I have so many friends, not to mention family in the USA that it frightens me to see what's going on.
I just had a long conversation with my brother in LA and from talking with him the denial is obvious.
It's a total horror show. I decided a while back that the only way for me to best contribute to resisting the fascistic movement in my own country (no descendants of colonialism are immune to it, IMO, and all have the seeds of it waiting to sprout -- and not just the empire, but within the colonized) was to disown any one in my sphere who is on that side (the side of Alex Jones, Youtube-addiction-that-ends-in-naziism, etc.) because the best thing one can do for them is let them understand that, if you're going to walk that walk, you only get to have the kinds of friends that are doing that, too, and that is eventually its own corrective measure.
We are going to wake up. We just have to suffer enough to overcome the hysterical denial. I was putting this together to send to a friend, while killing time waiting for the UFC to begin. This is a spot I normally surf daily, especially when there's big Winter swell. It's a surfcam, and these were the first groups of people that came along (I didn't cherry pick). No one is actively wearing a mask, but several have them around their necks. It's probably not that dangerous, because of the sun, the wind, maybe even the salt air, but above all the outdoor setting. But it's been like this, down there, from the beginning, i.e. before it was known that this kind of behavior is relatively safe. Of course, a side-effect of this is that people bring the illusion of safety that this outdoor/beach environment presumes to other settings, along with them.
I normally spend at least a couple of hours surfing down there, every day, and then visit a spot up the street when work is done to have a beer -- up to 4 or 5 hours, a day. It's a big part of my life.
I haven't been out of my car down there for 4 months because it's impossible to stand in a spot there and not have someone walk within 2 feet of you yelling into their phone, which they're yelling into on speakerphone, because they don't want the microwaves near their head.
I was being overdramatic above, but it is very important to engage the people living in denial. Only the perception that their denial is normal -- or for the narcissists the perception that their gaslighting is paying off -- allows them to continue to exist within it. It's a team effort (locally, nationally, globally). But it's important to engage the people that the problem. Everybody has their role to play. No successful effort to change anybody happens in a single, or single-type, of intervention. Here in the US we wouldn't have a Martin Luther King day if not for Malcolm X's scaring the **** out of powerful white people -- we specifically have an MLK day to discourage Americans from taking up the Malcolm X route. Hardly anybody ever thinks of that. It takes an army, many of whom are at war with each other, to vanquish any organized, widespread form of evil.
I'm down. Let's do it. : powertothepeoplefistemoji: