This is the end of my Hope Series, in the wake of the Likely Death of Democracy.  I’ve been queuing these posts for 6:30 AM Eastern time and a frivolous link post for 9:30 AM as a chaser.  I mention this because you may have missed previous entries.  There is one per day for every day from 11/6-11/16.  Check ’em out.

–

You may have seen a video recently where I said I want to see the equivalent of a “shadow government” for every aspect of life.  I want to buy shadow groceries at the shadow 7-11.  I want to see shadow movies at the shadow theater, eating shadow popcorn and drinking shadow coke.  With my shadow homies, Sheisty Pete and Nefarious Gonzalez.

Off topic, but how about Shadow… run?  In that TTRPG there were cyberboyz with something called a “monofilament whip,” which was sooo sharp it could slice through anything.  They had to keep it in a slice-proof little spool case like deadly dental floss.  It raised similar questions to the omnipotence of god – can there be a filament so mono that it can cut itself?  Would it turn into mono-confetti if you rattled your floss box?

Sorry, this is the last post of my “reasons for hope” series, so I should really be more serious.

OK a shadow government is where people are like, let’s actually run this joint because the official guys aren’t it.  Pretty quickly we will not be able to rely on the federal government for much.  The more “evil genius” of the coterie of ghouls waiting in the wings of the oval office will probably opt for a gradualism where the public won’t notice what they’ve lost until it’s gone, so I don’t expect Social Security to get shut off instantly, for example.  But it will get worse, as will every government service we rely on.  So.  Shadow government.

I do think good state governments will help a lot, but we will be better off with more self-sufficiency.  I nominate the university system to be the first system to get Shadow’d.

SHADOW UNIVERSITIES

The U system is a dead system walking.  The vast majority of professors are academic hobos who can barely afford mouthwash, while administrators snort coke off gold-plated toilets with israeli ambassadors.  I know the people who still are hanging on doing the best they can are doing the best they can, but.

Let’s get stronger systems in place for giving anybody whatever education they may desire, for free, under the table, out of the back of a rusty van with dealer plates, in a haunted stretch of Interstate 99.  Or the internet, whichever works better.  This would require a number of things to work.

First, an incentive.  The current U system uses the rotten carrot of adequately paying jobs as reward for million dollar debts.  The shadow system would have… what?  Shadow prestige, I think.  God, I’d heap laurels on a good shadow professor, for what those are worth.  Sexual favors too, if my husband allowed it, haha.

Second, it needs a way for professors to get by in a pursuit with no recompense.  You know, a lot of academic hobos / adjuncts are hard-pressed to get enough hours to pay rent, so they do have some free time.  Not all of them, but enough to support this endeavor?  Maybe.  Third, it needs resources, for lab work and such.  Well, meth labs exist.  We can figure it out if they can, although we have less money.

Fourth and by no means least, it needs at least a virtual classroom.  I think, maybe internet forums?  They’d be subject to getting disappeared instantly by crapitalism, but with frequent backups, you might be able to slide under the radar for years and survive a few fires, y’know?  Anyway, it would need a lot more than what I’ve discussed, but I hope what I’ve done is get a conversation going.

SHADOW SOCIAL SECURITY

Well, everybody who isn’t lost in the bullshit blizzard of media created by fascist billionaires knows that the rethuglicans want all social programs dead, dead, dead.  This is just a matter of time.  The only solution for this is something that people from more collectivist cultures have been doing for ages:  family and community associations.  In the West we used to have some things like this as well, but those institutions were eroded or violently taken out, in order to reduce us to rugged individualists who scrabble in the dirt until we die.

How do we rebuild something so completely fucking gone from our civilization?  Ya got me, chief.  But if we did, these groups could do things like care for the old and disabled, when all the mainstream gov institutions fail.  They can also pool resources, get young people jobs, provide physical protection when the community is threatened…

SHADOW MEDICAL SYSTEM

This already exists, and it is fundamentally bad.  Remember Sally Fields talking about how she was molested during her Tijuana abortion?  This is what we’re dealing with.  But.  I imagine the right kind of activists could improve it.  This would be fundamentally more expensive than anything on the list.  Shadow Social Security might help pay for some of it, but it might just need to be a kind of altruistic organized crime – straight up stealing medical supplies.

I don’t know, but it would be cool if, in some place where health care is all owned by the catholic church (much of the USA) or ruined by forced-birthers, there was recourse for health care that wouldn’t end in molestation or stolen kidneys.

SHADOW 911

Be nice to have somebody you could call to help with a rough situation where deadly force would be completely off the table.  Because 911 is tied to the pigs, even asking for an ambulance can get you twitchy overpaid nazis with guns.  I don’t want to discourage people from calling who they need to in an emergency right now, even with some amount of associated risk, but I do wish we had more alternatives.

SHADOW IRS

The tax system should be used to pay for the betterment of all, but it’s mostly a vacuum suck to the military industrial complex and other horrifying corrupt entities.  Not saying you shouldn’t pay your taxes because unfortunately that’s how things like Social Security are funded, but it’d be nice to be able to pitch some money into a fund you know will help your people.  I guess this gets back to the community groups I mentioned in Shadow Social Security.

SHADOW ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

There are a lot of people making art for little to no recompense, just to be heard, to express something, whatever their reason.  Corporate art has glimmers of brilliance that it squeezes out of the tortured bodies and minds of exploited artists.  Fuck the big five book publishers, fuck Diamond Comic Distributors, fuck the fine arts community and its incestuous relationship with extreme wealth, fuck the RIAA to death, fuck Netflix, fuck Disney, fuck Time-Warner-AOL-Nestle-Mars-DuPont-Halliburton.

