Posted by: Zea_mays
« on: May 29, 2022, 11:43:41 pm »
Zero.
Yeah, activism seems to be quite a thankless endeavor. It's like spectator sport or something--people love to watch from the sidelines and feel outrage, and maybe hold up a sign for a few hours or post a meme on their social media. That's easy, and people find the thrill "fun", I'm sure.
But few are willing to put in actual consistent work which inconveniences them and drains their energy. Once things require effort, they go "eh, this issue is big enough, surely a bunch of other people are already tackling it, so I'll just wait around until someone else fixes it."
So here is my message for the lurkers who agree with our message but are too timid to begin:
If you are afraid of jumping in and taking on commitments because you're afraid of the time it will take and don't want to let your collaborators down, I understand completely. But even the tiniest of consistent efforts adds up to more than nothing. Authentic American Dream was started on the premise that even a single post per year is better than nothing. It's like all the proverbs about moving a mountain one step at a time.
By starting activism, an individual is not obliged to single-handedly save the entire world, and no one expects you to do so. One high-quality blog post or local community event per year is INFINITELY better than doing nothing.
If people are hesitant to begin activism because they are afraid they are not "experienced" enough, do not have the skills necessary, or do not have enough knowledge... Well, we just had a president who was semi-literate, Boebert dropped out of high school and only bothered to get a GED months before winning her election, "experienced" activists like a BLM co-founder apparently bought a multi-million dollar mansion with funds raised for the movement, and "experienced" politicians are the most corrupt... Think about that. As long as you have a good heart, you are literally more qualified than a president, multiple members of Congress, and a co-founder of one of the biggest activist groups in decades. That's not just a hypothetical thought exercise. Those people really "achieved" all that, despite their lack of talent, lack of experience, and lack of good intentions. If they can do it, anyone can.
You don't need a PhD in political science, you don't need to have a law degree from Harvard, you don't need to be a clone of Martin Luther King. There was a time when even MLK was new and had no experience with activism, yet he rose to the occasion and gained skills in the process. Simply by starting--by doing anything--you have already become more qualified than 99% of other people. And I mean that. **** imposter syndrome. Look at the people who have been running the most powerful country on the planet, ffs! Can you really look at yourself in the mirror and deny that you are SUPERIOR to someone like Trump or Boebert and can do BETTER than them? Every 14-year-old left wing activist who has ever lived is more talented than them!!
All it takes is one individual to step up, and the course of the world can be changed.
The "Great man" narrative of history portrays heroes as larger-than-life figures that "regular people" cannot become. In opposition, False Left cynics have asserted that heroism is a random matter of circumstance that has nothing to do with the individual--or that it is fake or even a negative quality. Going beyond the "great man" attitude, Hollywood superheroes have made people think a hero is a born-perfected, all-powerful supernatural being which only exists in fiction and mythology.
But stories as varied as The Matrix and Sailor Moon show us that the every-day inexperienced individual becomes a hero by accepting their duty and rising to the occasion. Of course, it is not due to random chance alone that such individuals became heroes--to become a hero they had to care in the first place and have heroic personality traits lurking within them.
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To address another topic of your post, admittedly, writing and researching takes up pretty much all of my time and energy at the moment. So, I am not currently in the position to organize things beyond what I'm already writing.
If people want to help, I suppose the biggest thing they can do is post True Left articles, quotes/excerpts from articles, and talking points in places where leftists hang out. I don't have the time or energy at the moment to keep up with both writing and the social media universe.
If people are too timid to post things that are explicitly True Left, the least they can do is copy-paste things from the Reading List whenever False Leftists say stupid things. (That's why the Reading List exists--to be an easy place to find reference material for such purposes.)