Political

Struggle without end

Feel like giving up? Me too. But let's not.

Moata Tamaira

23 Mar 2024 — 5 min read

Look, I've never been one to not call a spade a spade so let's be blunt... things are pretty shit at the moment. It's not so much a "spade" as it is "a fleet of soul-crushing rotary hoes ripping the shit out of everything", amirite?

So things are bad and it's a daily struggle for me to not flip a table, pull the drawstring on my hoodie extremely tight, and hide in a corner, rocking and sobbing. That I DON'T do these incredibly reasonable things is frankly heroic (please courier my medal* to my work address so it doesn't get stolen by porch pirates).

I gotta tell you, I give this whole thing a sphincter factor of about 9.5. (Hippy, The Abyss (1989))*

And lately I've been wondering what the fuck any of us are supposed to do. How do we even begin to fix all of this? I feel overwhelmed by it and can feel myself slipping into despair. Every morning I jump on Bluesky to see what's what and there's yet another godawful policy, catastrophic bill or soundbite from a politician that makes my teeth hurt with its arrogance, narcissism or mendacity. It's like opening the door every morning to a firehose of effluent. Is it any wonder I just want to fling the door shut and walk away? Turn my back on the whole sorry thing and hope it takes a while before the sewerage starts to seep under door?

Gif from Star Wars series Andor in which the rebel, Nemik, outlines how an authoritarian state uses speed as a way to overwhelm the people it wants to repress, his exact words in the gif are "So much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly." — How much do I HATE that this Andor gif about repression feels like it applies to what is happening right now.

In the interests of radical self acceptance I'm not going to give myself a hard time for feeling this way (and neither should you).

But here's the thing that neither of us want to know. You can't give in to that feeling. Because things can always get worse, and good people switching off and disengaging only speeds up that process.

There are two things that we need to understand and it's not an easy combo:

You can't sugar coat it - things are grim.
Hope and optimism are required.

I know that asking someone to fully understand and hold both of those things at the same time is some ninja tightrope-walking shit. It's like they want to cancel each other out; matter and anti-matter walk into a bar holding hands - it's the set-up for a terrible joke.

It's not fair to ask you, or anyone to face the fucked up realities of the world that we live in (in both a global and more local context) and say "Chin up, love. It can always get worse!" but that is exactly what I'm doing for myself on a daily basis. Every day I'm trying to fight the inclination to throw my hands up and say it's too hard. Every day I feel the devil of despair on my shoulder telling me there's no point in signing yet another petition and most days I manage to punch that little motherfucker in the face and say "not today, Satan". Most days. I don't want to do it. But it is REQUIRED. But yeah, I'm tired.

So tired.

Photo of a truck and trailer. Strapped on the back of the trailer are 8 absolutely enormous tires. — This is a very dumb joke but being able to still make very dumb jokes feels like a victory at the moment.

It's so easy to tell yourself you're only one person and nothing you do will make a difference but that's never been true. Greta Thunberg was a teenage nobody who inspired a whole movement. Think of Rosa Parks. Or Naida Glavish. On a smaller scale you doing something gives the person next to you permission to also do that thing. Humans are flock-like animals in lots of ways.

And big changes can come from seemingly tiny moments. Self-care isn't something I've always been great at but every morning I get up and drink a glass of water. This sets my intention for the day that I'll make good choices and do good things for myself. You wouldn't think that something so insignificant would make a difference, but it genuinely has. I no longer doom scroll for an hour before I turn out the light and I get more sleep because of it. My wine intake has plummeted. I get more exercise. But it's just a glass of water... why would you bother? Because it's the bothering that's the point. Bothering to do one small thing leads to bothering to do more, perhaps harder things.

Well, we all need to bother now. We all need to bother as much as we can stand to. This is not a drill. There is no cavalry that's going to arrive. We are the cavalry. Yes, we the tired, the annoyed, the despairing, the terminally fucked off. We're it. Congrats, General.

Ka whawhai tonu mātou, Ake! Ake! Ake! / We will continue to fight, on and on and on!

So, I encourage you to do whatever it is that you can do whether it's donating money to a cause you believe in, signing yet another fucking petition, marching, writing an overly earnest post, or doing some politically motivated craft.

Photo of a middle aged wahine Māori wearing a denim jacket with a “TOITŪ TE TIRITI” cross stitched patch across the shoulders. — Also, stabbing things is sometimes cathartic.

Whatever it is, just do it. When you hear that little voice that says "ugh, there's no point" just tell that fuckwit to pipe down and DO THE THING.

I leave you with a clip from Angel (yes, Joss Whedon is incredibly problematic these days, and he did some toxic shit on that show but maybe that's a lesson in and of itself - even from the grim weird harassment environment of that show we can find a moment of beauty and truth^)