We need better systems for supporting indies, but more importantly for big projects, like competing with hollywood, we need better ways to have artists collaborate without exploitation.  It’s hard as hell because we’re such a chaotic bunch, but it could happen.  I can envision a better series of action-adventure movies than anything Disney could shit out, made with cardboard and computers, real writers, and a genuine vision.  I don’t know how yet, but I swear we could do this.

A good aim would be an indie soap opera.  Drama students and out of work dinner theater actors of the world, unite!  I want you to make compelling telenovelas for release on yewchoob or dailymotion or thepiratebay or thumb drives in manila envelopes and dark alleys.  It’s high time you got to answer your calling without a rapist’s casting couch in the way.

ORGANIZED CRIME

Technically speaking, even if these things were 100% altruistic and well executed, they would be criminal organizations.  Worse still, any institution that is not allowed to function in daylight is going to attract exploitation from the actual organized crime.  There are some who say the mafia is a community group that helps people get employed and defends when the community is under attack, all that stuff, but at the end of the day?  Protection rackets, drugs, sex trafficking, murder.  Bad shit, and any shadow org is going to attract some involvement of criminals like that.

There are no perfect solutions to a situation that is fundamentally bad, and I don’t have any solid ideas on how to make these things happen.  But it’s time to start trying again.  We have a lot of work to do.  We won’t have it all, won’t be safe or secure in what we do get, but we can get a better deal than the fascists are going to give us, if we make it happen ourselves.

It’s worth a shot.

–

With that, my Hope Series is ended.  Regular random content continuing tomorrow…

–

My least favorite refrain from oppressed people is “nobody cares about us.”  Bitch, please!  You have hella allies.  Yes, they aren’t always enough to keep you as safe, they might not be in your neighborhood, but they exist, and they are numerous.  You have the right to feel hopeless (I’d prefer you didn’t), but don’t try to spread your despair like a fucking ghost curse.  The rest of us don’t deserve that, and maybe our allies don’t deserve that either?

There are orgs with lawyers dedicated to defending this demographic (like lambda legal) or that right (ACLU), at least dozens of such groups.  They have the experience and knowledge to achieve things within the legal system we have.  It won’t always work, but sometimes it will.  There are orgs and less formal groups that provide material aid to people in trouble, like driving folks who need abortions between states, or giving help to homeless LGBT youth, etc.

There are hacktivists and whistleblowers who expose government evils to international shame.  There are left activists who take direct action, like antifa, protecting vulnerable people during protests, and making sure right wing thugs never have the street.  And there are whatever people in your own life that might be of some help.  People are people, which means every one of them is a mixed bag of good and bad traits.  But sometimes you need help from somebody who is a colossal piece of shit, and they’re willing to provide it.  My dad was rescued during a crisis by a fascist war criminal.  Take what you can get, when you need to.

We don’t all have the strength to fight fascism every day, but we do what we can, and some of us are much cooler in this regard than the average.  Real champions are out there, fighting for whatever causes move them, and every cause moves somebody.  Just because millions of Americans were ignorant or cruel enough to disregard human rights by sitting this election out, it doesn’t mean there aren’t millions more that see the danger and want to do whatever they can to fight evil – to protect those that need protection, from those who seek to cause harm.

Start looking for them.  Find your people: who you can reach, and what they can do for you.  And of course, whatever you find, take care of yourself as well.  And if, at the end of the day, you need somebody to fight for you,

Long live the fighters.

–

In our perfected world, whatever that looks like, from sea to shining sea all will live under a universal guarantee of human rights.  But billionaire-owned media selling tax breaks for themselves with fear of the underprivileged, well, it’s got a big swath of the middle of this country in a death grip.  It does not matter one jot what the actual majority of people in those states want*, the ones favored by gerrymander have decided it’s time for jim crow, prison farms, gaybashing, bookburning, and elimination of any religion but christianity from the public sphere.  And, in this moment, they’ve won so decisively that they are very likely to work the levers of power to eliminate democracy in the USA for decades to come.

In the meantime, the excuse they’re using is state’s rights.  States should have the right to murder their own citizens to meet the cruel whims of Blood Jesus.  Why don’t you understand these things?  It’s only right.  The flipside of this coin is that it may allow blue states the power to pass strong protections for human rights, and might allow for a lot more.

The state of California has so many people, so many resources, that when they pass laws that are technically only enforceable at home, any business that wants to do business in that economy has to conform or gtfo.  Chik-fil-A can deep fry trans people in Arkansas (I assume) but not so much in the city of Compton.  In fact, it’s pretty likely that Cali has everything they need to just ignore the entire rest of the USA economically and use their access to shipping in the Pacific for anything they lack.

They are exceptional in that respect, but a number of coastal states can still pull a pretty strong flex if they want to – which is why it greatly heartens me that my own state has a democratic governor.  During the strife around covid, there were meetings between the governors on the “Left Coast” about how they should respond, almost as if… they had the power to tell the District of Columbia to kiss their asses?  I dunno.  I’m interested to see what’s possible if these leaders are bold enough, when the time calls for it.

It’s not right that in order to maintain their human rights, many people will have to flee their home states.  But as long as states are being allowed some say in these issues – and as long as some states are powerful enough to take that say whether it’s allowed or not – there are places in the USA where hope is a little less crushed.

–

*74 million fascists in a country of 300 million is NOT the majority.