What can I do about authoritarianism and fascism?

Our hops vine is in full hoppy mode! Yay fall!

As a writer and community story wrangler, essayist, poet, researcher, herbalist, auntie, and elder caregiver hybrid—and now as someone with long Covid's terrible chronic fatigue—I'm online a lot. Here in the U.S., so many people now are on chronic overwhelm, stressed, hurting, struggling, sick, exhausted, terrified, anxious or depressed, feeling harmed daily by a cruel and violent government and billionaire tech oligarchs and ICE, and we're often getting angry at people who we're not really angry at because we can't seem to ever reach those who we're really angry at and that anger has to go somewhere or it sinks you. This question comes up over and over and over online now: What can I do? What can we do? Wow is it an important question. Thank you for asking it.

I created this list to do three things

To:

Highlight some of the amazing good that's being done now. Not to overwhelm but to offer rest to spinning, worrying minds.
Fill a gap in the resources already out there. I'm neurodivergent enough that I'm not a fan of the videos, noise, and super short clips disconnected from the larger picture that I find online. I like essays. Thoughtful written stories. Lived experiences with context and heart. Lessons learned the long way or the hard way. Nuance. So I offer these.
Demonstrate some ways to stop the overwhelm of now. Both what I'm doing here (writing—a rest activity for me—and curating what I love, sharing lived experiences from people on the ground, being honest that I'm not ok, prioritizing how I like to receive and share information, etc.) and what you're doing here (caring about your neighbors and the land or country, reading deeper and wending essays, stepping into slow-way-down spaces, celebrating what you're already doing and what others are doing, skimming to find and center on what matters most to you, finding new ways to get involved that better suit who you are now, letting go of what doesn't work, reading human writers instead of AI, etc.).

I could point you to so many different people who I love, who offer resources like this. And on social media, I often do. But there I can't control the overwhelm. Here I can. This is Lori Land. So, I will link to a few folks here. And we will wander here, quietly, at our own pace, and as time allows.

One difficulty I have with many of the "What do we do?" resources out there in 2026 is that they are often created by young, able-bodied folks on the front lines of disrupting the current violence-against-the-poor and making-a-lot-more-rapidly-poor-on-purpose system. Wonderful humans, disruptors. Huzzah! Yay you! I used to be you! And. With youth and full-body-and-mind health, you miss a lot of things. A ton. You just do. We all do for different reasons– no judgment. I hear young people online every day lament that the country and world are falling apart and nobody seems to be doing anything or enough about it at all. Online there's often an assumption of apathy within elders or complicit-with-the-current-system about elders, of older and more experienced people not doing enough to rise up, and of older people not caring about the broken world they inherited or the one they're leaving behind. On the flip side, at many in-person community meetings and at all our protests in person here, I often hear the exact same things being assumed about younger people by older people–where are they? Why aren't they here? Don't they care? Why aren't they voting? Why aren't they showing up to stand with us out here protesting week after week?

I am so tired of regular folk—aka, non-greedy-grifter-billionaires—falling for blaming each other. The people you're yelling at aren't the big problem. They may have flaws, and may use the wrong/different words than you, and they may be settling for less and less for themselves and their kids, and they may even be sold on and living terrible ideas that they don't realize are billionaire-pushed propaganda, but they still aren't the problem. They're symptoms of a larger problem. Yelling at symptoms of the problem, on your own, for decades, doesn't fix the problem. Believe me, I've tried.

The good news: we're all showing up and we all need—and get to take—rest

"We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are." - Anaïs Nin

Not everyone can show up visibly online or in person every day—it's not possible or not safe or both. Don't judge people for where they aren't. And. Showing up cannot just mean visibly working to change things every waking moment, of every single day, across our entire lives. That has been tried and tried, for generations. Activists burn out. Women burn out. More and more of our kids (here in the U.S. anyway, where our "leaders" clearly hate children) are burning out, younger and younger. People working themselves into early graves to make things better is sometimes needed, yes? Well. Umm. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not. What if working ourselves to into illness, suffering, distraction, addiction, chronic rage, and death is just perpetuating a patriarchal, billionaire-pushed myth that we're lazy and unworthy as individuals if we're not working 20 hours/day and making money hand over fist, mostly for them? What if non-stop shopping for stuff we don't need is lining the pockets of people now so disconnected from the land and deluded that they want to fully replace humanity with a new machine species?

Showing up now has to mean rest, too. And play, too. Just being. Just breathing. Going outside. Connecting to the land we're on. Celebrating. Showing up for this one body. This one place. This one family. This community. This moment. As we are. Right now. Being our messy- and silly-by-nature selves.

On the days/weeks/months/years that we show up to actively help, we are helping. On the days/weeks/months/years that we rest and play, we are also helping, because living beings need rest and play. Rest means just being, not doing. Just being, not fixing. Receiving. Believing in the power of yin, not just yang. Saying enough, and "I am enough," and believing it. Rest holds untold gifts too: laughing, playfulness, deepening relationships with self and others, collective strength via vulnerability, weeping, mourning and grieving fully, and ample time for wondering, wandering, growing curious, re-energizing, noticing, appreciating nuance, appreciating life, tapping into a whole world of heart and generosity and creativity. Rest can mean being held by the world for a while and re-finding your real self when you've lost your way, and then staying with that real self until you/they/she/he/us/we return to feeling the joy and belonging offered to the living by their home planet, their friends, and kind or generous others.

Earthlings belong here. Any voice saying otherwise needs deeper rest and playfulness and is trying to sell you things that you don't need.

The temptation when everything is going wrong and falling apart and being destroyed is to leap into action. To fix and change and control and protect and scream and fight, fight, fight. Yes, noble being. Do that. When you absolutely need to, do that. For a while. And. Rest. Play. Rest and play to notice that those who try to control and fix and change everything—all the time—are among those more likely to lose their way. We work ourselves into exhaustion. Into more easily losing what makes it wonderful to be an earthling. Lose community. Lose touch with the land. Become bitter, judgmental, paranoid, abusive, addicted to substances or screens or shopping, or violent, and– when we hit the point where we both have no real community and no personal consequences for our actions– even monstrous. Hello, global billionaires and the U.S. federal government. Luckily, most of the rest of us do face consequences for our actions.

Earthlings belong here. Any voice saying otherwise needs deeper rest and playfulness and is trying to sell you things that you don't need.

Why do something? And why rest/play? Same answer...

Because at your core, you love life and the living. We just do. Even when that gets entirely lost to us at times, most of us can hold on to that tiny, interwoven thread of loving life. Loving your life, or at least parts of it. And loving the living, or at least most of life. Humans make up just 0.01% of all life on earth. Even if you believe you hate half of humanity or more, that's still a teeny tiny fraction of life on earth.

Some tricks

We are both/and/all. When you're:

Doing. When you are doing, don't bother to negatively judge those currently resting/playing. You don't have the time, energy, or perspective for that, plus, pumping that judgement into the environment you're trying to change, especially on your own, just slows you and your people down. Feel free to commiserate with close others to blow off steam now and then. Just do it together and as multiple and diverse groups that fill everyone present with energy. The more diverse your group for commiserating, the faster you can return to confidently doing, and typically, the better for life on earth. Just don't commiserate with people who make your physical body feel unsafe: trust your own tight shoulders, stomach knots, clenching fists, shrinking backward, desire to leave the room or run, etc. Find better-suited-to-you others to commiserate with.
Resting/playing. When you're resting/playing, you're doing what it takes to release lies and old patterns, to stop judging yourself for just being you, and you're definitely getting practice at not listening to anyone who doesn't deeply love or respect you. You take all the time you once spent 1) judging yourself and 2) listening to not-for-you others, and instead use it to rest and play more fully, whatever that looks like for you. For example, I love to wander, wonder, write, walk in the woods, listen to/talk with trees and plants and animals, listen to everyone present in a whole place (from birds to music from the neighbor's house to lawnmowers in the distance to the sounds of people getting on the bus), and go places I haven't been and meet beings I've never met. A new plant or trail to walk down or new restaurant or perspective is pure delight, most days. I love to unlearn and learn the new-to-me/us. Because I deeply love these things, they live in my own personal resting and playing bucket. We may have some in common, and your resting/playing bucket will hold entirely different things that are restful and playful for you and your people.

What can we do?

