When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

- Mister Rogers

I don’t want to give them my fear

- AOC

Hope is what we have in the face of adversity. Do not accept defeat. There is so much worth fighting for.

Sustain and nourish your hope.

The best thing that can happen to your opposition is you losing hope. Losing hope, losing the ability to imagine a different, better future drains you from even making the attempt. Making you hopeless, paralyzed, complacent is part of the oppositions strategy.

This rapid horrific change is still proof that change is possible.

Consciously nourish your hope. Consciously combat the attempts to make you hopeless.

Stop looking at the monster until that’s all you see, and you’re locked, frozen to the ground.

Look between the monsters’ feet. Look at all the people gathering, organizing, helping each other fight these skyscraper tall monsters.

If you won’t hope, there is no better place to find it than in community with likeminded people. Turn your dispair into action. Look at people around you. What do they need? What is a small thing that you can contribute right now. A small thing. Go do that. Believing that your actions matter and your contributions make a difference is a muscle you need to train.

Small things can be: Put up stickers. Talk to your neighbor. Looking up groups in your area. Bring food to someone who needs it. Help someone with groceries. Check in on a friend. Look into mutual aid programs in your area.

Every little kind action matters. It’s an antidote to dispare. Both for you and the people around you.

Consider how you can use your skills.

Help people away from META and on to the fediverse like Lemmy. People in my area are setting up hang outs where they help each other migrate platforms.

A lot of activists aren’t necessarily skilled with tech or social media. Is that something you can help with?

What do you do for work? No matter what you do, those skills are directly transferable and needed in your community.

Genuinely - There’s SO much super easy, practical stuff needed in your neighborhood, in your community, in your movement that would be SO easy to pick up and make SUCH a big difference. The biggest need is more hands. Always. You don’t have to know how to help. It becomes apparent SO quickly as soon as you step in the door.

There’s still a lot of work left to do. Keep fighting, cause there’s a lot worth fighting for.

Racism is still free speech which sucks but the alternative is high censorship and fear

This is incorrect, and only serves those who target marginalized groups.

I wanna make it very clear that the conclusion that restriction of hate speech is a slippery slope for freedom of speech is not a given or universally held position

You can absolutely introduce laws prohibiting hate speech without introducing high censorship or fear. Many countries have laws prohibiting hate speech, including most European countries and a majority of, what Wikipedia calls, developed democracies.

Even countries that don’t have limits for hate inducing speech towards marginalized groups, with reference to the importance of freedom of speech, rarely have complete freedom of speech.

As an example, the US limits to freedom of speech include “fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising.”

The claim that intolerance to intolerance is dangerous, only serves the spread of intolerance.

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society’s practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.

Rosenfeld contrasts the approach to hate speech between Western European democracies and the United States, pointing out that among Western European nations, extremely intolerant or fringe political materials (e.g. Holocaust denial) are characterized as inherently socially disruptive, and are subject to legal constraints on their circulation as such,[13] while the US has ruled that such materials are protected by the principle of freedom of speech and cannot be restricted, except when endorsements of violence or other illegal activities are made explicit.

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