A question for my activist friends...

[pat]

and my friends on the left generally...

How do you avoid despair? How do you not get consumed by the rage?

I find myself sinking into sort of a cynical apathy, that looks at each new outrage and says, "So what else is new?" It's not that I don't care, just that I feel beaten down.

I know that for evil to triumph it only takes good people to do nothing, but how do you keep from that?

Comments

Is this helpful? Who knows?

[daltong.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I take the ostrich approach. I tune out a lot of what's going on. If something penetrates that is really, really, really egregious, and I'm not having a highly disabled day, I call or write my congresspeople.

Mostly I feel helpless, and I don't have much energy to spend anyway, so I try not to think about it and hope that general inertia will save the day. (i.e., a president's decisions are sometimes overturned by the next president, or they're unfunded, or they become irrelevant as time and new laws go along.) Yes, I know this is very "silence=death" of me. But I'm literally out of spoons most days just dealing with myself. It's not that I'm apathetic--I really sincerely cannot find the spoons. If someone told me something very, very easy and quick that I could do that would help turn the tide, I'd consider it.

I get "action alerts" from, for example, the ACLU. Unfortunately, those alerts just say to contact one's congresspeople. They do not include the name of the relevant bill, and I don't think it makes sense to write without speaking of specific legislation, and most of the time I cannot stay on the computer long enough to look it up myself (I can't find legislation info easily on the Senate and House sites).

So that's my defensive answer. The way I deal with not being able to make a difference is by not listening or, if I do listen, noting the information and keeping my emotions out of it. Now that's a specific skill I've learned the hard way.

Oh, wait, I have another helpful hint. If my emotions do get triggered, I learned that the really bad feelings can be attributed to a nearly instantaneous (on a human scale, anyway) reaction involving the amygdala and a flood of neurotransmitters. It's like magic, but it works for me: if I deliberately cut off any thought about the trigger issue--and that means really cutting it off, and cutting new thoughts off as they perk their sly little heads up--and focus on something else for at least 10 minutes, then I can think about the issue without all the anger and stress. If you get triggered again, I suppose you go through the cycle again. I have personal factors that help with this process that I'll tell you in email if you are interested, but I think it's true for owners of the human brain in general.