A lot of folks are still wondering what to do or feel like they're not doing enough. After a lifetime of doing for others. And others are wondering for the first time: what can I do? Yay! So, here are a few examples from our lives and our local (and emotionally local) communities from the past 25 years, off the top of my head. Don't even think of trying to do them all! You'll explode. Even reading the whole list can be daunting, because I'm looking at what a LOT of people and groups around the region, country, and world are doing. Skim the list twice:

Celebratory skim. First, skim to find one or more things that you're already doing in the list, or have done in the past, and celebrate that. Rest, in that. Play in those memories or share them with others. Most of us know far more about fighting authoritarianism and fascism than we suspect, because, here in the U.S. anyway, it's always been here somewhere. We're just looking it directly in the face now, together, instead of isolated and alone. This is also the time to let go of things that you've done before that you don't want to do anymore. Fully honor and celebrate what was, and who you were, to let it go.
Find-the-new-and-meaningful skim. When you have energy for the new, skim the list again and find one new thing to try. One. Time tends to move one day at a time. If we each do one new thing to fight authoritarianism and fascism, that's a lot more than one thing.

Remember, real community + real support + resting/playing your way = energy to continue. And we get real community and real support by being more of our real selves, everywhere we can be. We get rest by resting and we get more play by playing: whatever that means for us. Some weeks/months/years, we have no energy at all. We've given everything we can possibly give—to the point that we are ill or wounded or unstable or in prison or otherwise done with the energy of helping/doing for a while. We are still wonderful, worthy beings. Guilt and shame aren't necessary here. When you don't have energy for doing, then rest. Rest can be play, grieve, connect, rejoice, nap, sleep, let somebody else handle it, fuck it all—whatever rest means to you now (some rests change with time, others don't: reading a book will always be rest for me, for example). Rest longer than you think you need to. Rest until you feel flat out spicy or naughty or REAL again.

Have you been lectured long enough about resting and playing, not just doing? Good. ;-) Ok, here are a few things that wonderful humanity is doing somewhere to end authoritarianism and fascism: things we can join or return to or start or do and enjoy together. Slow down. Listen well. Look again. Tap into the imagination or heart field of your town or region or home planet. There are so many, many people and groups and other beings creating the world we want. Skim now to find yourself among them:

