Does anyone have good reading advice about how to help people overcome amplified and irrational fears when getting into activism? I want to do some more reading and writing about this.

For example, it is impossible on Tumblr to write a post about removing nazi stickers without 500 people commenting: “BUT WEAR HEAVY GLOVES THERE MIGHT BE RAZOR BLADES” even though that is super super rare, like ‘people who have traveled the world for decades and removed nazi stickers everywhere have never encountered it’ rare.

In general, posts that exaggerate danger far outnumber posts that give reasonable assessments of danger and offer real practical solutions on risk management in activism.

Most people writing and reblogging these warnings seem to have no actual experience with activism and just seem to like the idea of protecting each other, which is good but in this case this kind of an “everything is scary” stuff does nothing but promote a sense of helplessness and totally ignores the fact that letting the world run as it is is just about the most dangerous thing we could do. For each of us. This system isn’t going to protect any of us.

Now, I could act smug and superior about this problem, but I’d rather look for constructive ways to help people get over this
amplified and irrational fear

and the sense of helplessness is creates and into a space where they see activism as something they can do.