Veterans Day. Still recovering sitting stewing reviewing mumbling reacting to the election and the fascist being given the keys to the house. Troubling and confusing and disappointing and depressing but energizing. How to best resist the total reshaping of what we know America to be? the coming battles which will be many, small and large, subtle and often attempted to be slipped into what we know to be true replacing it with small variations which threaten to push out truth in favor of bigotry and control. This country has daddy issues. Young men are frustrated and falling for snake oil salesmen, ordering it as a supplement in an easy to swallow pill, then telling each other great job. It’s hard to keep the faith in the promise of the youth. They are not yet equipped to handle the powerful machine that is spraying their minds with toxicity. their minds haven’t developed. Unfortunately now they will be forced to develop in directions that are harmful.
I worry that young people will be the victims of poor critical thinking, expectations of a ready-made package. AI is certain to degrade the value placed on the process of learning hard things. Hopefully the hard skills will still require the practice and effort (that is their nature). Knowledge and study and thinking and context is under threat. Ideas can be easily replaced when the sources of that knowledge are gone from presence and consciousness (people, books, music, even audio and video). Anything that threatens to remove their presence from the learning process is a threat to continued human intellectual development.
One way to resist is to make yourself present. Take up your space. Show yourself. Express your ideas. Express your distaste and preferences and the life you live. Find common ground that is centered in progress. Communicate, but don’t scream. Don’t shame. Don’t give into traps of debate. Find friends both irl and online who see you, and whom you also see. Communicate and share with them. Sound the alarm when the situation demands it.
Ask questions of strangers, with genuine curiosity. Listen to their response.
Again: The battles will come to us appearing small and insignificant. The rising right-wing movement has designed cold and cunning machines and systems to chip away slowly at freedoms, norms, and institutions, rather than overhauling them in grand gestures. The good news is that smaller battles, in themselves, are easier to fight. If you despair, don’t let the despair paralyze you from holding your ground. Don’t let it bulldoze over your presence. Stand tall, stand proud.
Make things. Make ugly things, or beautiful things if you are someone with that sort of talent. Make things that are useful, things that are just meant to be looked at, listened to, shared, kept, felt. Tell someone about what you made. Or don’t tell anyone. Wear it. Use it. Give it away. Make 10 of them. Was the tenth any better than the first? Document your process. Notice how it makes you feel. Making things ourselves helps us to become more self-sufficient. It is also a keystone that we can build shared community around. It’s another way to be present, to express ourselves, to acknowledge a need that we have and our own ability to fulfill that need. It helps us to develop smaller skills, to notice the details. We notice what really matters, and what matters less. We can be amazed at the complexity of something, or the simplicity.
Move your body. Exercise without listening to anything while you’re doing it. Listen to your body. Listen to your own thoughts. Listen to the environment around you, the people, the life. The silence. Push yourself a little further. That night, notice how you sleep. Notice how the act of exercising your body can help your emotional state. For me it is like a medicine.