Savor. Savor the good more than you ever have before. When you can do NOTHING else, do this. We do this all the time here, and when I'm not doing this, I know something is really off with me. We learned to do this collectively in my family (we called it "making memories" as a kid—having adventures together and then telling our silly shared stories again and again, pulling the joy and laughter of then into the now). And I learned to do this even more as an Alzheimer's care partner for Mom for more than two decades. What you savor, you remember, with your whole body, even when your government, your neighbors, or your own mind, fails you. I will never forget watching my Mom with mid-stage Alzheimers disease savor being in an outdoor hot tub on a beautiful night. It was glorious, and a little embarrassing with strangers present, but 99% glorious. Mom savored the feel of warm water on her cool skin. I learned the word "savor" for this rest-centered way of being from musician, author, and tomorrow maker Andre Henry (@theandrehenry). Wow is this one powerful. Center rest within the doing. Notice the good. Savor the moment. The sunbeam. The breeze. The twinkle in an eye. The shared music and laughter. The cloud shaped like an old man. That time you "stole" apples from a tree on a long-abandoned old farm in the middle of nowhere and mom twisted her ankle running for the car and you laughed until grandma peed her pants, and then you all laughed even more, all the way home. Hold the good experiences and memories and roll them around within you and share them often as inoculation against all the intentionally-caused-by-lost-humans pain, loss, and suffering of now and all the grief that comes naturally to connected, loving, living, and dying beings.
Change "What can I do?" to "What's already being done around here where I could contribute?" Pick one aspect of the struggle that you're most passionate about, find people doing the work already, and join them. If you tend to show up on a high horse of any sort, do your best to dismount that sucker, leave the horsey at home, and walk in humbly, on your feet, as just a person, as the real, honest you: a being who loves this place and this land and these people but who has no idea what to do right now. Leading with humility and wondering what you can do for the community tends to get you invited into every door meant for you that's worth walking through. And, when you have the funds, donate to a few people and groups being the most harmed by our current old systems/corporations/governments and billionaires.
Make gifting a way of life. Capitalism wounds. The gifting community heals some of those wounds. Lots of ways to do this. Here's one. Join your local Buy Nothing group: a group within a vast community of groups that make no-strings-attached gifting of goods and neighbor-support and good will a whole-community way of life. Our local Buy Nothing group is remarkable and the admins are kind and fierce and wonderful and amazing. So is everyone who shows up to receive a gift and everyone who has gifted something to us. Gifting is centering pure joy and community power and is where true leaders are born: in generosity and abundance. After staying connected to distant family I adore, this group is the primary reason I'm still on Facebook.
Make fixing and swapping a way of life. Among your friends and family is great. Among strangers who may become friends is even better. Attend regular physical goods and homemade goods exchange/swap/mend/barter/repair groups and gatherings with neighbors in your area.
Make sharing things a way of life. Whole block, whole building, or whole community-level stuff sharing. Tool share libraries. Mini-free libraries. Regular soup swaps. Community fridges and food pantries. Emergency provisions storage barrels or lockers. Skill sharing gatherings. Donating quality items to thrift stores. Exchange gatherings where you curate and share gently used clothing, household, and work items with each other. Thrifting and garage sale-ing and antiquing instead of buying new when possible, and creating things intended to last for generations, to me, also fall into a broad sharing bucket. You can also gift across time. We once had friends build a 500-year (4+-inch thick) table out of the old wood flooring of the local high-school gym floor when they remodeled. We made the 10-person table for our in-home coworking space, knowing that the table would stay with the home when it was our time to leave. When we sold the house, we put our names and the dates it was ours on the bottom, knowing that the kids of the new owners would find that and likely do the same. It's important to think broadly when you live in a capitalist society screaming at you to buy new, and buy cheap and flimsy crap, and buy often, every day. ;-)
Flip the script on resistance and move in the world from this new truth. These days in the U.S., you hear a lot about resistance. Resisting tyranny, resisting authoritarianism and fascism, becoming part of the resistance, etc. Resist, resist, resist! But wait. Breathe deep. Feel the earth. Look at what's happening in other states and in countries around the world. Is that what's happening now? I wonder. Here's what I sense/feel/experience/think. Humanity as a whole is evolving and approaching or at a remarkable pivot point. What is extremely hard for many of us to do now, will soon become far simpler and easier, thanks to us and our relationships, not billionaires, not AI, nor other violent, extractive, surveillance/compliance nonsense. I think most people on earth are centered in love now–love of the land, love of the place you are, love of the people you're with, loving your neighbors, love of life itself and the living, loving yourself "flaws" and all (yay flaws!), etc. And we can see that. We can see now that we earthlings, humans included, are an unstoppable river of love and life—and humanity as a whole is just one small but uppity part of that love of life on earth. What if the billionaire Epstein class, their paid fascist footmen, and their bot farms/fake accounts/talking heads/politicians pumping out "humans-are-trash" fear and propaganda are the resistance now? They are the resistance. We are an unstoppable river of love. We are connected to all beings on earth who love life and living here. We aren't the resistance. We are the always learning/growing/changing river of those who love life that is about to overwhelm the rock-of-very-well-funded-idiots that is the last remaining abused/abusive folks permanently trapped in their own violent, abusive, non-stop-blaming, pasts. We are where the power truly is. They know it. It's why they're angry and blaming others no matter what they do. We have to know it too.
Notice, document, and share what's working well near you. Near you can mean either physically near you or emotionally local to you—who/what/where you're most loved and are most loving. Have you noticed that people are rebuilding systems for themselves locally, regionally, and being part of deeply-trusted global networks of friends, too? Noticed that we always have been? Watch your amazing neighbors–with permission of course–and share what's working!!! Most of my writing here, and my previous blog, and our books, do just that. Document here doesn't mean just writing or recording. It means anything you consciously do to save and pass on what's working for/to others. Creating food and recipes that people ask for, sharing tips with friends who want them, connecting those curating good ideas, planting trees, saving seeds as collectives, writing poetry, making music people love to dance to and share, sharing unforgettable stories in person, telling trees and dogs and birds about it: how you document and who you share with is up to you.
Shift & keep shifting to ensure that the majority of what you're doing– wherever you are– is imagining the world you want, creating the world we want, or supporting those creating the world we want. The temptation is to either stick our heads in the sand, worry nonstop, or to keep our eyes always on the pedophile, mass murdering, arrogant grifter billionaire class and their weapons manufacturers and paid-to-be-there bootlicking fascist footmen (who will happily turn on them the moment their money is gone). And yes, keeping an eye on them and what they're doing is a good idea. I listen to friends from other brutal totalitarian countries on this one. Looking away entirely—allowing yourself to be distracted from absolutely everything they're doing—is a bad idea. That's part of what got us here in the U.S. That said, for our own and our neighbors' health and well being, and for the planet we love, we have to devote the bulk of our time to where we can receive and expand energy as we expend it and where we can make the most difference. You are an imaginer, a creator, and a supporter. Do whatever it takes to make sure the bulk of your doing time is spent doing what you're here to do.
Reimagine private space back into public space. It's breaking hearts around the world watching oppressors kill and steal land and watching beloved public lands be stolen, sold off, and turned into private land for only the ultra wealthy to exploit and hoard or destroy. One option is to do the opposite where you are: reimage private spaces into public spaces. Years ago, we turned our Seattle home into a free community coworking space on Wednesdays, and then a SciFi Friday gathering space to relax, and then into a free community crafting space on Saturdays (actually, one Wednesday coworker-turned-friend took the lead on Saturdays). We've reimagined our current home and yard as a makers market space, writer's group space, teaching space, studio tour space, and most recently, as a free home for people who come to the island for our Island Shakespeare Festival. I once helped turn part of an old, unused school building into a coworking space for writers. Just imagine at first. Then find 1-3 others to imagine with. We can turn private homes, private land, or buildings or spaces into free community coworking or parks or play spaces or third-place spaces or retreat space or coworking space. Other larger examples of this I've seen are 1) organizations that glean fruit off fruit trees on private land (parts of Seattle were orchards before becoming dense neighborhoods and many trees were saved and still produce) and donate it to food banks, 2) churches and counties returning land to people it was stolen from, 3) creating food forests for neighborhoods on once-private land, 4) giving your yard back to support the needs of local wildlife and pollinators, 5) land trusts that pool community funds to purchase large swaths of land to stop development, leaving most of it wild, and adding a few walking trails for the public, 6) small businesses that devote a chunk of their space to being a third-place "free to be here" space for members of their community to play/rest/work in, and 7) turning "hell strips" between city sidewalks and streets into neighbor gardens, places to sit for passersby, and mini free library destination spots.
Parent and care-give for others as a village. Examples we've done or seen friends, family and neighbors do... Leaning on senior centers and community centers. Dementia care partner support groups. Reimagining yourselves as a dementia care-partnering improv troupe. Museums, zoos, and restaurants partnering with communities to have dementia-friendly days and kid-friendly days. Parents bringing groups of young kids in to entertain or play with elders in a memory care home or assisted-living home. Parent mentoring groups and stuff-share groups. Free parenting-supply libraries and free medical equipment-supply libraries. Bike buses for fun and to/from school. Hosting play dates. Babysitting swaps so parents get to do adult things now and then. Carpooling. Fostering. Adopting. Working to make the lives of all children and elders better—from cleaning and improving parks to making a public space or neighborhood more child friendly, elder friendly, and disability-community friendly to supporting literacy (thank you, Dolly) to drafting laws and pushing legislative bodies to better support those you care for to speaking out when your "leaders" and tax dollars are being used to disappear, incarcerate, torture, rape, or murder civilians, children, elders, the disabled, and others at home and abroad.
