Looking around me:
- I started seeing people who support capitalist companies instead of non-profits.
- People losing their freedoms everywhere at high pace.
- No one is taking any serious steps to stop climate change.
- A lot of non-profits had seriously down scaled their operations in the last 5 years, most probably more non-profits will get hit hard this year.
- On a relative scale, no one is fighting to change any of this.
Do we have any hope?
As long as there are people like you desiring hope, Hope will never die.
There is always hope. It just depends on how much effort you personally are willing to put in to help change the things you’re seeing. There are several movements (50501 and Indivisible are two that immediately spring to mind) with millions of members that are currently fighting to change things. Get involved.
Yes. Things will get better. We don’t know how quickly that will happen, but it will happen. Meanwhile, take care of yourself and do what you can to take care of the people around you. The whole MAGA movement is based on fear and hatred. Being decent and doing good may be the most effective way to resist and, eventually, overcome it.
Non-profit is 100% capitalist. It just differiates that the sound ce of money is grants and not direct sales. But the c many still needs to get those numbers up as much as possible, to get as much money as possible.
There are people out there taking action, go find some. Collective action is always stronger than individual action. If you don’t currently have a community that is engaged, consider joining a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Unitarians in the US and Europe resisted the German Nazis by creating documents and providing refuge for Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust. Many congregations today have active social and environmental justice groups, often focusing on local action with low barriers to entry. Nobody is expected to believe any particular scripture, but UUs have a common set of principles, the first being everyone has inherent worth and dignity. The sermons at my congregation lately have been about trans visibility, rising to the moment and processing the chaos, which I’ve found inspiring.
Sounds like The Satanic Temple with more Jesus, but that’s a compliment of sorts — except the Jesus part. 😅
It varies a lot by UU congregation. Mine has more focus on Earth based traditions, as in we’re celebrating Earth Day this Sunday instead of Easter. Although we’ve been known to celebrate the high holidays from several major religious traditions.
And this is where humanity shines.
We solve things by accidents. We discover things by accident. I tell you: one day we’ll have interplanetary travel due to some accident.
Can’t remember who said it, but I always liked the saying that scientific discovery rarely comes with shouts of “EUREKA!”, but rather quiet mutterings of “hmm, that’s odd…”
There is always hope.
It took thousands of years to rid the world of monarchy, it will take a long time to go post-capitalist.
Progress is inevitable. Just as most monarchs have fallen, capitalism will fall.
It’s still better than the 1930s, low bar that it is.
But possibly not better than 1855, unironically.
You phrase this as if non-profits are an alternative to capitalist companies. Do you know of many non-profits that sell things? We belong to our local coop and shop there, but the groceries themselves are all made by for-profit companies. IME, non-profits are primarily service or charity oriented.
Is love to hear about a non-profit alternative to Amazon, or a non-profit cell phone maker.
Be the hope. You are not alone. Be loud. Others feel the same way and feel alone.
Remind each other there are still good people left
Personally I don’t think the problem is a lack of good people. Some people are good, some bad, most are in between (or rather both). The problem is rather that we are, collectively, dumb.
Be the hope. You are not alone. Be loud. Others feel the same way and feel alone.
But this is clearly all true and important.
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Symmetrically alternative recipe that I recently heard (from a French academic): “hopeful pessimism”. The idea being, roughly, that while it’s delusional to be optimistic, hopefulness is by definition subjective and therefore valid. And indeed quite sensible given that we can never know the future and therefore it really might turn out to be better than expected.
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Nope! There is no hope. You were always going to die no matter what. But that’s not the negative you might think. It’s freeing. Life is full of suffering no matter what you do and one day you will die. So that means if there are no promises that life will be good, the only thing that truly matters is how you feel about yourself and the way others feel about you.
Take the time to study the way you feel, what you can do better, and how you can make others happy. Study yourself and grow, because the only way out is in.
The overwhelming opinion around me is “it’s all too hard now, we just have to look after ourselves”
I fucking hate it.
Seems this is the standard response in animals in times of stress and penury, and humans are no exception. The challenge is to find a way to surmount it. Tough times coming.
