This is the end of my Hope Series, in the wake of the Likely Death of Democracy.  I’ve been queuing these posts for 6:30 AM Eastern time and a frivolous link post for 9:30 AM as a chaser.  I mention this because you may have missed previous entries.  There is one per day for every day from 11/6-11/16.  Check ’em out.

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You may have seen a video recently where I said I want to see the equivalent of a “shadow government” for every aspect of life.  I want to buy shadow groceries at the shadow 7-11.  I want to see shadow movies at the shadow theater, eating shadow popcorn and drinking shadow coke.  With my shadow homies, Sheisty Pete and Nefarious Gonzalez.

Off topic, but how about Shadow… run?  In that TTRPG there were cyberboyz with something called a “monofilament whip,” which was sooo sharp it could slice through anything.  They had to keep it in a slice-proof little spool case like deadly dental floss.  It raised similar questions to the omnipotence of god – can there be a filament so mono that it can cut itself?  Would it turn into mono-confetti if you rattled your floss box?

Sorry, this is the last post of my “reasons for hope” series, so I should really be more serious.

OK a shadow government is where people are like, let’s actually run this joint because the official guys aren’t it.  Pretty quickly we will not be able to rely on the federal government for much.  The more “evil genius” of the coterie of ghouls waiting in the wings of the oval office will probably opt for a gradualism where the public won’t notice what they’ve lost until it’s gone, so I don’t expect Social Security to get shut off instantly, for example.  But it will get worse, as will every government service we rely on.  So.  Shadow government.

I do think good state governments will help a lot, but we will be better off with more self-sufficiency.  I nominate the university system to be the first system to get Shadow’d.

SHADOW UNIVERSITIES

The U system is a dead system walking.  The vast majority of professors are academic hobos who can barely afford mouthwash, while administrators snort coke off gold-plated toilets with israeli ambassadors.  I know the people who still are hanging on doing the best they can are doing the best they can, but.

Let’s get stronger systems in place for giving anybody whatever education they may desire, for free, under the table, out of the back of a rusty van with dealer plates, in a haunted stretch of Interstate 99.  Or the internet, whichever works better.  This would require a number of things to work.

First, an incentive.  The current U system uses the rotten carrot of adequately paying jobs as reward for million dollar debts.  The shadow system would have… what?  Shadow prestige, I think.  God, I’d heap laurels on a good shadow professor, for what those are worth.  Sexual favors too, if my husband allowed it, haha.

Second, it needs a way for professors to get by in a pursuit with no recompense.  You know, a lot of academic hobos / adjuncts are hard-pressed to get enough hours to pay rent, so they do have some free time.  Not all of them, but enough to support this endeavor?  Maybe.  Third, it needs resources, for lab work and such.  Well, meth labs exist.  We can figure it out if they can, although we have less money.

Fourth and by no means least, it needs at least a virtual classroom.  I think, maybe internet forums?  They’d be subject to getting disappeared instantly by crapitalism, but with frequent backups, you might be able to slide under the radar for years and survive a few fires, y’know?  Anyway, it would need a lot more than what I’ve discussed, but I hope what I’ve done is get a conversation going.

SHADOW SOCIAL SECURITY

Well, everybody who isn’t lost in the bullshit blizzard of media created by fascist billionaires knows that the rethuglicans want all social programs dead, dead, dead.  This is just a matter of time.  The only solution for this is something that people from more collectivist cultures have been doing for ages:  family and community associations.  In the West we used to have some things like this as well, but those institutions were eroded or violently taken out, in order to reduce us to rugged individualists who scrabble in the dirt until we die.

How do we rebuild something so completely fucking gone from our civilization?  Ya got me, chief.  But if we did, these groups could do things like care for the old and disabled, when all the mainstream gov institutions fail.  They can also pool resources, get young people jobs, provide physical protection when the community is threatened…

SHADOW MEDICAL SYSTEM

This already exists, and it is fundamentally bad.  Remember Sally Fields talking about how she was molested during her Tijuana abortion?  This is what we’re dealing with.  But.  I imagine the right kind of activists could improve it.  This would be fundamentally more expensive than anything on the list.  Shadow Social Security might help pay for some of it, but it might just need to be a kind of altruistic organized crime – straight up stealing medical supplies.

I don’t know, but it would be cool if, in some place where health care is all owned by the catholic church (much of the USA) or ruined by forced-birthers, there was recourse for health care that wouldn’t end in molestation or stolen kidneys.

