My state is impressing the world with its communal cooperation and altruism. It turns out we’re just responding in a normal human way.
In sociology, there’s a term to describe this phenomenon: “bounded solidarity.” Alejandro Portes, a prominent sociologist at Princeton University, first introduced the term in a paper published in The Annual Review of Sociology in 1998. It’s used to describe when a community is bound by a crisis, and during this time, it can lead to extreme acts of altruism and kindness that aren’t usually seen in non-crisis times.
OK, nice of sociologists to provide a name for the phenomenon.
We are seeing this in Minnesota right now. Multiple media reports have highlighted the ways in which the community has come together. Volunteers are delivering groceries so immigrants can hide at home. People are raising money to help Minnesotans cover rent because they haven’t felt safe to go to work. People are taking each other’s kids to school, organizing shifts for people to stand guard and protect immigrants in their neighborhoods. As NPR recently reported, when a preteen got her period for the first time — a preteen who hadn’t felt safe enough to leave the house to go to school — a community rallied together and launched an underground operation to get her pads. Minnesotans have been braving the below-freezing cold to show up for protests and denounce the violence in their communities for weeks.
These acts of kindness and solidarity matter because it’s exactly what people need to move through a crisis, build resilience, and transform a community for the better. Daniel Aldrich, a professor at Northeastern University teaching disaster resilience, and a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, once told me that when it comes to a disaster, his research found that community-based responses are more successful than individual-based ones.
You mean like mutual aid? The antithesis of the rugged individualism this country usually promotes? We’ve been talking about that for a century or so.
Now that’s the right way to do it.
Most humans are generally pretty nice people if they perceive an opportunity to do so. ICE is wandering around being jerks, the people of Minnesota look at that and think “I don’t want to be like that!”, and being nice and supportive to other humans is pretty much diametrically opposite the way ICE is acting.
Let’s not mince words.
Mutual aid – that sounds like dangerous Anarchist talk next thing you will be saying property is theft.
Remember the ‘Velvet Revolution”? Remember the “Soviet Union”? That old authoritarian regime collapsed, largely under its own weight with just the teeniest push from people. Sadly, it didn’t collapse enough in Russia.
robro, I do remember.
Checking:
The Soviet Union formally existed from December 1922 (when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was officially established) until December 1991 (when it was dissolved).
That’s a span of 69 years.
Not really that comforting, robro.
@ John Morales — Ever upbeat. At least it ended…sort of…Putin is there so not much of a shift in Russia. But the “Eastern Block” is gone, and it seems unlikely to return, at least any time soon. I’ll take whatever I can get.
Relevant article: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/476702/minnesota-minneapolis-ice-ethics-how-to-help
↓
Your friends are still acting like everything is normal in America. What do you do?
All Americans live in a “dual state.” Here’s what that means — and how to help others see it.
[pullquote]
Here’s his main insight: Life under authoritarianism is actually, for the most part, weirdly normal. It’s often even, well, boring. The average person can go about their day as usual. You take your kids to school, you head to the office, and yes, you even host dinner parties. You live in the realm that Fraenkel referred to as “the normative state,” and from within that realm, it’s easy to think that if you just keep your head down and avoid making waves, you’ll be perfectly fine, thank you very much.
But Fraenkel’s book is called The Dual State for a reason. This first state, the business-as-usual one, actually exists to lull you into a sense of complacency such that you don’t realize that another state is also operating in parallel with it. That second state, which Fraenkel calls “the prerogative state,” only becomes visible to you when you do something that the powers that be don’t like. Then suddenly you’re in a realm where the rule of law does not exist, where citizens can be killed with impunity, where you — even you, who thought you were invulnerable — can become a target.
The prerogative state has always been there for the nXXXers and fXXXots, until quite recently.
And a lot of people clearly want it back.
That is why black people were not as shocked as their white neighbors November 2016.
.
The good thing is, Minnesota shows Trump and his minions do not have the power they think they have.
-Now, please don’t forget to primary any Democrats who think Neville Chamberlein is a good role model.
Homo Sapiens is a social species? Who knew…
Oh dear. It looks like the Republicans have shot themselves in the foot.
‘Let’s Talk Elections’ [Minnesota special elections]:
“Democrats MASSIVELY Overperform in Minnesota Elections”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Me090kHebSk
A few years ago I got really interested in the Golden Age of Antarctic Exploration (1895 – 1917). Antarctica is a really inhospitable environment for humans, especially when motorised transport was not exactly useful there and they were trying to move around and explore. There are lots of accounts of expedition members falling out with each other – in fact almost every expedition involved the leader having a major disagreement with his (and it always was “he”) second in command, captain of the ship, and/or most experienced person. The general ongoing stress of life there did cause arguments, often big ones.
But when something went wrong and lives were on the line… suddenly there are amazing accounts of people putting their colleagues’ lives ahead of their own, and doing all sorts of things for them (mostly involving dragging someone else on a sledge across miles and miles of ice etc). Those that survived built relationships with each other that lasted the rest of their lives, despite coming from very different backgrounds.
