Vote.
Also knock on doors, volunteer for campaingns.
Get involved locally. Go to meetings, work with others, make your own community safer, better, more organized. Know what's on school board agendas. Show up and comment.
Give politicians a reason to know what you want, and why they should care.
Really cannot emphasize enough the emotional benefit of picking a spot where you can have an outsize impact and digging in to really work on it in addition to your other efforts. My contributions to protecting anonymity online have been SUCH a motivator for avoiding despair.
Maybe your spot is keeping your local school board out of the hands of bigots or organizing people to advocate for climate policy or providing tech services to a local candidate's campaign. Maybe it's writing postcards to voters or phone banking or doing jail support. Pick something. Anything.
Don't let it be the only thing you do, but have something that is concrete and specific that you can go work on when you're feeling despair that isn't doomposting! It is critical for not succumbing to the despair!
It is hard as hell to keep going after seeing every effort fail.
I've led voter drives. I've been involved in the Cirt Councils and School Boards of numerous districts. I've knocked on doors. All in Texas, where the state always seems like maybe, this time, we can make some headway.
1/2
In 2020, I worked a voter assistance hotline and helped dozens of people figure out registration and voting in a complicated state. It was immensely satisfying and I am signing up to do it again this cycle. It was relatively low stress, in the calls were from people who WANTED to talk to me.
I volunteered with the Texas Democratic Party hotline: www.texasdemocrats.org/vopro
I have also volunteered on site to assist voters at the polls with this organization, which is non partisan: www.texasvoterprotection.org/about Their volunteer page isn't up yet for this cycle.
Also, my sister became a voter registrar, and she registered hundreds of people to vote in the 2020 cycle. There are organized voter drives, or you can do your own! She made a point of carrying the application forms with her. She set up at a local garden center with her corgi, Chicken.
Yessss, fellow vopro volunteer! I volunteered (and am coming back to volunteer) in a different complicated red state, but the experience was very similar! ❤️
That makes PERFECT sense to me, and it's precisely the kind of unglamorous but necessary work that needs to get done and is susceptible to hijacking by awful people if nobody is watching. Great job.