SHADOW 911

Be nice to have somebody you could call to help with a rough situation where deadly force would be completely off the table.  Because 911 is tied to the pigs, even asking for an ambulance can get you twitchy overpaid nazis with guns.  I don’t want to discourage people from calling who they need to in an emergency right now, even with some amount of associated risk, but I do wish we had more alternatives.

SHADOW IRS

The tax system should be used to pay for the betterment of all, but it’s mostly a vacuum suck to the military industrial complex and other horrifying corrupt entities.  Not saying you shouldn’t pay your taxes because unfortunately that’s how things like Social Security are funded, but it’d be nice to be able to pitch some money into a fund you know will help your people.  I guess this gets back to the community groups I mentioned in Shadow Social Security.

SHADOW ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

There are a lot of people making art for little to no recompense, just to be heard, to express something, whatever their reason.  Corporate art has glimmers of brilliance that it squeezes out of the tortured bodies and minds of exploited artists.  Fuck the big five book publishers, fuck Diamond Comic Distributors, fuck the fine arts community and its incestuous relationship with extreme wealth, fuck the RIAA to death, fuck Netflix, fuck Disney, fuck Time-Warner-AOL-Nestle-Mars-DuPont-Halliburton.

We need better systems for supporting indies, but more importantly for big projects, like competing with hollywood, we need better ways to have artists collaborate without exploitation.  It’s hard as hell because we’re such a chaotic bunch, but it could happen.  I can envision a better series of action-adventure movies than anything Disney could shit out, made with cardboard and computers, real writers, and a genuine vision.  I don’t know how yet, but I swear we could do this.

A good aim would be an indie soap opera.  Drama students and out of work dinner theater actors of the world, unite!  I want you to make compelling telenovelas for release on yewchoob or dailymotion or thepiratebay or thumb drives in manila envelopes and dark alleys.  It’s high time you got to answer your calling without a rapist’s casting couch in the way.

ORGANIZED CRIME

Technically speaking, even if these things were 100% altruistic and well executed, they would be criminal organizations.  Worse still, any institution that is not allowed to function in daylight is going to attract exploitation from the actual organized crime.  There are some who say the mafia is a community group that helps people get employed and defends when the community is under attack, all that stuff, but at the end of the day?  Protection rackets, drugs, sex trafficking, murder.  Bad shit, and any shadow org is going to attract some involvement of criminals like that.

There are no perfect solutions to a situation that is fundamentally bad, and I don’t have any solid ideas on how to make these things happen.  But it’s time to start trying again.  We have a lot of work to do.  We won’t have it all, won’t be safe or secure in what we do get, but we can get a better deal than the fascists are going to give us, if we make it happen ourselves.

It’s worth a shot.

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With that, my Hope Series is ended.  Regular random content continuing tomorrow…

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My least favorite refrain from oppressed people is “nobody cares about us.”  Bitch, please!  You have hella allies.  Yes, they aren’t always enough to keep you as safe, they might not be in your neighborhood, but they exist, and they are numerous.  You have the right to feel hopeless (I’d prefer you didn’t), but don’t try to spread your despair like a fucking ghost curse.  The rest of us don’t deserve that, and maybe our allies don’t deserve that either?

There are orgs with lawyers dedicated to defending this demographic (like lambda legal) or that right (ACLU), at least dozens of such groups.  They have the experience and knowledge to achieve things within the legal system we have.  It won’t always work, but sometimes it will.  There are orgs and less formal groups that provide material aid to people in trouble, like driving folks who need abortions between states, or giving help to homeless LGBT youth, etc.

There are hacktivists and whistleblowers who expose government evils to international shame.  There are left activists who take direct action, like antifa, protecting vulnerable people during protests, and making sure right wing thugs never have the street.  And there are whatever people in your own life that might be of some help.  People are people, which means every one of them is a mixed bag of good and bad traits.  But sometimes you need help from somebody who is a colossal piece of shit, and they’re willing to provide it.  My dad was rescued during a crisis by a fascist war criminal.  Take what you can get, when you need to.

We don’t all have the strength to fight fascism every day, but we do what we can, and some of us are much cooler in this regard than the average.  Real champions are out there, fighting for whatever causes move them, and every cause moves somebody.  Just because millions of Americans were ignorant or cruel enough to disregard human rights by sitting this election out, it doesn’t mean there aren’t millions more that see the danger and want to do whatever they can to fight evil – to protect those that need protection, from those who seek to cause harm.

Start looking for them.  Find your people: who you can reach, and what they can do for you.  And of course, whatever you find, take care of yourself as well.  And if, at the end of the day, you need somebody to fight for you,

Long live the fighters.

