I give up. in Those Public Entries

There’s no point in fighting for a better world. No one wants things to get any better; they want to bitch and moan and virtue signal. If things actually did improve, no one would have anything to complain about, and that would be the worst outcome of all. How can people get their likes and updoots if they’re not playing the Oppression Olympics?!

People like me, who don’t have the money for grand gestures but still participate in mutual aid as much as we can? We’re the Bad Guys! We’re the shitlib normies who let the Democrats ass-fuck us! Because we’re voting and upholding the status quo!

No, I should try to be like “real” leftists, who go to DSA meetings to scream at each other about how the “shitlib normies” are just going to vote for COPmala and let Palestine be flattened. “Real” leftists don’t go out in the community, that’s where Republicans and //shudder// liberals are! No, it’s better to isolate ourselves. Covid is still out there and mutating, we can use that as a convenient excuse to not march or protest! Because no group of protesters IN HISTORY has ever risked their physical safety, or even their very lives, to advance their cause and fight for their rights! No one. Ever. In history. Simply has never happened.

//Cue John Lewis, Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Storme DeLaverie, Giacomo Matteotti, Viola Luizzo, Charlemagne Peralte, Che Guevara, Michael Collins, and hundreds of other civil rights protesters, screaming “OH, FFFFFUUUUUUCK YOU!” at the top of their lungs and from beyond the grave//

I should just stop trying to make the material reality of people better. Because every time I do, I get yelled at by “real” leftists, who are clearly acting in better faith than me, by being sanctimonious online.

Oh, look, I had a dollar and gave it to the person who was panhandling outside of Shaw’s, instead of looking away. What a shitty and selfish thing to do! I should’ve gone to Tumblr and made up a story that ends with “and everyone stood up and clapped!” instead. That’s real activism!

I’m using the yarn and tools I have to knit scarves for people, because I live in Vermont and know that there’s a housing crisis and people in Burlington, the city I work in, are going to be cold in a few months? What a selfish little cunt I am! I should have bashed a bunch of voting normies on Twitter, that’s a productive use of my time!

I spend time volunteering with Food Not Cops, an organization that cooks and distributes hot meals to people facing homelessness? Pfft, like that’s gonna help anyone, you shitlib normie cuck! Black out your profile pic on Facebook to “show people” what it would be like if women disappeared for 24 hours! That’s what’ll really change the world!

I donate money to the World Kitchen and do my daily click on Arab.org, sending money to Palestine? Get fucked, you lazy bitch! Put a watermelon emoji in your profile and add the Palestinian flag to your handle! Oh, and be sure to share pictures of mutilated Palestinian corpses, like handing out candy on Halloween, absolutely no one will be turned off or traumatized by that, especially not Palestinians who see it!

I prioritize listening to LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, BIPOC, and Palestinians, instead of white, straight, cis people? I am myself bisexual? I myself have ADHD, depression, anxiety, and other mental and physical illnesses? I’ve spent time learning ASL and trying to make my life more inclusive? Who fuckin’ cares, you liberal cunt! You don’t know what it’s like to be a straight, white, neurotypical, able-bodied, cis person who speaks for everyone else, they’re the ones worth listening to!

I check in on my neighbors during heat waves, because they’re elderly and none of the houses on my street has central air conditioning? Typical narcissistic Democrat performativity!

I have conversations about why I’m in favor of Medicaid for All and UBI with people I know don’t share my political views? You’re what’s wrong with the world!

I try to make sure I’m buying fair trade groceries, especially coffee and chocolate, because I’m aware that slavery runs rampant in the world of agriculture, and I want my money to go to slave-free food? How dare you!

No one wants the world to be a better place. Everyone who genuinely tries to make the world better, in whatever small ways they can, are just shitlib normies kowtowing to a status quo that keeps moving further and further to the right. People want to complain online, and that’s it. They’ll pay lip service to the idea of social justice and mutual aid, but when the time comes to pay that bill? Oh, no, we couldn’t possibly do anything, even in small ways, to make the material reality of peoples’ lives better! We’re too autistic! We’re too anxious! We’re too comfortable! It’s simply not possible! And anyone who tries? They’re just Democrats!

So what’s the point? Like Judy Garland told Liza Minnelli, “Give the people what they want.” They want to be oppressed? Fine. Project 2025 is right fuckin’ there. Let’s all vote for Trump! Go on, vote for him! You want to be oppressed that badly? He’s offering! You want to know what it’s like to live in a world that looks like the worst parts of the Hunger Games and the Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 and Nazi Germany? He’ll give that to us!

I have spent twenty fucking years trying to make the world a better place, in whatever way I can. I have tried to make people feel heard. I have tried to make people feel like someone cares about them. I have tried, as much as I can, to make the material reality of life better for the people around me. And for what? To be called a “Democrat” by someone more impressed with their own (almost certainly made-up) leftist “résumé” than the real work people are doing? To be told I’m acting in “bad faith” by pushing back against their shitty and, whatever else they pretend, personal attacks masquerading as “criticism” and “taking it personally” when they literally quote me to twist my words (which just “proves” I’m a stupid shitty lib, by the way, because “real” leftists never, ever, ever push back against bad faith criticism, or get so fed up with it that they put their critics on blast!)? To be told that nothing I do or say matters, because I’m more interested in what actually gets done than in joining some leftist circle-jerk? Because I’d rather do some productive work that has provable, measurable results, than be a part of a group whose members think infighting and moral policing is the goal?

Fuck that.

If wanting to do something to make the world a better place.

If wanting people to understand that boots-on-the-ground activism is how shit gets done.

If wanting people to know that they matter and someone cares about them.

If wanting to, in whatever way I can, clothe the naked and feed the hungry.

If putting my money where my mouth and my heart are.

If any or all of that makes me a stupid, shitlib, normie Democrat?

Then fine. I’m a stupid, shitlib, normie Democrat.

And I can live with that. I don’t give a flying fuck if you can’t. Because at the end of the day, you don’t have to live with me, and I don’t have to live with you. I have to be okay with the person looking back at me in the mirror when I brush my teeth.

And I am.

That person staring back at me? She’s not perfect. She fucks up a lot of the time. She’s got a temper that, when it explodes, makes Chernobyl look like a cute little hiccup. She gets thin-skinned when the people around her are more interested in looking like good people than being good people, and yes, her mouth often gets her into trouble.

But she walks the talk. She cares about other people. She wants to make peoples’ lives better. She knows what it’s like to be excluded and tries to make everyone around her feel included. She knows where her heart lies. She won’t suffer fools, and she especially won’t suffer do-nothing, sanctimonious assholes who care more about their own egos than reality. She understands that you can’t live in your own idealism, and that the world is a messy, fucked-up, uncaring place, so it’s down to people to clean it up and unfuck it and care, even if it’s just by a little bit. She understands that there is work to be done, and woe betide the sorry little people who try to stand in her way. After all, she’s also tiny; she doesn’t have to barrel anyone over, she can just slide between their legs.

I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to signal my allegiance to people who care more about projecting a certain image than doing something, just to impress other people or “prove” my activist credentials. I don’t have to do activism or mutual aid exactly the way someone else does, if it doesn’t work for me. I have to do what works for me. I have to do what actually makes peoples’ lives better. I have to do what actually produces results.

If that offends you? Then it offends you. Maybe ask yourself why.

Last updated August 25, 2024