A lady on the morning news is a few streets down from me showing everyone the prevalent and widespread flooding from recent vicious storms. She talks to a few people nearby I’ve never met before. Two of the girls want to drive through a newly created pond to grab breakfast. Another guy is closely watching his half submerged house for flooding in critical areas. I don’t know any of these people, yet they are my neighbors.
Why not?
Another day, another Trump headline. Some shootings in Chicago again. Crazy stories and revelations on the Drudge Report about a Russian lawyer no one’s ever heard of. CNN with shady coverage. Cringeworthy topless feminists trying to break up a Woody Allen concert.
Virtually every story I come across that I give attention to has no effect on my daily life. I “know” so much about what’s going on all over the world and nation, but just until today, I had no idea how bad the flooding damage was in my neighborhood and in nearby towns. In fact, I barely know what’s going on in people’s lives. Yes, I am busy creature with my wife and kids, but it’s far easier to share a Facebook status or meme than it is to get involved locally.
Plus I get to virtue signal to my own group that I’m woke. I’ve done my duty for the day and can avoid paying any more attention to the depressing hitsquad media circus in the current year. Of course, I’m able to do this because my life isn’t terribly hard at the moment.
I used to think that the majority of Americans are apathetic to the “important” stuff happening in the world and nation – and to some extent I still think that’s true – but how much can you care about riots in Berkeley when your basement is flooded and everything you had down there is trashed?
We often ask why all these sheeple don’t care about all the important stuff we know is important, but why should they? When I worked third shift, it was a second job for most of my co-workers. They were working 16 hours a day and sleeping maybe 5 if they were lucky. They didn’t have time, and anything they did wasn’t going to be spent worrying needlessly about things they couldn’t affect. Is it really apathy when they barely have time to sleep?
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Is it really Apathy?
Time is the ultimate resource, and for all the time I and others bitch about nonsense happening on College campuses to celebrities lecturing us, none of it matters to someone who is spending all their time trying to pump water out of their basement.
I and many of us in this dissident right sphere have ignored our neighbors for national issues. We’ve ignored the struggles, trials, and chaos that plagues those around us to formulate musings, observations, and rants about feminism, social justice blatherings, and vacuous journalism. Say what you want about guys like Jack Donovan, but at least he’s creating his own tribe with which to live his life.
I’m back in Illinois – and looking at moving to Wisconsin the future, and I can’t help but notice that people don’t have time to care when shitholes like Waukegan, Zion, and North Chicago are filled with the hopeless who can’t find jobs, drug pushers on the street, and people begging you for money and cigarettes on every corner. Regardless of whether you loathe or hate Trump, he has no idea who you are and isn’t going to bail you out of your shitty life situation. Neither obviously will his critics.
We keep looking for political saviors to improve our lives, but we find none because the national is never focused or concerned on the local – even more so for your smaller towns. Washington DC doesn’t care about you. Chicago doesn’t care about the small towns in the rest of the state. (There’s a reason urban and rural concerns and voting is so different. )
If we want to convince people to care about the problems that face our future, we have to make their future one that is worth living for. The friends you make are the ones that will hear you out because they know you, care about you, know the investment you have in their lives, and they know you are going through the same crap they are thus forming a mutual identity. No one REALLY cares about those that aren’t like them or in the same plight.
Mark my words, this is what will drive a new cultural class identity – not race or ethnicity. Anyone with brains already knows that there’s little worth preserving in France, that Japan disdains foreigners, and that Europe’s problem’s didn’t come from refugees, but from the terrible bitter fruit of the cursed French Revolution and Enlightenment. But no, let’s blame the Jews and blacks.
Yea we can be woke with our statistics about true crime, but until communities are rebuilt, it’s pointless virtue signaling to our own crowd and arguing with people online who have never met us and consider us loathsome deplorable chem drooling hicks from the Appalachians who apparently deserve to die.
Online persuasion with irritable keyboard happy strangers is a fool’s errand. Until they meet us face-to-face, their hatred will always blind them to the fact that the suffering of people who aren’t a “minority” or marginalized group actually matters.
