I reached adulthood at the Dawn of MAGA (graduated college in 2014), so it's interesting being in my mid 30s now realizing that my life has become defined by the necessity of resisting authoritarianism.
When Trump first got elected, we all talked about how much it sucks to live in "interesting times" (& it does), but I had no idea how watching this particular authoritarian takeover take place over this past decade would determine who I am & what I believe in.
It's sort of weird, taking a look at myself as a person existing at a specific time facing this global crisis.
As a child, I had a habitual thought experiment asking myself whether I would actually hide someone from the Gestapo if I were in Nazi Germany. I thought it was a self-indulgent thought because some part of me didn't believe that I still lived in that same world, where that kind of shit really happens. It felt self-aggrandizing, but it turns out it was actually an important question.
The scenario is very cliche, but the mental practice of hoping & praying that I would have moral courage in the face of authoritarian injustice turns out to have been more important than I had any idea.
I wasn't expecting my adulthood to be defined by the need to resist fascism, but I was raised to be patriotic, so it's safe to say I didn't "get it" yet.
The thing I didn't understand as a child was that all the mechanism for abuse, injustice, & fucking genocide were already built into the power structures of our society. I didn't yet know that the fascism was already here: quiet, bureaucratic, & largely hidden from the eyes of the middle class whites.
I certainly didn't have context for previous times, such as the Civil Rights movement, when much of the country WAS engulfed in turmoil.
I no longer long for the "simpler times" I once imagined I might enjoy if the rise of Trump & his cronies had not destroyed my chance.
The "simpler times" got us here. The violence, the bigotry, the exploitation, & the control... They all contribute to the current authoritarian crisis. I don't want to ignore it all & pass the problem to a future generation. I want it to fucking stop already.
I don't want decency & decorum. I want liberation.
I have mutuals on here who are old hands at resistance to authoritarianism & capitalistic power structures.
While Trump/MAGA & the global popularization of open fascism taught me as a young adult that all this shit is very real & present, I wasn't exactly learning anything "new", but we ARE in a new stage of it.
Something can be both very old & familiar AND brand-spanking-new at the same time. The oppression isn't new, but the world keeps changing.
There is power in the fact that we ARE shaped by our specific experiences & circumstances.
Generational infighting misses the point: there is value in the memory of how things were. There is value in having experience with tactics of resistance. There is also value in the intimate knowledge of the present moment which younger people seem to have. The immediacy of it. There is value in those at my point in life: enough perspective & education to start to build bigger mental pictures than before.
@artemis This is something I've thought about repeatedly over my life, and one of the reasons I find it so horrifying (and unsurprisingly TikTok culture-ish) to hear so many people be like "I don't talk to minors, that's gross."
Intergenerational solidarity is powerful. It supports (and is supported by) youth liberation. It is another way of binding ourselves tight together against the fascists that want to atomize us - we hear a lot about racism and sexism being fascist wedges, for good reason, but age is an axis most people don't even realize matters. And while support needs are a complicated topic, I do think we're a sick culture in the way that so many of our elders get forced into homes to rot and die quietly out of view like lepers. Part of the fragility of the human race against oppression is that living memory can only ever span about a hundred years - we don't need to artificially shorten it further.
@MaddieM4@artemis I really appreciate this bit about not disregarding your elders' viewpoints prematurely. Because even if we don't send our old loved ones to a retirement home, it's hard to contextualize their thoughts as part of the broader consensus we're trying to build in our groups. Crossing the vintage is an exercise in empathy. I think that gets lost in the most important times to heed such advice..
I get good advice from my grandparents if I can bear to refuse a third serving about once a minute :P