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In our perfected world, whatever that looks like, from sea to shining sea all will live under a universal guarantee of human rights.  But billionaire-owned media selling tax breaks for themselves with fear of the underprivileged, well, it’s got a big swath of the middle of this country in a death grip.  It does not matter one jot what the actual majority of people in those states want*, the ones favored by gerrymander have decided it’s time for jim crow, prison farms, gaybashing, bookburning, and elimination of any religion but christianity from the public sphere.  And, in this moment, they’ve won so decisively that they are very likely to work the levers of power to eliminate democracy in the USA for decades to come.

In the meantime, the excuse they’re using is state’s rights.  States should have the right to murder their own citizens to meet the cruel whims of Blood Jesus.  Why don’t you understand these things?  It’s only right.  The flipside of this coin is that it may allow blue states the power to pass strong protections for human rights, and might allow for a lot more.

The state of California has so many people, so many resources, that when they pass laws that are technically only enforceable at home, any business that wants to do business in that economy has to conform or gtfo.  Chik-fil-A can deep fry trans people in Arkansas (I assume) but not so much in the city of Compton.  In fact, it’s pretty likely that Cali has everything they need to just ignore the entire rest of the USA economically and use their access to shipping in the Pacific for anything they lack.

They are exceptional in that respect, but a number of coastal states can still pull a pretty strong flex if they want to – which is why it greatly heartens me that my own state has a democratic governor.  During the strife around covid, there were meetings between the governors on the “Left Coast” about how they should respond, almost as if… they had the power to tell the District of Columbia to kiss their asses?  I dunno.  I’m interested to see what’s possible if these leaders are bold enough, when the time calls for it.

It’s not right that in order to maintain their human rights, many people will have to flee their home states.  But as long as states are being allowed some say in these issues – and as long as some states are powerful enough to take that say whether it’s allowed or not – there are places in the USA where hope is a little less crushed.

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*74 million fascists in a country of 300 million is NOT the majority.

How do you act without despair, when you’re too realistic to genuinely hope or think your actions will have an effect?  One route is Absurdism, which is a more specific philosophy than you might be aware, and is probably not for everyone.  However, it did help one person survive a hate movement of thousands, so could be worth looking into, if you’re curious.  It was, after all, born from resistance to the nazi occupation of France.  Unfortunately relevant once again today, and has been for a while.

Another way is to focus on your actions that do have an effect.  Yeah, they won’t save the world, won’t individually defeat the monstrosity of this movement, but your actions could save other people, could save yourself.  That matters.  You don’t have to be the world’s buffest antifa kickboxer to carve some good out of a grim world.

First up, do things you enjoy, that also move your mind.  Reading, listening to or creating music, making art, writing, playing video games.  Doesn’t matter as long as you take a little care to do it in a reasonably balanced way – don’t let it round a corner to becoming unhealthy.  Hard to imagine how it could happen with some of those items, but somebody would figure out how, lol.  Second, do the things you don’t want to do, but will be glad to see done, like washing your dishes and take out the trash.  Just do what you can to be OK.

Something I forgot to mention in the inaugural post of this expanded thesis is that my real reason for doing this is my growing awareness of people in my life and in my readership who are physically hurt by stress, sadness, anger.  The rest of this blog network, especially Pharyngula, is apiece with the deathscroll vibe of the leftosphere at large.  That isn’t healthy for anyone, but for a significant subset of people, it’s extremely harmful.  For you more than anyone, self-care, buddy.

If you’re doing well enough, see what you can do for others.  This can include animals and plants in your life, or if you got the sauce, people.  For my part, at the moment, these posts are as much as I can manage.  The feedback I’ve been getting tells me it’s a good thing.  I will get to the end of my supply sometime next week, but I will have done something worthwhile for a minute.

Water the cats, feed the plants, give to medical fundraisers, give to charities, talk to lonely people, try to soothe people who are worried or upset – whether it’s about politics or not.  Careful with helping people that it doesn’t blow up on you, of course.  Never know when a guy you smiled at in the Starbutts will turn into a stalker.  But take the risks you feel comfortable with.

When it comes to politics, the best thing you can do is help people overcome the hurdles that rethugs put between the righteous and a voting booth.  It’s relevant even now, with the next elections a ways off.  In part, because people who were successfully kept from voting this time might still be struggling to get registered.  I know this is true – I spoke with a very old Native American woman from Arizona that was facing some inscrutable bullshit from that state just the week before the election.

