Kill the Doomer in your head

There is always hope, always opportunity

In one of the most tightly choreographed events on Earth, last night’s Super Bowl, one of the performers broke away and used their moment in the spotlight to promote the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of Sudan.

Wherever we are, there is opportunity. Wherever we are, there is hope. When a situation seems irredeemable, futile, or hopeless, the very fact that we are alive and able to act is itself grounds for hope. When Nazis drove into the Cincinnati, Ohio suburb of Lincoln Heights, I’m not sure many observers saw it as an “opportunity” exactly. But local residents took action. Many members of the Black community took up arms and drove the Nazis out of town quickly. The flag of the invaders was seized and burned. And, even though the police came to the protection of the Nazis, they still wound up running scared from the community they were trying to terrorize.

Days later, members of the community can still be seen patrolling and practicing community defense. What appeared to be just about the last thing any reasonable person would want in their community, a Nazi march, was met not with doom but with decisive action followed by continued organizing and community strength.

There is no room for the doomer in our heads. It pacifies us, silences us, immobilizes us. Somehow, doom became normal. It became normal to doom-scroll, to indulge in doomerism, to look at the horrors unfolding around us and think the most reasonable response is despairing observation.

Photo by Borna Hržina on Unsplash

This didn’t happen overnight, of course. For decades the working class has been intentionally dis-organized. Outside forces of capital and government responded to the radical thrust of the ‘60s and ‘70s with repression, sabotage, and ultimately a decades-long neoliberal movement that attacked unions and communities and most centers of working class power building. We’ve been demobilized, organizing has become harder, and maybe most important of all countless people have come to view themselves as observers in politics, rather than actors.

That thinking has not affected everyone, and a reversal is certainly in progress. But it’s worth looking at history for the countless examples of when masses of people felt empowered, and felt that way because they had done the work and built the power to make it real. In 1919, Seattle shut down for five days in a general strike. Not a thing moved that wasn’t approved by the central strike committee. Ten of thousands of union members made that happen. And they had organized in difficult conditions, with few legal protections, and with the threat of violence hanging over their heads.

If we look at the Haitian Revolution, we see people who had recently been enslaved rising up, organizing a powerful fighting force, and defeating not only the armies of Napoleonic France but also British and Spanish troops. If we look at the early 20th century in Alabama we see sharecroppers organizing, often in secret, under the constant threat from both the state and extra-judicial forces like the KKK. If we look at miners in West Virginia we see that from 1912-1922 or so they were engaged in a war against the bosses. In extremely difficult conditions, where mining corporations owned their towns, and essentially owned the state, miners of different races came together and fought like hell for dignity and for their basic human needs.

History shows us not just that people organized and struggled for everything we have, from the weekend to the end of child labor, but also that they took their agency and ran with it. Itinerant workers traveling across the West joined the IWW and unions sprung up in cotton fields, lumber yards, oil fields, mines, and more. Many of these men were hobos, riding the rails from job to job, but in the IWW they built power, took on robber barons, and often won. Dismissed as the dregs of society, they knew the potential power that lay within them as workers and as people, and they used it.

This all took political education. It took union halls where people learned politics and organizing and how to strike effectively. It took the participation and dedication of thousands and millions of people. If you had asked these workers across the United States and across the world about the concept of hope a hundred years ago or more, I’m not sure how they would’ve responded. But I think some might have said, “They don’t feed us decent food in this lumber camp we live in, so we’re going to do what we have to do to get it.” Or maybe some might have said, “I’ve seen enough friends die in that coal mine, we’re going to put a stop to it.”

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

For most of us, life is a lot more comfortable now, no doubt about it. Fewer deaths on the job, fewer limbs lost, fewer children forced to work in factories. But that which was won by decades of struggle can disappear under the relentless capitalist onslaught if we’re not prepared to fight. Child labor laws have already been rolled back, and Musk and Trump are going after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Departments of Labor and Education and more. This is part of a ruling class push that goes back decades. It’s an effort to crush worker power and end democracy. And we’ve sat on the sidelines for too long.

There is no time for doom. When I think about hope, right now, I think about what must be done. As long as we take action, that it where the hope lies. The billionaire coup must be stopped, millions of workers must build power, all of us must be activated and get to organizing. The bad news will not stop anytime soon, but consuming information is not resistance. Doom-scrolling is not resisting anything, and in fact it often fuels defeat. We absorb information largely on platforms by and for billionaires, and the algorithms are not on our side.

What we need is action. Even in circumstances that seem almost incomprehensibly bad, there is opportunity. And there is hope. There is hope because we are alive, because we have agency, because we can act. So kill the doomer in your head, find an organization that you can plug into, reach out to that one political friend and attend the next meeting or event they’re going to. Participate in collective acton and the long-term work ahead. People all around us are stepping off the sidelines and into the struggle. Don’t let them walk alone.

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A few links for this struggle we’re engaged in:

First some places to get plugged in with federal workers’ unions.

Get alerts from AFSCME — https://go-afscme.org/

AFGE — https://www.afge.org/

More resources for federal workers: https://linktr.ee/fedsworkforyou

The ShutDownDC Coaltion: https://www.shutdowndc.org/

Unionize your workplace: https://workerorganizing.org/

Talk to your neighbors and form a tenant union: https://tenantfederation.org/tenant-unions/