I want to take a moment to address this since I’ve been seeing a lot of it lately—and as someone who does something creative and (at least it often times feels) superfluous for a living (photography), I’ve been feeling this myself as well.
You can and should keep doing the creative superfluous things. They matter, for multiple reasons. I will go into why in more detail, but the short of it is this:
- Fascism seeks to change the landscape of daily life and the notion of what’s possible to deepen its control. It is imperative that we preserve the things it seeks to erase, both for ourselves and our posterity.
- Making The Good Fight your whole life is a good way to both lose the fight and destroy yourself in the process. The key has always been to incorporate activism and community building into your daily life as a part of the way you live, not to become an activist ubermensch.
I’ll start with the second point.
Hyperspecialization does have its place, and it’s true that some people are dispositionally suited to and personally interested in focusing on politics or activism or protest as their main thing. And that’s great! But that’s not everyone. Society is a system and that system requires many different parts. Not all of those parts see the same kind of engagement or the same amount of engagement and they each do vastly different things. You can contribute to bettering the world in a lot of different ways, and it’s important that you consider where your skills, interests, and abilities fit best.
And to be clear—I do think that everyone should be active in some way right now. In this current political climate, if you are able-bodied it’s fairly morally reprehensible if you’re not doing anything at all. But whether something is Big and Draining isn’t and should not be the measure of whether you’re doing something useful.
I do not have a lot of resources. I don’t have much money and I don’t have a lot of time or energy. But every month I put together care packages for the unhoused.
I go to Grocery Outlet while I’m out doing my usual shopping and buy snacks. I consider what would be easy to eat with dental pain or missing teeth (a common struggle among the chronically unhoused), take care to be mindful of common allergies like nuts and gluten, and pick targeted snack combos that offer a good balance of nutrition and have a reasonable shelf life. I usually spend $15-$20 in total, and that often makes 8-12 care packages.
I package about 500 calories worth of snacks with a small water bottle in a brown paper bag. Then I add in a note card I type up with up-to-date information on local resources: food pantries, relief shelters, mutual aid groups, addresses and phone numbers and comments if I have any (Current wait time calling into the EBT office is about 2-3 hours, construction on X street in front of the relief shelter thru June, etc). If I have a chance to stop by the chamber of commerce sometimes I’ll thrown in a local bus route map.
I keep these in my car and whenever I see someone on the side of the road with a sign asking for help, instead of ignoring them or panicking and digging scant change out of my wallet, I’m prepared and I can give them one of my care packs (I usually go through about 3-5 a week).
I chose to do this because:
- It was something I could consistently do.
- I asked someone who spent time living on the street what kinds of things they received that were most helpful and this was something they recommended.
- I looked at where help was most needed, and found it was in the day-to-day struggle to survive. A lot of the focus of aid to the unhoused is top-down big-picture stuff. More transitional housing, a larger budget to food assistance, expanded medical care. And that stuff IS important! But there are already lots of people focusing on it, and fewer focusing on connecting those in need to those resources, or helping them survive long enough to receive them. So I tried to step in and help there instead.
Now before y’all go yelling in the notes about how “yeah but that isn’t doing X or Y, or OP’s point was Z”, I bring up this example for this important point:
You have to start somewhere—and that somewhere should feel approachable and doable; and only by starting do you learn how best to incorporate activism, mutual aid, and political activity into your life in a balanced way. Only by starting do you build up to bigger things that have bigger impacts.
A favorite tool of fascism and authoritarian regimes is the shock and awe tactic: bomb people with things so overwhelming so quickly they’re left dazed and demoralized, too befuddled to think straight let alone fight back.
It’s what makes people like me (and OP), who make a living doing something that feels frivolous and useless, really struggle. Look at Gaza! And Ukraine! And Musk! And LGBTQ rights! Attacks on trans healthcare! Reproductive freedoms! ICE raids! And what am I doing? Drawing pictures! Editing pimples off someone’s face! Who does that help?!!
But here’s the thing about shock and awe: it’s not a measure of actual power or control held by the enemy; it’s meant to make you feel like the enemy has control of the battlefield. It’s a tactic to skew perception. The point is to make what you’re doing feel useless, to inspire hopelessness and inaction and compliance before the battle has even really started. The point is to make you lose perspective.
While it’s true that drawing pictures or editing photos won’t feed a family in Gaza or stop attacks on LGBTQ rights, carrying on with those boring frivolous everyday things holds its own inherent value in this particular climate, and here’s why:
Fascism seeks to change the landscape of daily life, to narrow the definition of the acceptable and the possible—to control reality (or our perception of it), utterly. And it will destroy so much before this is all over. The next generation of children will grow up never knowing certain norms, thinking the ceiling of possibility is so much lower, never even considering ways of life that to us are foundational—because those things simply won’t be there anymore. They’ll never have seen it, so to them, it won’t exist.
Therefore we need to hold on to as much of the world they’re trying to destroy as we can. We need to remember the childhood dreams and the lives we envisioned that drove us to become professional artists or photographers or pastry chefs or fiction authors or historians researching fascism or scientists developing vaccines because those perspectives are being erased. We need to carry on our crafts and live the lives those choices led us to because those lives and the unique work born of our perspectives and experiences are being destroyed.
Because one day when we beat back the darkness, we need to remember what we had, and have a clear vision of the world we want to build upon the ruin of their would-be kingdom.
In the immediate urgent now, no, just doing my professional work isn’t going to solve the problems strangling the world, my country, or my community; but I still need to eat and pay my bills. And so do you, OP, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. And because I know taking photos of frivolous things won’t contribute to solving some of those problems, I make time to try and help in other small ways instead.
Knowing I’m doing something to help makes me feel better. Feeling better enables me to handle the shock and awe without falling victim to its terror. And that gives me more energy to do more for my community, to be there for friends and family when the terror gets to them, and to grow into a person who can do more to fight back.
The thing I want people to take away from this post more than anything, is that you don’t fight fascism or shock and awe with your own retaliatory concussive blasts. Sometimes big shows of force are needed, that’s true; but that is not the foundation of resistance—and you have to start at the foundation.
Instead, you fight with the slow and steady creep of personal development, coalition building, mutual aid, grassroots organizing, and focused, fearless persistence. If fascism is the rocket blasting apart the city, resistance must be the weeds and wildflowers growing stubbornly through the cracks in the rubble, varied species working together to overtake the catastrophe as they create their own ecosystem with each budding flower and deepening root, vines winding around the machinery of war and oppression until the cogs break apart and become nothing more than the stepping stones to something better.
