What can we do?
There’s a lot of despairing going about today, so as someone who walked around in a daze for a week after Brexit and then realized I was still alive and I still had a chance to make a difference, here’s a small list of practical suggestions for what you can do now.
Take care of yourself while you are still mourning/processing/panicking stage. Maybe disengage, go for a walk, take your meds, pray, meditate and save yourself first of all.
Read this calming tweet
If you can, now would be a good time to donate to organizations who support the things you care about. Human Rights Campaign, for example or the American Civil Liberties Union or whatever other cause matters to you and would benefit from some money.
Once you’re feeling a bit better, then you can consider further action. The time for political apathy is past – it’s become very obvious that no, progress will not happen automatically, it still has to be fought for, and it’s our job to do that fighting.
If health and finances permit, you can get involved in activism in the real world. There must be causes that need help, protest rallies that you can attend, Queer clubs and meeting spaces that need volunteers. (And if there aren’t, perhaps they need starting.)
If health and finances don’t permit that, there’s still online activism. I’m a huge fan of Avaaz, for example. There are things you can do even from your computer. Mean time, although we now live in interesting times, we still live in them from day to day like always. Let’s just do the best we can while we can.
What I worry about most is the people. All protections for LGBTQ gone, women having no control over their own bodies, wholesale persecution in the name of religion and so much more. Are marriages going to be voided? Women and LGBTQ forced out of the military? And all because a snake oil salesman convinced a lot of desperate people that he can bring all the jobs back here, never mentioning that those jobs are paying less than $150 per month now. None of this has a direct effect on me but it feels like my soul is drowning.
Yes, I’m hearing a lot of terror from trans people, who are scrambling to get their documentation in their correct names and genders before it’s too late, and worrying about how they’re going to get their monthly injections (the ones that prevent them from wanting to kill themselves.) And kids who fear they’re going to be forced into conversion therapy, and women who are going for IUDs now while they still can. But also a lot of disabled/chronically ill people who think it’s a choice between leaving the country or dying (because they’re never going to be able to afford their meds.) And a lot of migrant/undocumented families who think they’re going to be split up and deported. And that’s without the rise in hate crimes.
Still, despair doesn’t help anyone. It’s up to us to do what we can to make up the difference and help each other. I think that’s all we can do.