Probably the saddest sign of our times is how many people respond with complete bewilderment if you mention direct action. Cutting border fences? punching nazis? sharing resources? blocking arms transports? building alternatives? They’re not even outraged, they’re just confused.
It’s like they’re so caught up in the spectacle of petitions, calling senators, ‘awareness’ and media visbility that they’ve completely forgotten that you can also just do shit without begging for permission.
Seriously, we’ve been so conditioned to seek permission for literally anything that the idea of just doing something yourself is seen as utterly unfeasible, pie in the sky, nonsense.
I for one am a huge believer in direct action and just making the changes we want to see instead of asking the powerful to implement them.
Want to house the homeless? Occupy some abandoned buildings. Want to replace your yard with a vegetable garden? Get you hands on some seeds and plant that shit. We can accomplish so much more by doing instead of begging.
I definitely agree except for housing the homeless in abandoned buildings, that’s putting vulnerable people at risk when the police inevitably respond, unless you have the level of force required to protect them of course. The response if you don’t is to create so much inconvenience for the people responsibile for social housing that they have to respond, smash their windows, invade their offices, make them afraid and then have someone else ask for permission.
‘The homeless’ is a pretty big category of people with different characters and vulnerabilities.
And they are at risk to become targets of police brutality no matter what, so it’s a calculation of where they are most at risk and what the pay off is. The good thing is: you don’t have to make that choice for them. Homeless people are perfectly capable of making this calculation themselves.
In the past there have been pretty succesful actions where experienced squaters and less vulnerable homeless people squatted buildings and resisted evictions, only bringing in more vulnerable people once the location was stable.
QueerAnarchism 