I actually genuinely love dealing with angry and aggressive customers because it’s SO funny. They always come in with a specific level of energy and they expect whoever they deal with to be scared of them and then when I’m clearly not physically or emotionally intimidated they get SO flustered and start doing the weirdest shit to regain power in the situation. Like there’s absolutely nothing you could do to me in this coffee shop that would ever even make my Top 10 Scariest Interactions With People but by all means, keep faking that phone call to your boss who apparently knows the Starbucks mermaid personally.
take this nachos supreme, for it is my body. and take this baja blast, for it is my blood.
I want other young people to understand that if the extent of your radical action is posting “eat the rich!” on social media and waiting for somebody to tell you a revolution has started, nothing will change and you’ll get arrested in the Third Red Scare and that’ll be it
What’s the plan?
Join a local trade union and the IWW. Join or start a local tenant’s union. Volunteer with Food Not Bombs and do other mutual aid in your community. Support your local solidarity economy and maker community. Build, fix, and grow stuff. Use free, open-source software and stop letting companies sell your data. Pirate stuff. Break unjust laws. Attend local actions
And most importantly, join radical groups in your area. Strength is found in numbers and none of us can change the world alone. If you need help finding your local movement, DM me and I’ll look around for you so you can start getting stuff done
Feed the people. People can’t–won’t– strike, protest, go against the bosses, sit in, down, or out, show up for community actions, marches or any other damn thing, and they won’t put thier jobs or homes or freedom or ability to feed and house thier kids in jepoardy unless you can answer the question “How are we going to eat?”
You’ve got to have an alternative. People need to eat and live and meet thier needs and the needs of the people they are responsible for. People have to come together and get each other taken care of and fed. Otherwise the only people who show up are the ones who can afford to. And since the group of people who both have resources-time, emotional, financial, transportation, etc and want to show up and change the system–is fairly small, and not growing fast…. That’s not enough people for a revolution.
Learn consensus. Build community with people. Talk to the humans around you and figure out what they need and how to organize people to meet that need. People aren’t going to show up and be told what they need. If you–if we–want a different system, we have to show up and show–not tell-people how they can meet each other’s needs.
and if your sole contribution is gatekeeping and infighting, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. turn outward. look for opportunities to help. DO SOME WORK.
Ella Baker
Very relevant wiki - Community Organizing
“Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other[1] come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest.[citation needed]
Unlike those who promote more-consensual community building, community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless. Community organizing has as a core goal the generation of durable power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence key decision-makers on a range of issues over time. In the ideal, for example, this can get community-organizing groups a place at the table before important decisions are made.[2] Community organizers work with and develop new local leaders, facilitating coalitions and assisting in the development of campaigns.”
Very relevant wiki - Community Building
“Community building is a field of practices directed toward the creation or enhancement of community among individuals within a regional area (such as a neighborhood) or with a common interest. It is sometimes encompassed under the field of community development.
A wide variety of practices can be utilized for community building, ranging from simple events like potlucks and small book clubs, to larger–scale efforts such as mass festivals and building construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.
Activists engaged in community building efforts in industrialized nations see the apparent loss of community in these societies as a key cause of social disintegration and the emergence of many harmful behaviors. They may see building community as a means to increase social justice, individual well-being and reduce negative impacts of otherwise disconnected individuals.”
Community-building and the Environment
“Community building efforts organize around toxic waste, environmental health, and environmental justice. Prior emphases on conservation, preservation, endangered species, rainforest destruction, ozone depletion, and other national global concerns often had no salience for local communities, and such emphases kept the environmental movement a largely middle class and upper middle class movement. (Brown) Groups may be as influential as the United Nations [10] or as small and local as neighborhoods. The Natural Resources Defense Council lists many publicly organized community-building groups created to decrease the ecological footprint and reduce the environmental impact that humans have.[11]”
These wiki are not exhaustive, just a starting point.
i’m so in love with domestic sweetness.
cooking dinner with the one you love while they wrap their arms around you. taking quick kiss breaks in between folding fresh laundry. washing each other’s hair in the shower. giggling and rolling around in the fresh sheets you both just finished putting on. dusting while showing off your latest dance moves and having your sweetheart show off their vocals.
it’s so comforting to have someone that you just enjoy making a home with. because chores done with someone you love isn’t such a chore after all.
mahersala ali being treated like shit this entire award season makes my blood boil
Mahershala Ali is a muslim and if Im not mistaken he doesn’t drink…. this a bit disrespectful
Not even just a bit, it’s really disrespectful and completely awful!
Not to be like “we live in a society” but I think a lot of people’s mental health would be significantly less fucked if they didn’t have to function in a system that forces them to think about their value as a human being as based on how productive they are/how much money people can make off them
One of the most useful things I’ve learned about recovering from trauma is that my decisions need to be judged according to the incomplete information that was available to me at the time.
So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.
I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.
What happened?
Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”
Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”
The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.
“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”
(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)
But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.
“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”
And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”
(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)
tl;dr: Bad results are not always evidence of bad decisions. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt about why you do what you do.
brown parents will push their children to become Big Things and Great People but at the same time discourage the SHIT out of their fucking children and somehow still expect their children to amount to something when all they’ve ever known is discouragement, disappointment, and doubt