I’m worried for the world. All I’ve been thinking about is WW3 and this shit makes me want to vomit. I can’t even smoke weed anymore without having a near panic attack. I feel unmotivated. I wake up and immediately just want to go back to bed. I’m not trying to spread fear but the Doomsday clock is 90 seconds till midnight, during the Cuban missile crisis, it was 7 minutes before midnight. Can we just have one day of fucking peace? Can everyone just stop for one day and enjoy one day of peace?
But don’t you feel a responsibility to the rest of the world?
Say if, for example, your tax dollars were funding an ongoing genocide and starvation campaign, wouldnt you feel a bit responsible to change that?
I wouldn’t feel responsible to change it. It’s not me deciding to fund the genocide. I would like to change it, but we are all powerless to change most of the evil things going on every day. What are we gonna do, vote? There are no good people to vote for. Good people are not interested in making a career in politics and they get eaten by evil sharks.
But do what you can as long as it doesn’t consume you. Examples of being consumed is living around people who make you feel awful about yourself, or staying with someone who hurts you.
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal” - Emma Goldman
In the last 100 years, protest movements have given us women’s suffrage, workers rights including the weekend and overtime pay, gay rights, civil rights, etc. History shows us that we can have positive change, but it’s not as easy as just voting.
We can see right now how protest movements are moderating the Democrat’s support of Israeli war crimes.
Yeah it’s because humans took action and actually did something real to create what they wanted to see. Those changes were because entire populations decided to change things and they had a simple goal that others could get behind.
This is also why there is so much media focus on what makes people different from eachother today. So we don’t unite like others did before us.
You should educate yourself on the history of protest. The media has always been a serious impediment. There was never an “entire population” uniting or a “simple goal that others could get behind”. It was always extremely difficult. It often looked hopeless. Many people were killed in the streets, and others were brave enough to replace them.
Overall I think feeling helpless in the face of monumental challenges is normal. But closing your eyes and telling yourself “nothing can ever change, so why bother” is self-soothing and pathetic.
Things can change, and you can be a part of that positive change if you put in real effort.
You are right, I actually never read about the history of protests. Do you have any books to recommend?
I would start with MLK, collected essays, no one writes about protest more eloquently.
A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn gives a great broad overview.
Death in the Haymarket by James Green is a great history of the first decades of the labor movement.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times goes in depth on LBJ and the civil rights movement.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau for the classic philosopher’s take.
We’ve Got People by Ryan Grim details the successes and failures of the movement in the last decade.
Not paying taxes isn’t an option. OP’s point is that the average person can’t affect any of that change, and this is one of those situations. Also, why would I or any other citizen feel responsible that the government used tax dollars for bad things? I don’t like that my taxes are used for something I don’t think is good, but the reality is I don’t have any control over that, and if the timelines were different and someone else were in power making decisions, odds are that it would be worse than it is, assuming we’re referring to the US and Israel/Palestine. Anyone that’s paid any attention to politics forever knows that one person could scream until they’re blue in the face about where their tax money is going, but it won’t change anything.