Commit within yourself to being part of ending your family's deep trauma journey (some say family curses--I don't) and accompanying bad habits. Yes, we live in systems designed to harm us. Changing those systems is remarkably important. And. Most of us have to start with where we are and with who we are and who we're with, or we just continue to unconsciously perpetuate the worst of those systems. For example, we can start with committing to 1) having friends you deeply trust and who you support with love as they support you well too, 2) attending therapy when you need even more help (and can afford it, of course), 3) attending/leaning on community support groups or volunteer groups as things come up that you need more help with and that you—well supported and by simply sharing your story and listening to others—end up helping others within, too, and/or 4) spending time on the land, learning with the non-human beings who make up 99+% of life on earth. I think of this friends (help this small body) + therapy (help this small family) + support groups and volunteer groups where everyone is a leader and learner (help this small community) + time on the land (be helped by your home planet and love it fiercely and well, which helps everyone) as our current holy quadrangle of ensuring that we pass on everything we love about life to the next generation while minimizing or avoiding passing on the cross-generational pain that has weighed down our particular selves and families and many other families. What is your holy quadrangle? Rest/play to figure it out.
Center on animals for a while or a lifetime. Animal sanctuaries, animal rescue groups, fostering animals, supporting the lifetime-devoted-to-animals people if you can't do it yourself, being a good animal steward, widening your family to include pets and wildlife and/or other people's pets, sharing beloved pet and animal stories online and in person. People who devote their lives to the improvement of the lives of animals, on any scale, are wonderful people.
Mentor or tutor others and be mentored at every age. Giving each other a leg up, supporting those struggling and receiving support with your struggling, ensuring that practices that work aren't lost when people change, leave, or die, recognizing life as life-long learning and life-long teaching, etc. Mentoring is so important.
Just get weirder and weirder. If the list is already sounding daunting, just do this: get weirder. A lot of us hold ideas and beliefs and wear approved personality types, not because they are ours but because they were given to us by our culture or the dominant culture where we live, and we were punished for being our true selves at some point or at many points. Drop those masks of "not really me" wherever its safe to do so and make sure that you're not stopping others from doing the same with things like tone policing or getting defensive when you could choose to listen and learn. The more we become our true, free, unexplainable, original soul/spirit/self/being, the better. Authoritarians need sameness, conformity, compliance, fear, self doubt, exhaustion, overwhelm, defensiveness, and apathy. The stranger and more true to ourselves we allow ourselves to be, the braver we get over time, and the less and less authoritarian we ourselves tend to be over time. To shake off the things you're not happy about within the culture, do things differently. Be different. Invite difference. Don't comply. Wear strange things. Talk with butterflies and listen to forests. Break with stale customs and too-tight-to-breathe mindsets and beliefs. Say your weirdest feelings and thoughts and ideas out loud. I recently looked at my heart, my nature, my woods, and my wardrobe and decided I might be a Goth Fae (aka Goth Fairy) more than a human right now. Leave places when everyone 100% agrees or bring new people in who disagree. Don't work for control freaks. Break laws meant to harm the poor and serve only the super wealthy. This can be a lonely path, at times, and even dangerous: especially in places and with people who still demand impossible and cruel conformity of themselves and others. But there's great joy to be found here, too. There are SO MANY strange and wonderful beings out here. The stranger you get, the more beings you can find, appreciate, befriend, and lean on. My 11-year-old niece and friends call this being REAL. And Wow, does that give me hope.
Intentionally collectively reimagine space, community, work, events, relationships, country, buildings, religion, the neighborhood, etc. Sometimes we're present enough to shift and expand possibilities together. For example, collectively reimagining unused space as coworking space or housing space or community play space or third-place space or music making/sharing space. Co-inventing new events and celebrations with the community and place that demonstrate new things about the community and place. Or imagining cross-community celebrations. Reimagining old events and celebrations into something new. Reimagining rituals and routines. Reimagining what work can be or how it's done. Intentionally collectively reimagining purpose, ways of being, norms, etc. as a people, place, community, region, or country. One friend– a former Seattle University professor of mine– is an imam in a new kind of church/temple/mosque/longhouse hybrid called Interfaith Community Sanctuary where a different religion is practiced each day of the week, and they have collective gatherings and parties too. Part of a family that values spaciousness within and part of The Interfaith Amigos too, he literally glows with spacious generosity and love found in these collective reimagining and awakening places. If more kind and generous beings don't take part in reimagining their worlds, then only wounded, abusive, self-centered dickheads are doing it. Don't let the dickheads be the only ones reimagining your world.
Join or start a community bank or financial share circle. Lots of groups across the U.S. and around the world trust each other enough to pool their money, grow their money together, and/or use their money for the good of the whole community or place, as collectives. Share funds for each other to make big purchases. Buy land together. The sky is the limit. All without traditional banks. Could you do this too? Find people already doing this and learn.
Speak your lived experience (aka, your truth) in groups and places where doing so will give those you love and respect courage or hope or energy or ideas or inspiration or reason to live another day. And in places where you can feel your whole body and heart rip those words out of your body: typically, when protecting others who've been through what you've been through or when protecting yourself. Not everyone needs to hear your story. But some people deeply, deeply do. Speak where everyone present matters to you.
Listen often and well. When there is something you don't know or aren't seeing or are curious about—something you couldn't possibly see from your individual place/perspective/body—and you want to learn or unlearn, listen. Listening works. Listening while intending to just be fully present, or to learn something new, or to not interrupt, or to minimize judgement so you can better hear what's actually being said—all great practices.
Judge harshly only sparingly. And forgive yourself when fear makes you forget this one, because—especially if you're from my culture—you absolutely will forget this one. Who does it serve to judge this person harshly? Answer this question before you harshly judge someone. Online, for example, the answer to that question is algorithms designed to keep you and others present, aka billionaires, and grifters served by chaos and hatred because well loved and loving beings would never fall for their shit. Judgement of others means that you're prioritizing your fears, and defensiveness, over the possibility of learning or unlearning something important in the moment. If your life is in danger, you damn well better be trusting your body's judgement to move, get help, run, etc. And, if your life isn't in danger, you could just leave or log off or get help. Let someone else handle someone you can't handle lovingly anymore. Or, you could also grow curious, wonder, stay in conversation to learn, unlearn, make mistakes, step into conflict, and repair relationships after conflict–all these actions are usually better options that judging harshly all the time.
If you love to study, study disruptive movements against authoritarianism that have worked in the past—with three hard-learned caveats:
1. First, don't just study cis het men-led movements and man-penned philosophies. Study what the women and nonbinary and trans and neurodivergent and disabled and so many other folk have been doing together on the ground. Listen to older women and nonbinary and neurodivergent folks or trans folk who were there or who are experiencing similar things now, learn from people with different ancestors than yours. Don't just read books or attend lectures in universities and other wealth-and-health-and-patriarchal-barriers-to-entry places, because much of what is done by regular folk to change the world isn't well documented, or the documentation has been intentionally destroyed or changed or stolen, or it has been hidden or disguised to keep it safe. Or the "documentation" may be woven into ritual and routine and song and art and dance and prayer and story and relationship and the hearts and DNA of the people they touched.
2. Second, study different roles and identities not just visible leadership roles: what were the artists doing? The musicians? The poets? What were the healers doing? The food providers? The seed keepers? The clowns? The grandparents? The children? The shop keepers? What were LGBTQ+ community members doing? The forests? The animals? What were the disruptors doing? Union members? The caregivers? The communicators? The teachers the kids loved most? Focusing on a handful of charismatic leaders or their traits can be deflating and is unnecessarily limiting your imagination.
3. Third, be humble no matter how much you've studied and don't you dare judge people who don't have the privilege and time to study like you do—or the capacity to remember everything they've done or learned in the past. Many movement leaders have been poor and/or harmed, trodden on, intimidated, ignored, mocked, hunted, raped, pulled from their land, fired from their jobs, starved, physically harmed for protecting water and land and children, etc.– for so long– that they had no other choice but to bring forth change together. Other movement leaders are disabled, many are elderly with limited mobility and memories and interest in being online. Elders and young children both may prefer face to face. Studying other movements to learn ideas for what to do today is a tremendous privilege. Arrogance about what you know via studying or making assumptions about those who haven't had the time to study like you did or who have been too busy MAKING CHANGE FOR THEIR COMMUNITY for years or decades or generations to study others like you have is often not be welcome or appreciated. Humility is almost always welcomed. Where humility is mocked and isn't welcome, you don't want to be. I promise.
Grieve together. Across my lifetime, a whole lot of us have been trying to hold the grief of our family, community, country, and/or world alone. And it shows. Figure out ways to grieve together: seasonally, and monthly or weekly, rituals/routines. And show up in person for others whenever deep loss moves you to. We are not that different from our ancestors or our neighbors—we all need each other to grieve fully. Joy can return when you grieve together, hold each other, and when you stay with emotions until they're experienced as gifts, friends, or at least not the enemies you fear they are.
