Live in Europe

A piece of American optimism:

America has been awful since the start, in one way or another. It was never going to change because the majority population was either comfortable enough, or scared enough of the minorities that they would accept a certain discomfort as long as their fellow man had it somehow worse.

Right now nobody is having a good time over there. We’re approaching a breaking point. And that’s scary, but it’s also an opportunity to build a better world on the ashes of the old. We are on the verge of huge changes.

Change is no guarantee for improvement. Americans should not only protest the regime, but start preparing to rebuild. Get smart. Read your own history, especially the parts you’re not proud of. If you don’t know or fully understand those parts you will never manage to build wide alliances. Read postwar history, read about the French revolution and it’s messy aftermath. Read Arendt, read Rawls, read Steinbeck and Locke. Prepare yourself to grasp this historic moment. You have an opportunity unlike anything since the 18th century to change America for the better. Don’t waste it doomscrolling. Don’t think you know enough already. Prepare yourself to be the kind of person who is needed once the regime falls.

You’re not powerless—on the contrary, it’s an historic opportunity. And in power there is hope.

European optimism:

After the events of the last few weeks I think a lot more people are fed up with this fascist bullshit, and it seems even Eurosceptics now believe we need to stand together in solidarity across the continent. It’s a new European moment, and the American hegemony has been broken. I’m feeling genuinely optimistic.

The protests in Minnesota also fill me with joy.* I sincerely believe things are beginning to crack. Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are all in extremely fragile positions, and dictators have famously poor life expectancy. Change is gradual, then sudden, and the destinies of these despots are intertwined. The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

* I wrote this before they ended in more killings. It’s hard to see joy in it now, but I see equal amounts of hope.

Perhaps a nice egg would help

Find things that you are grateful for. Remember them daily, and find new ones daily.

Praise other people for their qualities and for things that they have done well. Daily.

Touch the corners of your mouth with 2 fingers and push them upwards. Then try it without fingers :-)

Take a historical perspective. Even with the muppets currently in power in some countries in the world, this is still the best time to be alive in the history of mankind. 100 years from now, 47 will be two paragraphs in a history book.

How many people know about the life and times of James Buchanan? How many people care? What about Herbert Hoover? Or Andrew Jackson?

And at least you get to talk about it. Imagine life under Stalin in the USSR, when a neighbour could report you for sedition and you would disappear into a gulag the next week. Or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where wearing glasses was a death sentence (yes, really).

I’m in Europe, and from where I’m standing, Trump looks like a giant unflattering mirror. If America doesn’t like what it sees in it, maybe work and fix it. On our side is the same: this mirror shows decades of complacent bureaucracy and infighting. So here’s the other silver lining: now we know what needs fixing.

Find a supportive and fulfilling community that is trying to make things better locally. I’ve found this at my Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. UU’s don’t believe in a shared religious text, instead they have a core set of shared values. My church has people who identify as atheist, Christian, several types of pagan, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, etc. We celebrate religious holidays from all of them as well as secular holidays like Trans Day of Visibility and Earth day. The focus is on being together and trying to make the world a better place. There’s active volunteer groups for hunger relief, housing support, the environment, and LGBTQ support. I also really like the music program. There’s a handy website to find a congregation near you, many stream services on Zoom so you can test them out before going in person. They can vary a lot based on the members of each congregation.

The “no elections” thing is a psyop designed to make you fearful and hopeless. Fraud is possible, but at the rate it’s going, it will probably be super obvious if they try it, which carries risks.

The assholes are fucking stupid, they’re bad at this, and I think the Kremlin is intentionally giving them shit advice because they want us to collapse more than they want the regime change. We will prevail if we work towards it, and I see a labor revival in our longer future.

I bought a gun.

I find that finding solutions to the problems that generate the feelings of doom is a good way to fight those feelings. Have a plan or several plans. You don’t have to solve the issue just find ways to get through it easier with less stress.

Example: Where I live, the power grid is garbage. Too much money has been diverted to the stockholders instead of grid maintenance. We’ve lost power three times since Christmas. There is a storm coming on Monday and the odds favor the power is going off. I have a checklist of what to do before and during the outage which makes it easier to get through.

With apathy, cynicism, and caritas.

Disengage.

The amount of doomer shit you intake is directly proportional to time spent online listening to the opinions of imbeciles.

So basically walk away.

I’m trying to enjoy the last of the abundance of good things, and have been educating myself mercilessly on how bad things are likely to get.

When I have the spoons and relevant opportunity, I try to spread some of the knowledge I’ve accumulated too.

Good things wise, I’m mainly leaning into my hobbies and interests of perfume, food and gaming.

• so trying and collecting scents that comfort and interest me, eating and cooking with lots of fruits and vegetables that will be hard to come by once fresh water and arable land stop being so readily available, and recently I’ve also been collecting and playing all the pixel dungeon games.

Education and escaspism are two sides of the same coin imo.

Avoid people who have this pessimistic mindset. This includes the news.

Next step is to think optimistically. There won’t be any election? He will be 85- something by then and he is not exactly the image of healthy living. And that is not even optimistic, it’s realistic thinking.

Sex mostly.

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