that a person might be pursuing multiple avenues of resistance in addition to attending a high-profile protest, such as watching for and documenting ICE patrols in their communities, contributing to mutual aid organizations, raising awareness of boycott efforts directed at collaborating corporations, registering voters, or supporting efforts to represent immigrants and the victims of fascism in the courts, is just not considered. Why allow for that possibility when you see a perfectly good opportunity to humiliate a middle-aged lady who is dumb enough to think that she’s helping?

Personally, I oppose fascism because it is poison to all of the things I support, including but not limited to healthcare, education, and the arts. So I’m naive and liberal enough to believe that teaching and encouraging your children to dance is more than a clueless bourgeois distraction, and that scheduling regular colonoscopy appointments in the second half of the average lifespan is exactly what pretty much every single person with a colon ought to be doing if they have the chance. And you should keep that appointment, and attend those dance recitals, even if they coincide with a possible chance to perform a reel-ready “direct action.” In fact, I believe doing these are among the many forms of resistance a person should be incorporating into their lives.

And personally, I like the idea of scheduling mass protests well in advance, because while I definitely support rapid, spontaneous strikes like the one we had yesterday, you are simply bound to get more meaningful participation from people if you give them a decent heads-up that there is something to participate in. If it’s two months ahead, that gives you all kinds of time to organize and help in other ways while you wait. I wish more people would realize that not only is it possible to do both, a great many people are already doing both, and all of it helps.

When a person decides they want to help, the most important question they ought to ask themselves is not “will this one action be sufficient to decisively change the course of history for the better?” None of them will be, unless they are all done together. They should ask instead, “what can I do next?” We will be reckoning with all of this for a long time, and we have to care for our minds and bodies all the while. Let’s start by not listening to voices who seem to want nothing more than to demoralize us.