Take care of this one body and this one small family. Every year is different. Let that be so. I'm 56, and I've been involved in one way or another with just about everything in this list. But across the past few years, I worked and care-gave myself into the ground. I helped and helped and helped and fixed and fixed and fixed. This year, I'm grieving the loss of my Mom, and letting go of my business/business self (sold the biz), and then I got Covid which has turned into long Covid, which is TERRIBLE, and Daniel is having some health problems as well, as is my Dad. After four months of fighting reality, I gave in and accepted this reality. This year I must take care of this one body and this one small family. I don't have a choice. Long Covid chronic fatigue is freeing me from my need to be involved in everything, to help with everything, and to fix everything. I don't have the energy to walk the dog for more than 20 minutes right now. I have to take multiple naps just to have the energy to shop/cook/eat. I don't have the energy to repair many things, including relationships, that fall apart. I'm on the couch a ton because the fatigue is unbelievably bad. This year, I'm learning to let some things just be broken, just be messy, just be unclear, just be handled by others. Me? I'm just going to be at the moment. Fuck doing at the moment. It's not helping.
Use libraries more: both in person and online. Grow closer to your librarians and neighbors in one beautiful, welcoming place. We protect what we love. We know authoritarians and fascists always come for books, libraries, and librarians. Know yours. Support yours. Protect yours.
Create, host, volunteer, improve, and/or attend regular community in-person celebrations. Dances, BBQs, potlucks, events, parades, makers markets and holiday markets, concerts, plays, pow wows, canoe journeys, and other rituals that celebrate the place, land, season, animals, trees, plants, water, and all people present together. Some look remarkably similar from place to place and connect us across cultures: most of us love a great harvest festival or street dance, for example. While others are unique to the place and celebrate what's unique about the place, animals, people present. For example, here we have a Welcome the Whales parade and ceremony each spring to welcome the whales that return every spring, and a Murder Mystery weekend to help all of us get through our ridiculously gray Februarys (after an equally gray November, December, and January) with our brain cells and will to live intact, and Soup Box Derby day, yes soup, to see who can build the strangest looking non-motorized, human-carrying vehicle/contraption that can speed the fastest or most flamboyantly or most laugh-inducingly down our main street hill and into downtown.
Join or start a community time bank group to reveal both new and strong community and normalize that our time and contributions are equally valuable no matter who we are or what we offer. I love this idea and intend to become part of one or co-start one some day, when I have more energy. In these groups, people share any or all of their many skills and abilities, by the hour, within the time bank community, for the joy of it and also to earn time that they can then use to receive help from others offering their skills and abilities to the community. Everyone's time is worth exactly the same in community time bank groups: an hour of babysitting, an hour of legal help, an hour of time to help paint a closet, an hour of mentoring or professional coaching, an hour of healing help, an hour of emotional support, an hour with an accountant, an hour with a dentist, an hour of full presence, etc. These groups also allow us to offer more of our selves: you may be an accountant by day but you may also have a talent for painting front doors and the ability to teach home canning or the guitar. Within the community, everything you are and offer are valued equally, which teaches us where our real joys live and helps us see when they shift. Here are some resources: https://www.timebanks.org/ and https://hourworld.org/index.htm and https://thehiveindex.com/topics/timebanking/.
Actively seek to recognize other ways of being in the world as powerful and valuable. For example, try leaning on and learning expertise from those far better grounded in both the local and the land than those whose wisdom is distant and impersonal. Wisdom that pre-dates the tech you now believe humanity can't live without, or the country whose borders you're somehow certain that you're living in though it hasn't existed for that long, or different kinds of healers than the doctor's office that's been causing you more stress, depression, or anxiety than it fixes lately. Groups of people such as indigenous folks, acupuncturists, herbalists, street medics, historians, librarians, community center staff, senior center staff, and grandparents or great grandparents, for example. People who can hear plants, read weather with their bodies, feel forest moods, understand what the sky or your pulse is saying, connect people to others and to wisdom without the internet, and speak of the gifts of every local plant, waterway, place, animal, and person, for example. OR, go the other way and spend more time with kids, babies, teens, and young adults. Be reminded of what they offer the world that you've forgotten and see what they offer now that is brand new to you.
Pay in cash, and in person, so that billionaires/huge corporations don't get 3% of your money every time you pay for things. Credit cards and payment apps are convenient and they also drain money from locals you love and give money to the kinds of people happily putting flock cameras and ICE agents and concentration camps and data centers in neighborhoods because they profit from it. Avoiding apps that send money to too-rich a-holes every time you spend or receive money is not easy these days. I'm not saying it is. Especially for those always doing and never resting– those who are far too easily led down paths that harm us. No judgement. This one is HARD to do. So hard. And. We can do hard things. Speaking of doing hard things. People around the world also develop their own local currencies. How cool is that?! Could you?
Join or lead or support community reduce/reuse/recycling/repair efforts. Changing little things doesn't feel like enough these days. Instead of giving up, join a small local group, and suddenly, you're not a little being doing a little thing anymore. Small groups of people making little changes together shift the human world for the better in more lasting and sustainable ways than individuals can. Yes this one overlaps with other items in the list. We overlap. Overlapping is cool.
Turn (or allow) your church/mosque/temple/place of worship into a safe place for speaking against authoritarianism and fascism and working for justice, equity, and freedom for all. Not my area of expertise, but there is a long history in the U.S., especially in communities of color, of leaning on faith and faith community to fight authoritarianism and fascism (and white supremacy and all that comes with it). Learn from the best!! I also recently came across Fr David Gierlach, an Episcopal priest in Kailua, Hawai'i on Instagram: @davidgierlach. Looking authoritarianism and fascism in the face and speaking the true words than need to be said out loud now. So few white men are being this visible and brave, I suspect because they don't have the community to back them up. Fr Gierlach clearly does, and good for him. We don't need to agree on everything. We do need to agree that the cruelty and violence of authoritarianism and fascism are causing horrible harm to our neighbors and ourselves and the land we love. And that it's our job to change things.
Practice and cultivate the art of non-fixing. This is not doing nothing. It's about being far more discerning about what is yours to do. Fixing things takes energy, time, and often relationships, community, money, and more. Those of us who've been activists or parents (or anything really) for decades often have less energy overall than those just starting out. And sometimes, regardless of age, for whatever reason, we just don't have the energy, time, desire, funds, or community to bring forth the change we want. In these moments, we can practice the art of non-fixing. Not the same as "giving up." What if you just let some things be broken? Some questions go unanswered? Let some things or even relationships fall apart? What if you just let people believe the worst of you? What if that broken thing is not your broken thing to fix? What if some things have to break so there's room for the new? Where are places that your divine neglect is warranted and even better than your divine presence, attention, and changing things? What if you just decided to stop trying to fix most of what's broken for a while, to rest, just to rest and play or grieve, because we need rest/play/grieve as living beings and we are so much more loving and generous and creative when we are well rested and seen and heard. And, maybe, also, so you eventually have the wisdom and energy to find your focus and help fix one important piece of the beautiful puzzle of life instead of being pulled and pushed in a hundred directions?
Become part of protest groups, in person. Feel the truth of your community, in person. I will never forget the voices of tens of thousands of men chanting "Her body, her choice" on the off beat beside us as we walked in the Women's march chanting "My body, my choice." in 2017. That showing up, that self-decentering and full support from the men of my city made me weep in the moment. I walked with goosebumps and felt entirely safe among those men. The facts that the U.S. federal government is run by a handful of horrifying men and that social media is now flooded with 75% bot and fake and intentionally horrifying "male" accounts that spread hate and attack women–-to push us apart from men and keep us all isolated and tired and apathetic–doesn't touch my faith in men as a whole. Because I've felt the truth in person, regularly, at protests. Real men care. They weep. And they are fed up with violent bullshit too. Protesting is cross-generational and cross-cultural groups of people who show up in person and seek to relatively peacefully spread the word that the current system or ways of doing things or something happening is actively harming people, land, animals, climate, forests, waterways, earth. This is democracy in action: it's messy, can be scary, empowering, fun, surprising, connecting, frustrating, and stretching people to be braver and connect with others in new ways. If you love democracy, you should do this, as you can. You learn so much about yourself, people you know and love, strangers, and your community and region and nation. Assumptions are challenged, and changed. Every time I protest I learn something new and go home humbled and with more love for humanity in my heart. The more diverse the protest group, including all ages, the safer the group tends to be—unless violent abusive fascist/white supremacist folk show up intending physical harm (in or out of uniform)– which is a valuable lesson to learn in a country that holds people of all ages and from everywhere else on earth. A country that harms far, far FAR too many, because we settle for not showing up in person, not learning to trust our own and each other's voices and faces, not regularly challenging our assumptions in person, or not letting go of stale beliefs that serve literally nobody anymore. Not everyone feels safe to show up in person: for good reason. There are so many guides out there for staying safe and keeping others safe at protests. Find a few. Read a few. And when you feel safe to show up on your feet in person at protests, do it. Ideally, with friends.
Offer simple Pay-It-Forward or Pay-For-Others options as a regular practice in person. I'm thinking brick and mortar stores and organizations here. So people who have extra money at the moment can fluidly pay for others and those who need it can receive it without making anyone feel less than. Individuals, I have another idea for you...
