All true, but I think we're the choir here.
Resist: It's Time
We are still in this together, but "this" is going to be real different in the very near future. This demands a different kind of "we."
The French Resistance during Nazi occupation played important roles delivering downed Allied airmen back to safety, supplying military intelligence, and acts of sabotage.
The Underground Railroad is estimated to have brought 100,000 freedom seekers to safety between 1810 and 1850.
It's time.
Rules
- Do not gatekeep resistance
- Do not organize specific subversive plans here.
- Do not identify yourself or anyone else here.
- Do brainstorm general ideas about how to support people who need it and stymie the efforts of fascists
- Do share thoughts on how to be personally prepared for subversive action
Well, it's like pulling teeth to get anyone moving.
For one, there's nobody on the inside to give access. Hard to work from the top down like that.
Most of the people in the middle of it all don't have much they can do, and since they're government workers to begin with, they don't likely know that there's people ready, if they can get in deep enough for direct action.
But, nobody seems to be able/willing to make moves at the bottom either. Most of that is the lack of any real organization preexisting. Even the folks that are relatively radical on the left don't have a history of serious resistance preparation. They're used to thinking in terms of protest and disruption rather than outright breaking established situations. And that's a huge gap. Going from "I want the system to change, but without destruction" to "I'm going to do whatever it takes" is not easy.
Two weeks in, I'm actually amazed that anyone has managed to do anything useful, and that little bit isn't online at all. Offline there's people prepping, but you take a small local group and try to put them on a wartime footing, you discover that a lot of what was talked about was more hypothetical than willing to take risk. Now you've got half-assed people that are a security hole, but can't entirely cut them off either. So anyone trying to make moves has to go slow or risk it being stopped entirely.
Seriously, how many people do you know are willing to die for this cause? That's what is being asked of anyone that wants to try and halt things before it ends up as a prolonged resistance. And, out of those, how many can do something useful about it?
So, it ends up where the goals have to be about delay and blunting efforts rather than rising up in numbers because there aren't enough numbers. And what numbers there are, don't have the ability to walk into the places where the people doing the destruction are. They can't use stealth because you ain't walking casually into the Treasury apparatus (as an example) and cleaning house sneakily.
Our democracy was at risk at election time. It died on Jan 20th.
Yea. We're fucked.
As sad as this is gonna sound, I don't think it's time for change, at least not yet. It's only been 15 days, there are no organized country-wide movements with a clear game plan on how to liberate the country, a lot of people still don't truly grasp the severity of what's happening or just straight up cheering, and there are still a lot of questions related to these things hanging in the air.
If there was somehow an alternate reality where all of the people who oppose Trump magically got unified and organized, how many of them would stay safely at home watching from the sidelines instead of taking up arms and risking it all to topple an oppressive regime? If the regime gets toppled, what happens afterwards? Do Democrats (who are also being infiltrated by the Oligarchs) get put back into power again who would likely not have a mindset change? Maybe Liberal Democracies just aren't strong enough to prevent this and, if so, what's the alternative? How would it work and how would it be achieved?
The only things that realistically can be done for now are protests to spread awareness/oppose the regime, helping those who need it the most (the ones being persecuted like trans and immigrants), and just biting the time, thinking about solutions and hoping that more people are going to get the wake up call, be it from living conditions becoming worse. getting influenced by protests or just seeing the horror that current US administration is doing.
As the other commenter puts it, the post is just preaching to the choir so I figured I'd leave another perspective here, even if people here disagree I hope it at least inspires some thought. If it's considered gatekeeping or too negative, feel free to remove.