“Raids and gangs are dangerous because they kill outright. Peace is dangerous because it encourages complacency and carelessness- which also kills sooner or later.”
Parable of the Talents, Octavia E Butler.
Was the fall of Rome this stupid? Was the French Revolution this lazy? Despite the fact that the United States of America was born from a revolution, we, the people, have become happily complacent. Abiding by the system, so we can one day make a change from within. We blindly follow the rules set for us by people who are playing a completely different game, all for the hope of being one of them. The idea that public submission is common sense and condoning state violence as justice is not new, but we seem to have forgotten that all of our civil rights were won through disruption and not politeness. The setting may have changed, but the story remains the same. I, like many of us, ‘doomscroll’ on social media, wondering “what can I do?” We silently sign petitions and write think pieces, like this one, and hope that if everything goes wrong, at least someone on the internet knows where I stand.
When it is revealed to us that the people who are in charge are not working in anyone’s interest but their own, we do nothing. Because what can we do? Social media has immobilized us. Comedy and internet memes have desensitized us. We bring our outrage to social media, and we never let it leave the platform. No one is arrested, and no one is held accountable. Because what can we do? There are individual acts of resistance that get stamped out because no one joins them. We have gotten comfortable, and we have forgotten how to demand change from a government that works for us.
I am 98% sure I’m not Katniss Everdeen. I don’t have what it takes to lead a movement. I don’t know how to motivate others to boycott to the extent of inconvenience. I have a semblance of an idea of what is wrong, but I don’t know how I’d fix it with a solution grounded in reality. Holding a government accountable means getting people off their phones. How can anyone compete with the dopamine rush from each scroll? Who has enough charisma to hold just a second of our shortened attention span? How can we convince people to stop funding corporations and a government that does not serve the people? I don’t know what to do, but I’m hoping someone can figure it out soon. Maybe that’s what everyone else is thinking, too.