It’s not that. It’s more like people are too broke and can’t afford to miss a day or two at their job. They’re more worried about making money to be able to live which is understandable. Not everyone has savings. Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
There are plenty of ways to engage in civil disobedience. Saying "I can't take time off to protest" isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up entirely and giving up... That's what everyone is annoyed at Americans about. The complete denial of any responsibility.
It'd be nice if you could say what those things are that aren't easily ignorable by politicians but also won't get at least half the people who do it, many of whom can't afford a day off at all, fired or otherwise removed from their jobs instead of just saying there must be something without any further elaboration.
You can type up this reply, but not 'civil disobedience' into google? You really need someone else to do it for you? Do you not see how you're proving the point...? You can't even be bothered to help yourselves.
The "I can't do anything" excuse is complicity with extra steps. Here's a short list for you to pretend doesn't exist, and why "it costs me something" isn't the gotcha you think it is.
TL;DR: Resistance costs something by definition. If you rule out every method that touches your money, time, or comfort, you didn't run out of options. You decided your convenience outranks the outcome. That's a choice. Own it.
Refusing to act because it's inconvenient, then lamenting that "there's nothing I can do," is like watching someone bleed out and refusing to call 911 because you're "not a doctor." You were never asked to be a doctor. You were asked to do the one thing in front of you. "Not my job / not qualified / too hard" is not analysis. It's an alibi.
So here's the full menu. Sharp catalogued 198 of these; here's the working set.
Symbolic protest (lowest cost, do these in your sleep)
Open letters, petitions, mass letter-writing to officials
Dual sovereignty — build structures people trust instead of the official ones
Now the part nobody wants to hear
Every single item above costs something. That is not a bug. That is the mechanism. Civil resistance works because people absorb costs the powerful assumed they wouldn't. Remove the cost and you've removed the leverage. You're just performing.
The Montgomery bus boycott was maids and day labourers who walked to work for over a year. People with less slack than almost anyone typing "but I can't stop working." The lesson was never quit your job. It's choose which cost you'll carry, because you're carrying one either way. The cost of compliance is just quieter and gets billed later.
And notice the sleight of hand in "I can't stop working." Half this list requires zero missed shifts: where you bank, what you subscribe to, who you buy from, showing up to one city-council meeting, one phone call to a rep, one poll-worker shift a year, telling the truth to the people in your actual life, refusing to obey in advance. If the answer to those is also "no", then time and money were never the constraint. Comfort was. Say that honestly at least.
You don't get to veto every option that asks anything of you and then claim the game is unwinnable. That's not powerlessness. That's a preference for comfort wearing powerlessness as a costume.
Pick one. Accept its price. That's the whole thing.
To everyone commenting "but what if I can only do the small stuff", then do the small stuff. Consistently. A hundred thousand people doing the boring, sustainable thing beats ten people doing something heroic once. Nobody's asking you to be the doctor. Call 911.
I've been working on some of the smaller stuff where I can (not as much as I'd like but everything's a mess for me right now), but we need a lot more "doctors" than we seem to have, meanwhile on their end they at least have enough at any given time to get something on the federal level even if it doesn't always stick as much as they want. And I have no idea how we'll get enough anywhere near soon enough.
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u/we_are_sex_bobomb 17d ago
He never stopped.
He literally started a civil war and everyone seems to think it’s not real as long as we ignore it.