Stop going to fight AntiFa in Berkeley or some other peaceful, prosperous, and devoid of poverty liberal city. Focus on your neighbors instead. If AntiFa tries to show up to where you live, then fight them there – hopefully with locals and neighbors who don’t care about politics, but see AntiFa as invading scum who are the Fascists they claim to fight.
We want to be on the frontlines “making a difference”, but the frontlines are our OWN communities. That’s where the war has to be “fought”, where it’s always been fought, and it for sure as hell isn’t for those who troll mercilessly on twitter with no attachments to a communities people in real life. It’s for those who are willing to strain their backs, babysit their neighbors kids, and actually get off their damn smartphone and learn that actual face-to-face conversation is what builds trust, community, and stability for the foundations of the future.
Online Movements Are Nothing Without Local Community
Ask yourself, how much do you have in common with those in online communities besides overlapping parts of your worldview? If you perished tomorrow, would you be missed? Would articles be written? By no means should any relationships and friendships formed online be denigrated, but are your forming quality relationships with your neighbors? If a Ferguson erupted in your town, your and your frantic neighbors would share the same terrifying situation.
What’s left of the Alt-right is already proving to be narcissistic feuding degenerates all wanting a piece for themselves and to rule it from their arm chairs, while throwing each other under the bus. The online presence is often just that; online trolls to personalities either spamming books, asking for patreon donations, or meming from sun up to sun down. (I won’t denigrate the meme aspect of the culture war.)
Just as most of us pessimistic types realized, online movements are often corrupted into some warped version of themselves – as the white nationalists among us make clear daily as they obsess about race, race, and more race. Often, I’m wondering if they are just as bitter as the BLM types and what the hell is worth preserving of “white” culture – whatever that means these days besides materialism and perpetually shopping till you drop.
What the alt-right originally undertook – the forming of an identity that could rebuild the crumbling foundations of Western culture – has instead been subverted into a shallow identity of “opposition” to the left. Rather than offer up real solutions – with the exception of Vox Day – it’s been reduced down to infighting, blaming, “big government is great if it helps whites”, and ramblings about IQ.
As Davis Aurini points out regarding the eventual subversion and death of online movements:
“Take a group of people – any group of people – and if they lack an explicit purpose for associating, as well as a command and control system to make sure that purpose doesn’t waver, their identity will eventually boil down to the lowest common denominator. And the lowest common denominator for any group is usually the fact that they’re not that other group. Their identity will become something reactionary and negative; by defining themselves as the opposite of that which they oppose, they will eventually allow that other group to define who they are. Often enough, their opposition will do the same thing. Soon enough, you have two groups who are mirror images of one another, fighting one another, and whatever principles or goals that might have started the two groups, are quickly reduced to nothing but slogans, and their former leaders are vilified for holding them back from the fray.”
Even the proposals that do come forth such as Spencer’s white only ethno state aren’t just bad ideas, but will never happen. That of course assumes “white” will mean the same thing in the future as it does today – which means it won’t. What are you left with?
A local community from which you and your neighbors will build an identity. Take everything you learn online and apply it. Avoid repeating the mistakes of your “blue pill” self. History is a great teacher and one that we must constantly come back to for lessons that have stood the test of time.
Image may be NSFW.
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Our focus must be local. You can’t address your neighbors worldview when his house is falling apart and he doesn’t know where the money is going to come from for his next mortgage payment. Desperation is all around us, but often we are blissfully unaware of it. We forget that the most eager “converts” are those whose lives were previously in shambles, yet now are starting to emerge from the slime and grind of daily life.
No reformation, societal overhaul, or prevention of the fall of what’s left of Western culture will take place until it transforms local communities. Online movements are constantly prone to decay, and ours is no exception. The Neo-Reactionists in our sphere may write as obtuse and high church like manner to keep out entryists and subversion, but they likely will be left behind in their own bubble never pushing the Overton window.
To believe in anything, you must see it impact you and those around you. It is far better to live in happiness with your neighbors then to write in malice toward strangers on either coast. The former will always be with you, while the latter you will never meet. Perhaps we can make the “change” Obama disingenuously never intended.
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