Make Care Visible

There’s a rather popular flavor of social media content focused on helping unhoused people. The creator will give out sleeping bags, socks, and care kits; sit down and have a meal; or take the unhoused person shopping. Sometimes they help them find work or start a GoFundMe to get them off the streets. It does a lot of good. But it’s also gross AF! Imagine you’re cold, hungry, and desperate, and someone offers to get you all the things you need… if you consent to having a camera shoved in your face and the footage of you at your lowest blasted on the internet. There are inherent power dynamics at play that make this coercive, even if the person being helped gives “consent.” Care is Contagious The flip-side of this is that helping others is contagious. Fascism loves to use a flood-the-zone strategy: throw so much bad shit at people that their brains get overloaded, shut off, and tune out. Visible, public acts of care are like flushing your brain’s RAM or force quitting a bunch of…