I don’t know what the wisdom is, with fighting the ratfucking dirtbag “leftists” that discourage people from voting.  I know a lot of them are foreign – a weirdly large amount of them from Brazil and Argentina, the next largest contingent from Eastern Europe – which puts them out of reach of the ol’ sockarooni.  If the answer to bad speech is more speech (dubious), then you can just reach out and touch people you know, people who are non-voters, and encourage them to get it together.  That is itself a serious challenge, because you won’t win ’em over with condescension or screaming, but goddamn is that tempting.

People like me might be well-qualified for that task, on a good day.  When I interviewed for my current job, I cited my experience helping poor people with communication difficulties in customer service at muffuckin’ walmart.  With the shit I have to do at my current job, I feel like my ass could get nominated for sainthood by now, so I’m probably doing something right.  Maybe take a job in social services?  If they’re hiring and you have serious fucking neurotypical sauce.

I don’t have a rousing endpoint for this.  I’ll just reiterate the thesis.  You can do things, and even little things matter.  More grandiose things can come if you’ve got the strength, and that may be at some undefined time in the future.  But if all you’re doing is cleaning your goldfish’s bowl, thank you.  You’re also cleaning the inside of your skull.  Heal.  and then go kick some fucking ass.

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Oh yeah, I’d meant to mention my Hellstar Reminism philosophy.  Maybe another time.

As I’ve mentioned before, political doomerism is part of what cost us the country.  But even now, when fascism is flying its freak flag unimpeded down Main Street, when so many shitty things are going to happen, political doomerism is wrong, and it can cost us more than we’ve already lost.

To the doomer, nothing can ever be changed so don’t even bother.  Smoke ’em if you got ’em and learn to laugh at horror.  Like eco-fascism, it’s something with a compelling ounce of truth, but taken in a bad wrong direction.  And so easy too.  So easy I’d characterize it as fucking lazy.  If you think the world is coming to an end, find something more interesting to do than sit there, c’mon.

The element of truth in environmental doomerism is that we are well past the point where the beautiful world we were born into can be preserved in anything like its current form.  Vast swathes of species will go extinct, including much of the “charismatic megafauna.”  Places that are right now beautiful forests will become inhospitable wastelands.  Plastic and pesticide and biotic interchanges that never should have happened, and now we have politicians even more eager to accelerate us into that future.

BUT.  Life has survived worse, and no organism in the history of the world has had the problem-solving powers of a human mind.  We may be able to get through all that.  But we’ll never know if we don’t try, right?  And those efforts have short-term benefits galore.  Environmental doomerism keeps people inert, coasting on a deadly momentum, fulfilling its own bullshit prophecy.

Political doomerism is the same.  The true aspect is that the federal government is far more powerful than it should be in the USA, and that has been lost wholesale to fascists right now.  But there are still reasonable people who are in there, able to sometimes, some ways, fuck up the program for the jerks.  The fash will get away with doing an awful lot of damage, but some of it will be blocked, one way or another.

And Washington DC isn’t where the rubber meets the road on legislation.  This stuff needs states to enforce it, and while some are hijacked by the worst tyrants this side of Mecca, many states are going to work around or even fully block the effects of bad laws.  They can’t stop all the bleeding, but they can stop an awful lot, if they put their minds and resources to it.  If you’ve got a blue or even purple government, press your politicians to do whatever it takes to keep their constituents safe.

And government isn’t the end-all be-all of politics.  Street level, we can kinda do whatever the fuck we want?  As long as we’re willing and able to face the consequences.  The multifarious US right wing terrorists live by that credo; no reason we can’t too.  Ideally, to be doing things like helping humans survive, making love not war, but still.  You could literally do anything you are physically capable of, if you want to.

This election was lost by blue voters not showing up.  Culturally GOP people actually improved, with many of them staying home, and I thank them.  It was too much to hope for that many would switch to blue, like those prominent few did.*  It is people who might have voted blue that tossed this thing.  Some were misogynists, which is still a problem so much more pervasive and deep than most understand.  Some were single-issue voters who hated dem heel-dragging on Palestine, somehow too dense to realize this can do nothing but make things worse for the muslim world as a whole.  But I suspect, having seen endless rounds of the “it’s cool to not vote” discourse on social media from ostensible leftists, that a great many had just given up hope.

Political doomerism, like all doomerism, makes doom happen.  Resisting that is crucial to salvaging anything good in the future, and very importantly – and very possibly – to making good things happen in the present.  Fight doom!

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*as it turned out, the number of trump voters was almost exactly the same as it was last time.  the cult is devoted, what can we say?