Offer spontaneous gifts to strangers. Oh my God do I love to do this! So many examples of this here to share. Paint a little rock to bring joy and leave it by somebody's mailbox or put it in a community garden for someone to find. Leave a nice note on somebody's windshield in a parking lot– complementing how they raise their children or treat their dog or park their car, for example. Pay for the coffee of the person in line behind you. Tell someone they're brilliant or a genius in an online group you're part of. Tell someone in a genocide zone that you love them and they/their people are not forgotten and that you're fighting for them. In person, listen to someone nobody else seems to be listening to. Spend time with someone who is lonely. Last week I was wearing a new wooden, flower barrette in my hair that I'd just gotten from a local maker the day before. Handmade. It cost $12. I loved it so much. I was standing in line for coffee and a very old woman complemented me on it as she walked by. She was caring for her husband who clearly had significant memory issues. I told her I'd gotten it in a town 35 minutes away (which I consider close by, because I'm there every week visiting my Dad). Sadness crossed her face and she said that they'd likely never make it up there. They walked past and into the store beside the coffee shop. I couldn't shake her sad face after I got my coffee and was sad that she didn't have the freedom to travel that I do at the moment. I know what it is to be a dementia caregiver. To be stuck at home for years, longing to go places and do things that you can't do. So I went and found her, and I gave her the barrette. She was delighted, over joyed, and offered to pay me for it. But some days, joy and delight are payment enough. The next week I went and got the other, similar, barrette, because there were only two like it in the shop. This new barrette means 100 times more to me than the first one did. The old woman whose name I don't know, and I, are the only two people on earth who have them now. Mine reminds me of her and how lucky I am. How lucky we all are when we experience strangers as friends or community members: feel and receive belonging as a gift. I hope hers does the same for her.
Intentionally decenter humans. Humans make up just 0.01% of life on earth. That's a whole lot of non-human life to learn from. Is who you're learning with/from balanced? This is about giving as much respect and attention to the ways of being and needs of nearby trees and waterways and insects and animals and habitats and beaches and mountains as you do to humanity. This can be anything from sitting and walking and working outside more and better listening to the non-human world, to rebalancing your schedule to make sure you're not scrolling your life away listening only to humans, to doing these things as a family or community, to working on projects and for organizations that help others decenter humans, to listening to, learning with, and supporting the people of earth who have NEVER centered humans as the supreme beings here. There are people whose people and beliefs have never held the humans-are-supreme-beings delusions that the rest of humanity does. Can you hear them? What are they saying now?
Reimagine food and food systems for the better and support the new (or the old that's always worked). For example, learning how to ethically forage, community gardening, small farm-farming, regenerative agriculture, learning practices from people indigenous to the area who know the land and plants and waterways and animals and fish and insects like kin, gardening at home and sharing with neighbors, cooking and sharing with friends, swapping home-baked and homegrown and home-canned food goods, subscribing to community supported agriculture (CSAs), joining food co-ops, attending farmers' markets, donating to and leaning on food pantries and food banks, learning and teaching a myriad of food storage practices, attending or teaching at small organic farming schools or in your own kitchen, pushing for food safety and inspections, voting for people who support healthy land, healthy people, and healthy food. There are also great organizations to donate to that help feed those impacted by authoritarian's cruelty-centered and make-climate-change-worse-for-profit rule. World Central Kitchen is a great one to support.
Reimagine wellbeing, health, and health care for the better and support the new (or the old that has always worked). Finding a hole in the current system and creating something to fill that hole (for example, my herbalist practice focused on emotional support because that's where doctor's offices and hospitals keep letting us down). Making the current system more affordable and more accessible. Using or becoming an alternative practitioner: people who stay healthy, get healthy, and spread health outside the current mainstream medical system. Learning from other cultures and spreading that wisdom. Insisting that health and health care is a whole community practice not an individual responsibility in a cruel, rigged system (in the U.S., seeking healthcare bankrupts more than 500,000 families of the sick each year). In my authoritarian country, becoming a street medic, a care bear, an herbalist, a therapist of any kind, or serving in any role capable of reducing the stress and pain and suffering of community members makes you a member of the health care community. So, um, yeah. That's almost everyone. Just don't throw out what's worked remarkably well for generations, or you may spread disease or die of Covid, the measles, or other preventable diseases.
Show up in person to help those most vulnerable in your physical community right now. People need faces. They need bodies who show up in person. When you're in doing mode, this is among the best things that you can be doing. You can do this full time, part time, or once a season, month, or week. If infrequently is all you can do, try volunteering as a family or as a friend group to increase your impact locally. If you are volunteering in a community that you're not part of, your job as a volunteer do-er is to listen to those for whom this is just a way of being. Some present are resting here, playing here, just being themselves here. They are the leaders. Listen and follow their lead.
Join direct action groups. This is a step or many steps beyond protest groups. People willing to work together, drop their own egos, and risk their freedom and their lives for the whole community or place. From sit ins where you know you'll be arrested, to bringing more visibility to an urgent crisis, to quietly destroying weapons of war on their way to commit genocide, to helping free people in concentration camps, to destroying property owned by billionaire grifters who have giddily and arrogantly and openly stolen from generous, hard working poor people for years or generations. There are people far more qualified to talk about how to do this than me. I've done this but it's been awhile. I've been caregiving for elder parents for the past 13 years on top of my work—with no other family nearby to help– so my lived-experience knowledge is a bit out of date. But there are direct action groups all over the world now to learn with and be part of, and they're not all hippies or anarchists or hackers or artists or young folks. Far from it. They are good-hearted people not willing to let the uber wealthy slide their people one inch further into fascism or authoritarianism or genocide. They show often from within groups sick and tired of watching people being harmed in their names: Christian groups, Jewish groups, Muslim groups, armed services veterans groups, for example, or they're simply people on the front lines with the resources to do something, such as boat captains rescuing refugees and asylum seekers from the water or taking supplies to people trapped in genocide zones. These days you see a lot of very old people in direct action groups too. People happy to put their lives on the line for their own grandchildren, for children everywhere, or fighting for much-needed services or healthcare for elders.
Join and support those with generations of experience seeking to end human, corporate, systemic, billionaire, and/or government corruption and cruelty. And those who left corrupt systems to work for themselves. Join and support groups and organizations intentionally created long ago to disrupt corrupt and cruel corporations, people, governments, and systems. Legal aid groups, experienced independent journalists who've left controlled/corrupt print or broadcasting corporations, Black community groups, immigrant protection and rights groups (WAISN in Washington state is a great group), women's rights groups, LGBTQ+ rights groups, for example. Political groups pushing to eliminate government corruption and the wealthy buying politicians and laws for themselves. Groups that craft policies to protect the living and then influence legislators passing laws. If you're a connector, connect these groups to each other. If you're a sharer, share about these groups so others can connect. If you have funds, fund them. If you have time, show up in person. There are so many groups doing this already in the U.S. that it's often better to join than to try to start something new. Not always. Just usually.
Poison the data. Always learning from young geniuses. Thanks @addielamarr.sh! If big tech is going to use all our data from our phones and devices against us, one idea is to poison the data. Five ideas from Addie: 1) fake an online pregnancy (regardless of your gender). Search for strollers and diapers. Download "what to expect when expecting." etc. Let them waste advertising $$ on you. 2) Swap grocery and other loyalty cards that track you with your friends and neighbors now and then–-so they advertise to a person who doesn't exist. 3) Install AdNauseum, which obfuscates browsing, blocks ads, and then clicks them so your ad profile fills with thousands of interests that you don't have. Apparently this makes user tracking, targeting, and surveillance by large organizations futile. 4) Fill out online forms wrong: wrong birth date, wrong middle initial, a different version of your name for every company. 5) Lie to Alexa. Addie says advertisers bid up to 30 times more for smart-speaker interaction, which leads to targeting from 3rd party advertisers. Lying to Alexa means wasted advertising dollars. Personally, I wouldn't use Alexa and other surveillance tech at all anymore, but this is good advice if you're going to continue using them. Here in the U.S., a lot of women have also stopped using medical tracking type apps and we're thinking twice about giving our doctors all of our data: the date of your last period, your weight, a particular diagnosis you don't want the whole world to know about—these are all things that the government and giant corporations and healthcare insurance companies can now use against us. We no longer share everything with our medical doctors. I don't let them weigh me either. We trust healers who we know as people and who work outside of the mainstream surveillance-heavy systems.
No unpaid work for the patriarchy. Speaking of learning from the young, this one is big now and getting more popular by the day. As healthcare and education and social services and research and programs are defunded year after year by a hostile and now openly thieving-for-themselves "U.S. federal government," regular people, mostly women, are expected to pick up the slack. While everything the government has done to support women is cut. Can't afford child care anymore? Women will do it. Can't afford elder care either? Women will do that too. Can't afford to eat out? Women can cook. Oh, and women must also work 2 to 3 jobs to pay the bills, now, too. And have more babies that we're having. Bleh. No "good old days" for us. We're being worked into early graves by this system: autoimmune diseases, heart disease, anxiety or depression, diabetes, dementia, and more. And the government is taking our tax money and offering us nothing we want in return: not quality education, not healthcare, not safer food or safer work environments or cleaner air and water, or cheaper groceries and gas, not protecting public land and parks or being respected by other countries or stopping genocide abroad (they fund it instead): they offer literally nothing we want now. Just unending war, violence, pain, and suffering so that billionaires can get richer. I'm not suggesting that you don't look after your children. Of course not. But I am suggesting that you stop overworking for grown men immediately. They can plan meals and shop and cook. They can do their own laundry. They can schedule family appointments, plan trips, make sure celebrations happen, take their kids places. Parent their own kids and care give for their elders. They can do the hard work of keeping close relationships close and growing, pulling the community together, and listening to and holding the pain of others. We need to stop filling all the gaps that billionaire grifters leave in their wake. Let some things break. Stop overworking. Quiet quit the patriarchy. Most men won't stop voting for utter nonsense until they feel the consequences of the utter nonsense. Treat them like the adults they are. Let them feel the consequences of their votes and actions. Use the time you receive not working for free for them anymore to play, rest, and, when you have the energy to volunteer and help, volunteer for those most harmed by the current systems/corporate rule/government.
