Start the day right! Pick up a hitchhiker.
It's the little things. It has always been the little things. It will ever be the little things.
Last Saturday I resisted capitalism and authoritarianism in six different ways before lunch. I’m making similar plans for today. Here’s the list!
I gave my kid-in-law a ride to their 8 a.m. shift at the food co-op.
I picked up a hitchhiker even though he was going the opposite direction from me.
I cried in public.
I bought fawncy French pastries made by hand at a local café.
I wrote a protest slogan on a salvaged plastic bag and stuck it on an armature my spouse, David, made out of scraps (see photo above).
I stood on the street corner and waved said sign.
What’s that you say? Only #6 sounds like an act of resistance?
Wrong!
It’s the little things
These are seriously fucked-up times. I can’t keep track of the 57 thousand ways our democracy is dying and our nation’s so-called leaders are failing us. And they are failing most grievously the people who most need federal protections.
I am enraged. I am primally screaming inside.
I wanna get into trouble
I wanna tear all my bridges down
And pour gas on the rubble
I wanna burn them to the ground
Guess what. I fucking can’t.
Given that realization, I can either tear myself up and burn myself down, or I can do good shit that is within my sphere of influence.
Pro tip: unless you are Elon Musk or Vladimir Putin, your sphere of influence is not the size of this planet.
Plan B it is! To wit:
We do what we can, whenever we can.
We start giving ourselves credit for it—actively celebrating it, in fact.
I invite you to join me in acknowledging every small act of resistance you perform. Here’s how each of my activities last Saturday helped make this big ol’ world a few tiny increments better.
You ain’t done nothin’ if you ain’t been called a Red
My kid-in-law takes their job at the Brattleboro Food Co-op very seriously. Cashiering at a community supermarket is profoundly exhausting emotional labor. Every second they’re on the clock, those cashiers are—at their own personal expense—actively and consistently making other people’s days better.
Better days, over time, magically turn into better lives.
By driving my kid-in-law to work (in an electric car), I am supporting a better life for co-op customers. Also a better life for my kid-in-law since the co-op is a great place to work in comparison to Price Chopper and Hannaford.
Those are shitty places to work. You know why? Capitalists are cutting staff to the bone and enlisting their “guests” in scanning and paying for their own groceries using the most infuriating fucking UX on the fucking planet instead of letting us look into a another human’s eyes and express gratitude to them for making our day better and, over time, our life better.
You might view the checkout line at the grocery store as purely transactional at best, an exercise in impatience and rage at worst. If that’s the case, I’m sorry. Perhaps consider switching to a unionized grocery store that doesn’t have self-checkout and pays cashiers a non-insulting wage.
P.S. Regardless of where you shop, just fucking be nice to cashiers, capiche? Especially the ones who have to staff the self-checkout that replaced six of their friends. #AngryCry
P.P.S. The co-op has fresh, local eggs, and they are reasonably priced! Because free-range chickens are not as vulnerable to a fucking pandemic since they are not packed into cages where they don’t even have room to stand up. Yay, Bonvue Farm! (The pic is old.)
Make hitching great again
Back when my mom was living here in Brattleboro, a woman with stringy hair, frail before her time and likely struggling with an opioid addiction, walked by the house one day as we were getting into the car. Noticing that we were about to pull out, she asked for a ride. “Hop in!” I said.
My mom had a panic attack. Later she yelled, “You don’t even know her! She could have had a gun!”
OK, sure. Fine. You know who else in this Great-Land-of-the-Biggest-Constitutional-Loophole-on-the-Planet could have a gun? Everyone. Every last person. And—this is a famous feature of range weapons!—a gun owner doesn’t have to be in the backseat of your car to shoot you.
Capitalism and authoritarianism thrive when we are in an arms race of suspicion and hostility. People who are afraid of being shot, for some fucking reason, buy guns. People who are afraid of having their neighbors in their cars buy SUVs and pickup trucks and drive to Walmart in them alone to buy useless crap that is made overseas because it would literally be illegal to make such shitty shit in this country. People who are suspicious and hostile don’t get together and rise up against the machine.
The hitchhiker I picked up last week is a quirky local character, a violinist and erstwhile fringe candidate for Vermont public office. But I’d never spoken to him until I picked him up. For all I know, he’s an axe murderer. But I doubt it. Jerry was on his way to a gig at Fire Arts Café.
Capitalism isn’t fond of quirky local characters participating in the creative economy without giving Wall Street a cut. Authoritarianism wants to crush fringe leftist candidates.
Back here in Objective Reality, going 20 minutes out of my way was Jerry’s bread and butter that day. And it was such a small, small thing for a person who is rich enough to own a car and lucky enough to have a leisurely Saturday morning.
For everyone else? One of the world’s biggest gifts! Music! Beautiful music for the beautiful masses!
Play the fuck out of that fiddle, Jerry. Thank you for your service.
Play until the sun comes up
Play until your fingers suffer
Let them eat croissants
When I got to the café, I saw a friend I haven’t seen for two years. Last time I saw her, she was on our front porch, delivering soup and bread in the wake of our son’s death. She lives two blocks away.
How do you go two years without seeing a friend who lives two blocks away? That is so messed up.
You know what else is messed up? Not crying when you need to cry.
Capitalism thrives when we are emotionally fatigued and let our pain tear us up inside. Because then we tend to numb our pain with dysfunctional consumerism and mind-altering substances (most of them legal ones). Or we go on Facebook and have flame wars because we feel like shit and want to share the misery. Authoritarianism thrives on our anonymized (except to advertisers and AI screen scrapers!) isolation from one another. All this instead of hugging each other and quietly weeping while in line at the café.
After I wiped my tears, I ordered a selection of delectable biscuits, croissants, and empanadas to share with my loved ones. Again, for a person wealthy enough to buy such things, a tiny gesture. For the job creator who runs this café? For hundreds of people up and down the supply chain of the local fucking economy?
A fucking lifeline. I am not exaggerating.
And make no mistake: enjoying wholesome food hand-crafted by wholesome people who are using wholesome local ingredients is an act of resistance. Capitalism wants us to crave the crap they hire psychologists and neurologists to help them dream up and that they then concoct. Not in kitchens, though. In fucking chemistry labs.
Do you want to be a lab rat?
I do not want to be a lab rat.
Resist being a lab rat—even, perhaps especially, if you are an actual lab rat reading this. (Ping me if you need help.)
Down on the corner, out in the streets
OK, now we’re getting to the part that was most identifiably an act of resistance.
Making protest signs out of trash is an obvious eff-you to capitalism. Standing at the main town crossroads holding a sign that says “A nation of laws, not bros” was an obvious eff-you to the current administration.
I’m off to do it again in about ten minutes, actually. David made my sign this time because I’m busy writing this. (Thank you, my beloved. <3)
For my money, though, that was the least effective form of resistance I participated in last week.
Today I’m hoping to add one extra act of resistance also: a fucking nap. Pleeease, give me a nap, please.
So! How are you resisting today?
Great post!! ❤️