• Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 hours ago

    Joining any group your comfortable with, as others have said, is the #1.

    One you can do from home is just start sending money to mutual aid requests you see on insta or wherever. Make it a weekly thing even if it’s just a couple of dollars. There are also plenty of groups that operate mainly online, though they tend to be harder to get into for security reasons.

    And honestly, being generally nice to random people is underrated. Never doubt how much better you can make a stranger’s day by giving them a smile. Similarly, some of the best support I get is just from chatting with people, I’ve had so many crap days completely turned around because we had a seemingly meaningless conversation. I guess we’re social creatures after all, so it’s not too surprising.

      • I would def recommend looking into local mutual aid groups in your area. If there aren’t any, starting a Food Not Bombs group yourself is relatively simple if you have the time and resources to devote to it, even if it starts out being just one day per month until more people get involved.

        More specific examples are pretty dependent on location, resources, etc.

        There’re ‘roles’ for everyone though, according to their ability, whether it’s lower risk stuff like creating/curating/sharing content (entertainment, propaganda), emotional/moral support, calling out transgressions- and these examples exist on their own spectrums of ‘extremeness’: from posting a leftist meme on Lemmy, to wheatpasting it downtown; from being nice to a leftist online, to being someone’s emergency contact and bailfunder; responding to a racist comment on Lemmy, to smashing the window of a car with a racist bumper sticker.

        Personally, I try to model every aspect of my life around anarchist principles, so I evaluate everything through that lens to help determine what behavior is most congruent with my values (at an acceptable risk level). Not that I actively do this all the time though, to be clear- it’s more like a heuristic mindfulness that has become mostly second nature with practice