Offer sliding scale tiers for payments, scholarships, and/or free offerings to some so that people pay only what they can afford. We've noticed that somehow people who work for themselves and very small organizations and businesses can make this happen for their communities—from artists and arts organizations to lawyers to teachers and small educational organizations to herbalists to naturopathic doctors and healers and theaters and art centers to creators of all sorts—while somehow large, wealthy corporations either can't or won't do this, sinking them ever-further into the abyss of hating themselves and harming humanity.
Join, support, and create community-centered creator groups and projects and mutual aid groups. Music making groups, art making groups, fiber arts groups, crafts groups, sewing groups, book clubs, writers groups, actors collectives, sketcher groups, painter's collectives, working artists' collectives, improv groups, stand-up comedy groups, art groups for the pure joy of it, public art groups, etc. Personally I'm a huge fan of small, close-knit groups and emerging groups that aren't formal non-profits or for-profit groups. Groups that aren't easy to pin down, attack, or be shut down by authoritarian jerks and fascists. But you do you. Mutual aid groups tend to be hyper local, but there are online resources these days, such as Mutual Aid Hub.
Follow, join, support, and share about boycott and divestments groups. And find those making lists and apps that help you understand where your money is going. BDS is my favorite right now. There are a lot of large corporations and governments working for billionaires and being horrible right now. Find them. Boycott them. Divest from them. Give your full presence, time, and money to those making the world a better, healthier place. Spend as much money locally as possible, with people and families and small orgs and businesses where you know people by name. Search "defund fascism" or "defund ___[what matters most to you]____ in the browser you prefer or on the social media platform of your choice to find lots of folks sharing how to make sure your money is funding what you want funded, and not funding what you hate. I found @baratunde via @resmaamenakem on Instagram recently creating a list of alternatives to the giant companies now actively supporting fascism/authoritarianism/surveillance and control technologies in the U.S., but there are tons of folks doing this work now.
Follow, join, support, and share about people and groups that seek into increase playfulness or rest in the community. People who remember that we are play-centered beings are the best! As are groups intent on bringing more rest or play into the lives of people most harmed by current systems and beliefs. If teens and adults in Gaza can create circuses for kids and spaces for art making and play, then we who are not in the middle of a genocide zone and targeted daily by drones, snipers, and bombs can most definitely do this, right? Doesn't have to be perfect. Doesn't always have to have funding. Just has to be real and truly playful or restful. In the U.S., look for Black women and indigenous women and trans folks who are making rest and play possible for themselves and others. Donate there. That's where our leadership truly lives.
Move your investments and retirement accounts away from experts centered only on making you more money and put them into the hands of experts who care about your values, ethics, planet earth, and life. Or, take them back from the "experts" and manage your money yourself. We who can—always only we who can—need to make sure our money doesn't support the people, companies, organizations, and philosophies that we can clearly see are harming people, land, animals, planet, home, and/or everyone. Boycotting is the easy step. Divesting is a harder step, at least in the U.S. Trusting that our money should be in our hands and move with our values and should be going to what helps others, not just us, is important. An even harder step is convincing wealthy people and/or your parents or grandparents to do the same. We can do hard things. We've talked about doing this for a while in our family. We're making this one happen this year in our immediate family. Not sure if our parents will go for it or not. Some "what?" resources: BDS movement divestment, Divestment List for Immigrant Justice, Divestment List for Palestinian Rights, Some "How" resources: Natural Investments, Mutual Fund Ratings list, First Affirmative Financial Network VADIS, Trillium Asset Management.
Support and defend good people running for elected office and good people in elected offices, locally and nationally. I'm more of an outside-the-political-system person myself, so this isn't my area of expertise. But we do read up on candidates, meet them when we can, donate when we can, and spread the word about people we love who are running for office. We go out of our way to do this for great people running for office or in office who aren't financially advantaged and financially supported by the current crumbling, racist, misogynist, ableist, heteronormative, and elitist old systems. Doing this as part of local groups—League of Women Voters, Indivisible, county-level political groups, etc.–-when you can, seems to be the best way to go.
Help others register to vote or get to polling places or overcome language barriers to voting. We have many friends who immigrated to this country in the past 20 to 50 years. People who've spent their whole lives or the bulk of their adult lives here. This country is home. Many of these friends are now afraid to be visible online and often, in person, too, because ICE tends to accost, round up, and disappear anyone who is not white when the mood strikes them--regardless of citizenship status. This idea came from these friends. There are organizations that help people register to vote and get to polling places and overcome language barriers to voting. Join one of these organizations and help there. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes places to help, like these: places to help when you're afraid to speak out elsewhere because you're now a target of a racist, misogynist, authoritarian, fascist government.
Be a poll worker. Whether people vote in person or via mail in your state, in the U.S. we need volunteers to keep tabs on voting. Despite the insulting nonsense pushed by authoritarians (such as "all the Republicans elected on the ticket were elected fairly but the Democratic president and candidates on the same ticket didn't actually win"), the people to show up to volunteer and help with voting are universally wonderful people. People who want every vote to count. In more authoritarian and racist places, they are people who put their lives on hold, and lives on the line, to protect voting and voters. Could that be you this year?
Vote. Regardless of their political leanings, the vast majority people (and bots and AI slop) who tell you that voting doesn't matter are short sighted. Like everything else in this list, if it changes you for the better, it changes your family/community/region/country for the better. We're all connected. We're all standing on the shoulders of those who fought and died for rights that we now take for granted, including voting. We're all in this together whether we like it or not. Voting is yet another sign that you are on the side of loving life and the living. Just don't let voting be the only thing you do. Thinking that voting is the end of our responsibility to others is a TERRIBLE idea pushed by those with zero respect for history and even less respect for everyday people. Not voting in the U.S. gave us fascist rulers who are happy to mass murder people abroad, make enemies of long-time friends, and who want to take away all our rights including the ability to vote them out. So vote. Nobody running is perfect. The system and country you're voting in is far from perfect. But those who would take away every right, every protection, every piece of public land, every gain made by regular people, every social safety net, and every opportunity for the poor and struggling and children and elders cannot be allowed to take over. The U.S. has dropped from #21 to #50 in democracy rankings by country on earth—for representation that reflects what the people actually want– in the past year alone. That gift was handed to global billionaires, grifters, and fascists by people who didn't vote and now we all have to work harder than ever to see if we can get some of those rights back and find representatives who actually like us and represent us and get them back in charge.
Refuse to allow new surveillance, compliance, and weapons technology, AI data centers, and private for-profit prisons and concentration camps into your town or city or county. There's far too much overlap between the billionaires who want to rapidly reduce the human population from 8+ billion to 4 billion people (and who believe its up to them to decide who lives and dies) and the billionaires running surveillance, compliance, and weapons tech companies, pushing AI data centers, and running private, for-profit prisons and concentration camps in the U.S. So. Show up. Speak at community meetings. Organize. Run for office. Spread the word when when these dickheads come to town. Stop them, together.
Check in on your friends. Better yet, make it a ritual/routine. If you hear that women are losing yet another right, check on your women friends. If you hear that trans friends are being legislated entirely out of public life somewhere or not allowed to drive and added to global genocide watch lists, check on them. If you hear that immigrants are being harmed and disappeared, check on immigrant, refugee, and asylum seeking friends. If you hear that soldiers are being left at sea and starved or that the current administration is pilfering their payroll, check on soldier friends. If you hear that yet another Black person was hung in a tree or mysteriously died when with white friends, check on your Black friends. If you hear that Asian people are being attacked again for a pandemic they had nothing to do with or that gay friends are being attacked for being themselves or that elders and disabled friends are losing benefits, check on them. If you hear that scientists are being attacked by congress again, check on them. If you hear about people in genocide zones suffering and dying, check on friends there or on friends near you who are from there. Create new routines. Take three hours of doom-scrolling time and make it check-in-with-friends time.
