Looking around me:
- I started seeing people who support capitalist companies instead of non-profits.
- People losing their freedoms everywhere at high pace.
- No one is taking any serious steps to stop climate change.
- A lot of non-profits had seriously down scaled their operations in the last 5 years, most probably more non-profits will get hit hard this year.
- On a relative scale, no one is fighting to change any of this.
Do we have any hope?
Yes. Get off the goddamn internet for a while.
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
- Mister Rogers
I’m not going to give them my fear
- AOC
Hope is what we have in the face of adversity. Do not accept defeat. There is so much worth fighting for.
Sustain and nourish your hope.
The best thing that can happen to your opposition is you losing hope. Losing hope, losing the ability to imagine a different, better future drains you from even making the attempt. Making you hopeless, paralyzed, complacent is part of the oppositions strategy.
This rapid horrific change is still proof that change is possible.
Consciously nourish your hope. Consciously combat the attempts to make you hopeless.
Stop looking at the monster until that’s all you see, and you’re locked, frozen to the ground.
Look between the monsters’ feet. Look at all the people gathering, organizing, helping each other fight these skyscraper tall monsters.
If you won’t hope, there is no better place to find it than in community with likeminded people. Turn your dispair into action. Look at people around you. What do they need? What is a small thing that you can contribute right now. A small thing. Go do that. Believing that your actions matter and your contributions make a difference is a muscle you need to train.
Small things can be: Put up stickers. Talk to your neighbor. Looking up groups in your area. Bring food to someone who needs it. Help someone with groceries. Check in on a friend. Look into mutual aid programs in your area.
Every little kind action matters. It’s an antidote to dispare. Both for you and the people around you.
Consider how you can use your skills.
Help people away from META and on to the fediverse like Lemmy. People in my area are setting up hang outs where they help each other migrate platforms.
A lot of activists aren’t necessarily skilled with tech or social media. Is that something you can help with?
What do you do for work? No matter what you do, those skills are directly transferable and needed in your community.
Genuinely - There’s SO much super easy, practical stuff needed in your neighborhood, in your community, in your movement that would be SO easy to pick up and make SUCH a big difference. The biggest need is more hands. Always. You don’t have to know how to help. It becomes apparent SO quickly as soon as you step in the door.
There’s still a lot of work left to do. Keep fighting, cause there’s a lot worth fighting for.
The 30s and 40s seemed hopeless too.
I choose to hope and I’ve been remembering Tolkien to help
So in about 20 years our lives could start having a fraction of the comfort and joy we had until now? Sounds awesome
There is always hope. It just depends on how much effort you personally are willing to put in to help change the things you’re seeing. There are several movements (50501 and Indivisible are two that immediately spring to mind) with millions of members that are currently fighting to change things. Get involved.
There are people out there taking action, go find some. Collective action is always stronger than individual action. If you don’t currently have a community that is engaged, consider joining a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Unitarians in the US and Europe resisted the German Nazis by creating documents and providing refuge for Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust. Many congregations today have active social and environmental justice groups, often focusing on local action with low barriers to entry. Nobody is expected to believe any particular scripture, but UUs have a common set of principles, the first being everyone has inherent worth and dignity. The sermons at my congregation lately have been about trans visibility, rising to the moment and processing the chaos, which I’ve found inspiring.
There is always hope.
Yes. Things will get better. We don’t know how quickly that will happen, but it will happen. Meanwhile, take care of yourself and do what you can to take care of the people around you. The whole MAGA movement is based on fear and hatred. Being decent and doing good may be the most effective way to resist and, eventually, overcome it.
deleted by creator
Symmetrically alternative recipe that I recently heard (from a French academic): “hopeful pessimism”. The idea being, roughly, that while it’s delusional to be optimistic, hopefulness is by definition subjective and therefore valid. And indeed quite sensible given that we can never know the future and therefore it really might turn out to be better than expected.
deleted by creator
As long as there are people like you desiring hope, Hope will never die.
Every person who isn’t a little bitch that rolls over is hope.
It’s still better than the 1930s, low bar that it is.
But possibly not better than 1855, unironically.
deleted by creator
Nope! There is no hope. You were always going to die no matter what. But that’s not the negative you might think. It’s freeing. Life is full of suffering no matter what you do and one day you will die. So that means if there are no promises that life will be good, the only thing that truly matters is how you feel about yourself and the way others feel about you.
Take the time to study the way you feel, what you can do better, and how you can make others happy. Study yourself and grow, because the only way out is in.
I can’t help you with most of the points, but you should stay hopeful and start forcing change with activism. With the climate change point, I reccomend this video, it is optimistic while staying realistic and addresses the problems that are a roadblock to net zero.
There’s hope. Take a media break. Come back to the fight when you’re rested
