Creature Comforts
Goblin Week, day 6, by Jaydot Sloane
It is so hard to even think straight when you are cold. Or hungry. Or in pain. Which is exactly why that is the first things fascists want to inflict on you. Drive you crazy by driving you into pure survival mode, make you easy to control and direct like a school of fish trying to evade a predator.
Creature comforts are a foundational support of resistance. It’s much easier to tell someone no, and to fuck off, when you have a full belly.
I’ve seen it said a hundred different times and a hundred different places, but the idea of a lone hero who saves all of us is a dramatic fantasy (sorry Luigi, much as I admire your work, and appreciate the way you’ve unified so many of us, it’s the conversations that happened between people afterwards that brought us together moreso than a hero standing over a corpse).
(hello FBI watchlist, I would like to note contextually this is denouncing vigilante violent justice)
(hello vigilantes, I would like to note contextually I do prefer to cover my ass, legally speaking, but that I am not a cop or your mother)
A leader is a single person with no power save what people give them, and it’s the people around that leader providing childcare, and meals, and warm places to sleep at night, that make anything that leader does even remotely possible. Anyone can stand on a soapbox and scream (sounds amazingly cathartic so I don’t begrudge those who do that), but the first steps to change are bringing people together and getting them to work together.
And not in some happy sappy everyone gets along kind of way, but in a “we recognize we’re all screwed over and we all want to pitch in to make it better” kind of way. Any kind of movement needs way more people who are good with spreadsheets than charismatic leaders. The work is hard, bitter, cold, and hungry, and often discouraging. Changing our fortunes and changing our culture, however, is worth it, to make those promises of an easier life for everyone come true, not just for those who swear fealty to their great leader (often to be sacrificed at his earliest convenience anyway so what has that fealty really gotten you).
Anyway, my fingers are frozen now. I’m gonna go warm up, so I too can do the work.
