Someone is Doing Something

and you are still a person with choices

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Everywhere I go people are asking the same question: “Is anyone doing anything?” Sometimes it’s “Where are the Democrats?” Sometimes it’s, “I don’t understand where to even begin taking action.”

Far from D.C. and surrounded by Trump bumper stickers, it feels like there is no recourse. Everything seems to boil down to dumbly waiting for court decisions and hoping the administration feels like abiding by them. In the meantime, so many days all I have is rage.

This is one of the most intolerable feelings for human beings: helplessness. In fact, the rage only compounds the more impotent we feel.

People can handle a lot of things as long as we can busy ourselves with something that feels like recourse or response. People become dangerous when we feel effectively thrust back into childhood: without options, without power. If we don’t unleash our rage on others, we instead become dangerous to ourselves. Repressed rage will make us sick. Despair will make us dead.

Over the grueling years of the pandemic, I came to recognize this feeling as a blaring signal that I needed to get off my phone. It bears repeating every day of our lives that our brains interpret searching for information as “doing something,” but in today’s world, gathering information for information’s sake is literally more than we can process. The Internet becomes a pit whose sides grow steeper and steeper the longer we’re in there. It’s so much. I’m so upset. The answer must be just beyond the bottom of my scroll.

The commentators I trust most are begging us to understand the significance of our own lonely moments, feeling trapped on our couches, while our necks grow stiff and our eyeballs beg for mercy. The people now in power excel at wielding the weapon of attention. They are staging sets and blasting us with headlines because they didn’t win by making sense or respecting people; they won by creating content. As Tressie McMillan Cottom says, all of it—from the idiotic to the cruel—is content. And it’s working: Trump’s approval rating keeps rising since his inauguration.

Whether you love it or hate it, as long as you’re still consuming the content, they win. You don’t get to respond because you’re reacting to plans they’ve been making for years. You can’t see news of what other people are doing about it, because the administration’s news is just so relentless. Your body is contorted to peer into the glowing rectangle. You’re stuck inside their story.

From that perspective, you’re doing something every time you stick your phone in a basket, stand up straight, walk outside, look a neighbor in the eye, and say hello. You are reclaiming your own reality and reasserting your own agency in your own body. You are connecting with a person—not with the story someone else wants to tell about them.

Here’s the thing about governing-as-content: it is way less effective than governing by governing.

Many of the things the administration has done illegally for the sake of theatrics, it could likely have done legally—and by moving slowly, they would have worn down their opposition instead of firing it up. It could also have done them in a measured and professional fashion that would give the illusion of competence.

Instead, by “moving fast and breaking things,” they have all but guaranteed some sort of catastrophe will result from, you know, all the broken things—and there will be no way to deflect blame at that point.

When I’m half-dreaming and half-awake between the hours of 3 and 6 A.M. every day, I’m partly worrying about my immigrant friends, my trans friends, my friends who work in public health and education, my children. I’m personally offended by the dismantling of one of my favorite federal agencies, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and if I don’t mourn it, who will?

But I’m also worrying about the implications of a rapid-fire executive “strategy” that seems to bear such little regard for public opinion. This administration is working hard to raise prices and antagonize our friends and enemies while subjecting the federal government to the same enshittification that Twitter has suffered. It’s sure looking like the only people whose lives are going to be better by election time are tech executives.

Maybe this is sheer breathtaking hubris—these people somehow believe they are doing smart things in a smart way, and everyone is going to thank them for it—in which case I’m afraid of what they’ll do with their rage and vengeance when everyone doesn’t.

Or maybe they know the vast majority of us are going to suffer under their regime of destruction, and they don’t care, because they never intend to compete in a free and fair election.

And maybe the onslaught of content is meant to prevent us from thinking that far ahead.

Now, look.

People are doing things. People are marching and protesting every single day in Washington, D.C. People are refusing to obey. Democratic representatives are staying up late to respond to the administration and build the infrastructure to keep responding. People in my town and yours are gathering and donating to figure out how to fill in the gaping holes that have been blasted in refugee services. People are making lists of more ways to resist that are so beautiful I’d annotate them if I had time.

AND. If you are not those people. If you don’t know those people. If you, like me, probably do not have the resources to become one of those people any time in the next year or two. THEN! You have the most important assignment of all.

You stick your phone in a basket, stand up straight, walk outside, look a neighbor in the eye, and say hello.

Then you do it again the next day.

Every time you practice being a sane person who has agency within your own life and maintains connections with your neighbors, you contribute to the mass movements we could soon need to mobilize. Because here is the thing you are maybe not supposed to remember about mass movements:
The Montgomery bus boycott wasn’t about not getting on the bus. It was about helping each other get to work without the bus every single day for months on end.
The Freedom Rides and marches on Washington weren’t about speeches and parade routes. They were about the preceding years spent mobilizing student groups and neighborhoods in small, regular collectives of everyday activists.

Every successful flashpoint mass action is built on the connections between people. As Grace Lee Bogs says, “The real engine of change is never ‘critical mass';’ dramatic and systemic change always begins with ‘critical connections.’”

Think about it this way: if you have a network of people, of any size, who have practiced working together or caring for each other in any way, you have potentially created a ready-to-mobilize unit for whatever action becomes necessary. Sharing resources for a strike. Providing before- and after-care for whoever attends a demonstration. A babysitting collective, an emergency contact network, or a spreadsheeting super-gang for a larger movement. Giving someone a ride to work so they can boycott the bus.

Knowing your neighbors’ names, dog-sitting for them, bringing casseroles—these do not make for good content. They are non-controversial. They are made of things with substance. And I am begging you to remember that that is what makes them so powerful.

People are sick of staring at their phones and feeling angry at phantom enemies. When they also get sick of even higher prices, botched emergency responses, international upheaval, and further chaos, they'll be in search of new leadership. Maybe there will be more content wars of various kinds; but the fastest way to break through the noise will be to offer a real hand, in real life, from someone people trust even a little bit.

This is not just my theory of political organizing and marketing. This is what I mean when I say that humility will change the world. When I remind myself I believe love is real, true, right-now power. When mustard seeds and remnant-armies show up in my dreams.

Yesterday I went to my midwife’s office and had a blood draw. When I walked into the little cramped lab, the phlebotomist was looking at rentals on Zillow.

I am perpetually tired these days. As we’re all adjusting to a new news environment, I’m far more Velcroed to my phone than I really want to admit. I could have kept my head down, but I decided to say something. “I saw you were on Zillow!” I said.

“You KNOW I’m just looking.” she said. “I can barely afford the place I have now!”

“I’m in this organization that’s having an affordable housing meeting next week,” I replied. “We’re getting together with candidates for public office to advocate for affordable housing policies. We’ve gathered a bunch of data on the corporate landlords buying up properties around town, and we have ideas for what to do about it.”

“OK, I’m looking that up right now,” she said. I showed her the info about the meeting on my phone. “Someone’s gotta help us out.”

I was on my way out the door by this time. “WE help us out!” I grinned.

I don't know if she'll come to the meeting, or whether she'd like it if she did. But I did learn that organizing is a language you can practice.

That I walked out of that office feeling twelve times better than I would've if I'd just kept staring at my phone.

That “leadership” and activism look a million different ways.

Maybe it even simply matters that I passed the message to my potential new friend: someone is doing something.