Cancel all subscriptions and apps or services that are clearly funding billionaire assholes or their foot soldiers and let go of giant companies that hurt people. Again, as you can. We shoot for dropping a few every year. We started by moving from banks to credit unions and from cable tv to streaming 15 years ago. We let go of most big box companies next, opting for locals when possible. Costco is our exception (and we watch products there too, to make sure they're ethical). Then we let go of more companies clearly out of alignment with our values. We dropped Uline early. Stopped watching mainstream U.S. news media and instead support independent journalists and apps like Ground News and foreign news organizations that we trust. Then we deleted the Starbucks app and dropped Amazon, then PayPal. Then we let go of all companies actively supporting genocide (thanks BDS and thanks boycat, No Thanks, Boycott, Goods, Buy'r, and other boycott and product consumer-informing apps). Then we dropped anything to do with certain billionaires out to harm humanity as a whole, such as deleting our Twitter, aka X, accounts entirely, then shunning the Washington Post. And severely limiting time on all Meta platforms: we'll happily jump ship when our elders can too. In the past years, we've avoided AI like the plague it is, and we've moved to using tech companies outside the U.S. that actively support privacy and refuse to give the U.S. government data they want to track, intimidate, arrest, prosecute, and harm good people. Why would we use tech so closely tied to those who've said good people are terrorists for nothing more than wanting their neighbors home safe or for being against surveillance or fascism? That thing our grandparents fought and died fighting against! We've dropped Paramount and Disney+ and Amazon Prime and Target for unethical, fascist-bootlicking behaviors. Said goodbye to Taylor Farms and their human-and-earth harming ways. This week I deleted the Google Maps app for calling Lake Ontario "Lake America" and installed the MapQuest app (it's great!) for standing up against tyrants with us. I kept Apple maps, for now, but they're hanging on by the tiniest of threads. I'm old enough to happily use paper maps again, you cowardly corporations. Bowing to and conspiring with fascists makes you a fascist, dickhead CEOs and corporations. Read a history book.
Search for "wellbeing economy projects" near you. After decades of being online and watching more and more of our once-free spaces online be taken over by bots, billionaires, and governments, I prefer the real world to online for battling despair and "What can I do?" But you're not me. You can try doing a search for things like this, just see what comes up. This doesn't work everywhere: authoritarian governments limit what people can see online in places like China and the United States, and the government may come after you for what you search for, depending on who you are. I talk about some of these wellbeing economy project ideas here but you can also just search on your own. The important thing to know is that there are millions (or billions depending on your perspective) of people around the globe already working to make the different world we want possible. Some people never stopped. Others are just joining now. I've called this the Bloom Story for 14 years now (compared to the Doom Story that billionaires pump propaganda at us for so they can sell us more crap and nonsense we don't need). From those who know the land well and are humble stewards of land, water, air, and animals to mutual aid networks to local currencies to community-owned businesses, worker cooperatives, and community land trusts. There are so many smart people building the better human world. Find and connect to some near you.
Quit your evil job, or quiet quit, or do it extremely poorly. If you work for an organization or person that clearly is chronically hurting the land, animals, people, and/or you (aka, evil), quit when you can. Drop the "personal extreme financial wealth = success" nonsense of capitalism. Extreme wealth is all ego. Live lighter like the good people do: get housemates, get a smaller house, share land, live with family, take on side gigs until you can get a different job, go to work for women- and minority-owned organizations, grow food, work with your hands, lean on your community, cross the border to get more affordable healthcare and medicine until they get the bars up around the whole country, etc. A whole lot of things in this "What can I do?" list exist to support this one brave action: stop working for evil people/corporations/governments/billionaires. If you can't quit the evil job—like so many Americans can't today—then don't over work. Give the bare minimum, so you have more to give to others elsewhere, more time to volunteer, more time to create art, more time to visit elders and play with kids and disrupt fascists, time to study/learn something new, etc. Or, become less competent. Actively slow down the evil organization. Muck up the wheels of fascism. Talk about what you're doing only with people you adore and trust and only offline and away from work and with zero devices present. Intentional incompetence is hard to prove.
Join and start unions. The more unions there are, the more power regular people have. That's why billionaires and giant corporations hate them. Never perfect but almost always better than the alternative billionaires-take-all approach, at least in my country.
Go to work for yourself or people you adore and invest in yourself and people you adore. Not easy. But you're worth the risk. Even when things don't turn out like you planned, you learn far more by trying– and you form relationships with people who you love and trust and who become community for you regardless of what happens at the "business" level—than you do by hating where you work and hating who you are for working there. If you have priorities that absolutely require steady income, and you don't want to do this, that's ok too. All of these ideas are for those who can do them or for those who can't right now but would like to imagine different for the future.
Strike. Work strike, school strike, or general strike, nothing shifts the uncaring elite who think the rest of us should be puppets or slaves or happy with those destroying the planet faster than watching their money train shut down. Strikes have worked all over the world. This one is easy to research. Strikes have worked in this country too. Again and again and again. Most of the rights we hold dear involved strikes at some point. Most of the reason we're safe– from the air we breathe to the food we eat to schools we loved to the nurses and hospitals we rely on—are due to people demanding safety for themselves and others, using strikes.
Cross old boundaries. Ask questions of people who you respect whose way of being, way of moving through the world, and perspective are different than yours. Read their books or publications, visit their shops and restaurants and studios, galleries, and museums, take classes offered by them. If you're in a majority (culture, religion, skin tone) or of a privileged gender or health status or age group, etc., go to places where you are in the minority, see how that feels. Just make sure that you're welcome when you do so and respect if you aren't welcome. Not all spaces are for you. Invite people to a celebration who create or celebrate or pray differently than you do. Learn new languages and ways of being. And share your people's ways too. This does NOT mean you have to learn with everyone. Some people are dangerous—physically or emotionally or both. Some people will hate you or harm you on sight. Some refuse to shift or change even a little bit for their own friends and family, let alone a stranger. If you have the energy to stick with a total asshole, good for you. I just put in 40 years of having conversations with total dickheads and caregiving for occasional assholes. I'm currently on a much-needed break. I get more done talking with people who fill me with energy and who stretch me a little bit (which I do the same for them) than with those who drain me of energy to the point that I'm almost comatose. Wish someone had told me that 40 years ago.
Prep just enough for a short emergency situation as an individual family. Put the bulk of your imagining, thinking, working, and playing into relationship building and mutual aid and systems reimagining at the neighborhood, community, or regional level. A lot of us are learning now that nobody is coming to save us but our neighbors. Not distant experts, the government, giant corporations, technology, and definitely not the young white tech billionaires who now call humans "meat sacks." It's up to us to save us. A lot of folks have experienced this reality for generations: so experts abound on working at the community level. And unlike the billionaire preppers trying to get their giant fortified bunkers in order—where's my eyerolling emoji?—we life-and-love-centered beings survive and thrive at the community level. Thinking solar panels might be a good idea? Work on a community solar panel project. Thinking about what will happen at home if the power goes out for weeks or the water gets contaminated or internet and phone systems go down? If the old food system breaks to the point that conglomerate/grocery store food is too dangerous? Work on a community project. What about community food/cooking/kitchen collectives? Community gathering and charging stations? Learn from those already doing it. I watch and learn from other herbalists and foragers, from food banks and pantries and local farm collectives and grocery co-op collectives and buy nothing groups, and folks in Gaza rebuilding a safe water system from nothing but love and studying in tents to become doctors and engineers and having only community kitchens and community phone/computer charging stations be a way of life, because they haven't had reliable utilities, power, school buildings, or hospitals for years thanks to their well-funded, genocidal, neighbors.
Decide what "No taxation without representation." means to you today. And figure out what you're going to do about it. The U.S.A. solidified as a country to begin with in part because people were tired of being taxed by a distant, uncaring government—a government working for the super wealthy and a great distance away— while not having a say in their own governance. We are back here again in the U.S. today. All of us this time. What are you going to do about it? As a family? As a friend circle? As neighbors? Not everything we do needs to be talked about online. This is one of those things I don't talk about online. This is a great one to discuss with people you deeply love and trust, in person.
Create an emergency party preparedness kit as a building, block, neighborhood, or community. We did this in our Seattle neighborhood. Not all emergency planning and preparing has to be for dire circumstances. The only thing more fun than being weird and playful on your own is being weird and playful as a whole building, block, neighborhood, or community. Such deep joy and belonging to be found here. World-changing joy and belonging.
Play. Wherever, whenever, however you can. Just play. When fun shows up, drop plans and play. Have fun for the sake of fun. I could tell you all the reasons and all the research why and how playing saves us, but what fun would that be? ;-)
Share this list. And other lists like this one. Whenever people are tired enough or scared enough to believe the lies that nothing can be done to combat authoritarian governments and fascist lies.

I could continue, but it's time to rest. There are some answers for when "What can I do about authoritarianism/fascism?" comes calling on you.

The kinder, gentler, more land-centered and child-centered system that we want is here, and it is growing, among the good people of the land. Life is growing out from the cracks in the stale, violent old systems like dandelions from pavement cracks. We just have to tap into life regularly, in person, to feel ourselves a part of it and sense our belonging, where we can. After that, it’s easier to let go of listening to the billionaire-funded cultural garbage pouring out of screens that tells us we aren’t enough, both individually & collectively, and that the only way to fix ourselves is to buy more stuff we don't need from them or to harm others coming for our stuff.

Yes, there is doom. So much doom under the thumb of authoritarians and their unhealed self hatred and blame. But that doesn't hold a candle to the bloom story. Even here. And especially now. Life is life-ing. And we're still a part of the Bloom story. The projects and ideas above are just the tip of the iceberg.