So fingers crossed Minnesota can manage to keep those relationships going in the future too.
Hey, you guys – Springsteen weighs in:
Did not mean to embed, sorry. But check it out.
Rather than embed, I’ll just copy the URL to an entirely appropriate news story on a bookstore owner who demonstrated the true meaning of “Minnesota Nice”:
Well darn, just copying the URL embeds it.
In truth “rugged individualism” has always been as much a lie as the “American Dream”. In truth Americans were and are always looking for a hero to save them from the consequences of their actions or a big bully they can hide behind to safely jeer their victims. If there’s something the Trump regime is great at it’s in how much is completely dismantles the great American delusion and how much it forces Americans to face the truth.
When South Korea very recently was faced with a rogue head of government, they threw him out and put him in prison. Trump’s done so much worse and yet the Americans are still too chicken to do anything about it, even while he’s openly murdering people in the streets, happily destroys the American economy and obliterates relations to other nations.
“Land of the Free, Home of the Brave”, eh?
@ 16. Jaws : The code to avoid embedding is here FYI – I always just cut ‘n’paste it myself
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-5/#comment-2244446
Comment #422 thanks again to CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain for that.
@13 Reminds me of the comment made at work a month or so ago, “I still love Springsteen’s music, but I hate his politics.” To which every single f-ing one of us (sadly fewer than I like) went, “What the F songs by Springsteen have you been listening to then, if you think his politics are unacceptable. Its just like all the nuts that love Star Trek, but insist its gone woke now, somehow.. WTF?
But, then, as someone pointed out, to them, they only see a delusional funhouse mirror “meritocracy”, in which “of course” they are the captain of the ship, because they deserve it. I reality, Trek does show them and their “kind” of merit – in every single freaking villain of the week out of control admiral, crazy loon trying to root out “spies” in the federation, or executing CIA style assassinations via Section 31. They “know” that Eddington, for example, is the bad guy, and recognize that he deserved what he got in DS9, but utterly fail to comprehend that their own twisted thinking would “make them” into Eddington, if they ever actually ended up in Starfleet at all.
For so, so, so many conservatives its not doublespeak being engaged in, its doublethink. Cognitive dissonance of a level that makes AI hallucinations seem sane and reasoned. So of course its totally sensible for them to see Springsteen and his music as a great American treasure, while utterly failing to see their own reflections in the mirror he is holding up.
Oh, and, of course, because even the idiots in corporate have to be this blind, they traded out, about six months ago, as part of their adjustments to in store music, “Closing Time”, which was at least upbeat, if odd for people still working, for “Takin’ Care of Business”, which basically spits in the face of anyone that has to work for a living, laughs at them, and proclaims, “Wow! I can sit on my ass all day and make money, what are you idiots doing?” Yep… massive improvement there people. Makes me feel even more appreciated by the idiots whose jobs seem to consist of driving between stores to tell other people what they are doing wrong, and make up stupid rules, and not much else, than I ever was before….
So, of course, the same idiots that, “hate his politics, but love his older songs”, kept breaking out in singing at 9 am and 3 pm, every time the damn thing came on (though, not so much since I pointed out what it was actually saying, or maybe they just god bored with it.. who knows). Sigh…
Should be notable, of course, that most of these people are also deeply religious, so also engage in, “We hate all them dang liberal Christians, while simultaneously talking about all the liberal stuff Jesus supposedly taught, but also denying those things if any of it gets applied to the wrong sort of people, who don’t deserve such things.” Madness.
I never could figure out how Eddington was the bad guy. Cisco’s the one that committed a war-crime.
Ah, I got the name wrong. I meant Luther Sloan. They are a bit similar in appearance, and its been a while since I watched it, so I got them confused. But, yeah, I mean the guy that literally was involved in infecting Odo, then sat on the cure, because having the founders all die would have been a much less messy solution to the war, vs. actually applying any sort of diplomacy, thus leading to a need to literally rifle through his dying mind to find a solution. Basically, any example from the show of someone either so bloody obsessed with protecting the federation that they will break it, throw its rules under the bus, and possibly set them on fire, if necessary to “fix” some supposed problem, because doing it the right way, and without, say, railroading some poor sap that fudged his application by claiming Vulcan ancestry, instead of Romulan, while looking for “traitors” that either don’t exist, or don’t exist, “where they are looking for them”.
Its exactly the current logic of ICE – “If we just arrest everyone, then we can easily sort out the real criminals, and anyone that might be merely inconvenient for the administration. Besides, we have a quota to meet!”
Trump flooding the zone.
Chief concerns:
Rig or cancel the midterms
Drag out Epstein, hiding the core damning evidence but dribble out the rest in a slow, boring trickle.
Explore the boundaries for building a loyal army and enabling brutality.
If the response to this kind of organization is “yay, Democrat’s new line of Electoral Products TM will outperform that of Republicans” I fear we’re learning the wrong lesson.
I hope Minnesotans keep this up well past elections, that they have seen that they can force the powerful well beyond what voting allows them to do.