14 Days of Freedom: Day 10

A big part of all this activism and freedom-fighting is hopelessness, strangely enough. On the one hand, you have the righteous and upstanding pillars of society (read: sheeple) claiming that "protest never changes anything" (I debunked this a couple of days ago), and on the other hand you have the ones who fight the good fight...well, they don't give up, but at some point every activist is going to sigh and wonder why they got themselves into this in the first place, why they waste their time trying to convince people who will never listen of a cause which many think is little more than a pipe dream. If you're an activist and that hasn't happened to you yet, it will.

I want to concentrate on the second manifestation of hopelessness today, since I've dealt a little with the first one already. I'm no blithe optimist, no ignorant idealist, and I don't believe flat-out denying problems makes them go away. I know how hard it is to convince people; I know bashing one's head against a brick wall is probably more productive than arguing with your average capitalist. I know that things are on balance only getting worse and worse. I know that we have the world against us. I know all this, and I keep on going for a couple of very simple reasons.

I rely heavily on logic as a tool to understand the world around me; some would say I rely on it too heavily. I've weighed up the evidence and decided that, unlikely as I am to achieve anything, it would be impossible were it not for people trying...so I help out.

I don't really like using emotion to try and decide things, but two emotional responses also make me in favour of doing something, anything, to try to change the world. The first is that changing a person's mind feels like it's worth, or almost worth, the effort one put into it, and the second is that it gives me something to live for. I try to do something because of that.

I understand the hopelessness all too well. The number of times I've wanted to bash my head against a hard surface, or simply stop acting...I think what keeps me doing this kind of thing is, well, I'm lucky enough to have family, friends and random people on the internet to support me. Hell, we all support each other. That's sort of the point.

I love you. We love you. We will fight; perchance we may win.

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