street flowers — by flightlessblrbs
Do not take the bait. Shooting wars do not exist now. They will drone your asses. They’re highjacking your amygdala to get you to do stupid s**t that plays right into their hands.
Organize locally. Grow food. Raise rabbits. Pile up in owned or mortgaged housing. If you can, stop charging your tenants rent. Take on roommates, and figure out how to live with each other. Give each other free medical and dental care. Hide regime targets and help them go dark. Multi-layered housing swaps to disorient kidnappers should begin now. Take your kids out of school; they will be indoctrinated.
Starve the regime of your fear and your tacit cooperation. Stay offline as often as you can. Limit yourself to 20-60 minutes a day. I cannot emphasize this enough: social media is a massive psyop and surveillance scheme.
Creators and writers: Move from social media to old school mailing lists, particularly if you’re emailing from a free, encrypted email account (like Proton or Tuta). If you’re using the online to create a revenue stream, include a Buy Me a Coffee link. You don’t need venture capitalists to make money, if you need to make money from your content. Besides, free newsletters are going away on this app anyhow.
Stop doing advertising for the regime by talking onilne about what the dictators are doing, get offline, and start planning practical ways to help each other. There is no peaceful revolution without daily, coordinated efforts to help your neighbors. This is about freedom from a system quite literally designed to enslave you (same as it ever was).
Engage in pro-democracy public art in your neighborhood. Host free concerts. Learn to care about your neighbors, their needs, capacities, resources, hopes, worries. Fascism is only enabled through you closing yourselves off and hiding inside, hoping the monster doesn’t get to you. The monster will get you, if you take this approach. See Niemöller.
This approach I’m suggesting isn’t naive. Mass noncooperation, plus community cooperation and interdependence starves regimes of power. It’s been done before in both fascist and imperialist contexts successfully; the reason you don’t know about it is because you live in a war-profiteering culture and peacefulness is antithetical to the fascist elite business model.
Daily, neighborhood-level coordinated noncooperation, in the form of para-institutional community support systems, starves regimes of the compliance they need to survive. They don’t want you to focus on the fact that they need you to pull this off. That is why they’re trying to scare the s**t out of you: so you don’t see your power to make this regime crumble.
Never agree to the abusers’ terms of engagement. You have waaaay more options than to cower inside or fight in the street.
Fascism can only go on as long as people passively, tacitly consent. They try to scare you into thinking “there is only now” and that there is no future. It’s psychological warfare: make a people think a tyrant’s win is inevitable and they will collapse into despair.
Until we can pull off a general strike (which will take time because they require local resources and a coordinated national murmuration), work ineffectively, work slowly, make so many mistakes, be very confused, ask to have things explained on loop, share info you’re not supposed to share.
If you work for the government in any capacity and are asked to take on illegal orders or indoctrinate others, refuse. Leak illegal orders. Leak fascist requests. No job is worth you propping up fascism— no job is worth your soul.
Engage in local campaigns to get local LEOs to defect— white moms, kids, and grannies, this is your time to shine. This is your work.
Clergy and healers of all faiths and spiritual practices, now is the time to host interfaith, all-inclusive services— ideally outside. Demonstrate a joyful public alliance of neighborly love. If you are a church within the legacy of nonviolent civil disobedience, encourage your elders to pass this wisdom into your community— to anyone who’ll listen. Host local ceremonies to alchemize neighbors’ grief, anger, fear, and hopelessness.
But whatever you do: do NOT take the bait for violence. You will literally be playing into these people’s hands. I highly recommend staying out of the streets at the moment that a tyrant is clearly indicating a desire for bloodshed and mayhem, because even if you don’t give it to them, they will create it.
If you’re in a blue dot, the goal is to induce defections from security forces. Remind the military that we are their neighbors. Leave flowers in the empty streets and signs in the windows that say neighbors do not turn on each other. This will create a moral contrast so stark that the soldiers won’t be able to ignore it; they are already feeling used. Remember, the regime needs these soldiers’ obedience to pull off their coup. If soldiers and cops start to ignore orders, this whole thing collapses.
The time for symbolic protests in the streets are over. We know we have the numbers; that’s what street protests have always been for. (See Gene Sharp.) We know the dictator and the dictator waiting in the wings are very unpopular, across identity and party lines. Use your numbers to coordinate at the zip code level. Stop looking at the mountain, take the first step, and be useful to your actual neighbors in your zip codes (and neighboring zip codes).
“One lesson that we had to learn pretty quickly is that if there is somebody in the group… who’s shouting, you know, “Off the cops” or “let’s break some windows” or whatever, you’re very likely to see him in court testifying for the police, because that’s their job, you know, to try to turn activism into something that’ll alienate the public… and give them grounds for repression.” — Noam Chomsky
If you want more ideas to get started in your zip code and move in formation with your neighbors, check out this post to get started. A plan is coming. Neighbors across the country, regular people, are working on a plan to help us move in formation with each other to shut down this treasonous violation of our collective sovereignty.
Thanks for reading my work! If you like this weirdo’s content, follow me as I shift my content to a free Patreon, in order to get outside this nonsense, anxiety-inducing algorithm. Weirdo’s Patreon will go live October 13th. There you’ll find Weirdo’s blogs (including vintage weirdo archives from Substack), flightlessblrbs’s pro-democracy art, a new podcast called “My Weirdo Friends,” and a series of hosted community discussions to focus on the tactical art of neighborliness during times such as these.
