This Machine is Fickle

March, 2025

They are trying to wear you down; all of the headlines, executive orders, and deployments of government thugs are put in motion to strike fear. A nauseating and unrelenting fear that renders you lethargic or else ignorant for avoiding it. It becomes your duty to keep up with the headlines and political actions to stay a step ahead of the machine. Try as you might, the machine is unpredictable and fickle in its means, new rhetoric begins to form by advancing and further bastardizing the already incoherent arguments they used to support the ruler's dictations.

By tiring you out, you might begin to compromise on your ideals. Maybe the Democrats weren't so bad. Maybe Biden was okay. If only it wasn't him. When battered by a storm, all you wish for is stability. Just like how past fascist countries (Germany, Italy, Spain) have become "respectable" democracies, the aim once the tempest is over is to break your spirit and "return" to a perverse sense of "normalcy". To the way things "used to be". Except, they will never be how they were. The machine takes as much as it cans and only spits out droplets when its hand is forced. (9/11 was 24 years ago and we still haven't gotten our privacy back.) The plan is to break you and give you a false paradise.

The thing is, you're not alone. I feel this way, you feel this way, and so do the vast majority of Americans. The machine is fickle but the neighborhood is steadfast. Don't rely on the machine. If you are able, form community with your neighbors and peers. Share resources, grow a garden, offer support, and listen to their experiences and share your own. Not sure where to start? Talk to your roommates, neighbors, or find an online group that meets up. Seeing people in-person is the most important during this rise of faceless interactions.

Mutual aid stands apart from charity as being a reciprocal exchange rather than a one-way transaction. By being an interaction rather than a temporal relief, mutual aid builds stronger bonds and actually responds to community needs in a way charity organizations never will. A form of mutual aid is the neighborhood pod, which centers around 5-20 individuals who check in on each other and communicate what their skills are and what they need assistance with. There is no one provider but neighbors instead offer assistance when needed and they also receive assistance as needed.

To getting free,

Nara

Check out this article on how to form mutual aid networks: link

And here's also this practical guide for creating neighborhood pods (it was written in light of the pandemic but still offers a good baseline for the practice): link