I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache
Thinking about all those youtubers and streamers who generally stayed nonpolitical as not to alienate anyone but who absolutely could not handle it when that hogwarts game came out and their progressive audiences were telling them to maybe not play/review that one and they’d throw a fat tantrum like “no you don’t get it it’s my job this is the biggest game of the year I can’t not play it” and now we’re a few months along and fucking nobody is talking about it anymore cause it wasn’t even good. Was it worth it
This is something we as radicals don’t talk about much but which has come up a lot in my experience:
You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else
I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free
You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them
There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it
But that doesn’t happen if the resources aren’t used! Get out of the capitalist scarcity mindset - give freely and take freely, because by being lifted up you help us all
It’s really, really hard to learn. To unlearn “you don’t get something for nothing”.
Especially when I have to relearn what the “thing” in question is. Is it money? Is it food? Is it something less concretely quantifiable? Do I have any of that thing to give back? What if it’s not enough? What if I don’t deserve it???
I really wanna go to a rave but i’m scared because I jusg so happen to have the cop body type. And i only wear black steel toes twnnis shoes becau,e i’m scared of getting my wittle feet hurt… and i really wanna smoke weed there or do some dmt or someting but i’m autistic so i don’t know the right social cues to ask for drugs so i always just ask people on the atreet if they havw drugs and they never say yes theg always leave me so im scared if I do that at the rave people will leave me… and i keep a walkie talkie in my pocket so i can always call my mommy when i’m scared…… so yeah
Not to mention the handcuffs I discreetly keep in my back pocket in case I neeed to be handcuffed to something
