Daily Engagement is a new, brief, daily feature on Flavorwire. It’s aimed at helping people feel somewhat less helpless and hopeless (or at least in control of their helplessness and hopelessness) in the midst of a political news cycle that’s been doling out daily affronts to human decency.
Every day, we’ll post one easy thing that people can do to continue to resist the current state of politics under the Trump administration, focusing on the creative ways (we are a culture website after all) that citizens are finding to resist.
It goes without saying that, at a time when just about everything merits protest, there’s a need to maintain a balance: on the one hand, you need some semblance of a life, and on the other, you want to stand up to the Trump government and its cadre of greedy, white nationalist, bafflingly narcissistic human root vegetables. It’s particularly important to be deliberate with one’s activism when the government presents a deluge of extremist orders to oppose all at once.
Making telephone calls about any number of things is easy: each call to a representative takes about a minute. But protests are obviously more time consuming and more emotionally and physically overwhelming. For New Yorkers, there’s now a helpful calendar, courtesy of TakeAction NYC, for seeing upcoming local protests and events in panorama, as opposed to them coming at you thick and fast on Facebook. (TakeAction “aims to help people in New York City find ways to take action toward social justice and economic justice by providing a centralized event and resource hub.”)
This is a very comprehensive calendar; currently, just about protest I’ve seen posted on Facebook at random times — from tonight’s protest against Chuck Schumer’s politics of compromise that were on display earlier in the cabinet confirmation process, to tomorrow’s March for Muslims and Allies in Foley Square, to a “Tax March” to oppose Trump’s unprecedented refusal to release his tax returns on the day taxes are due (April 15) — is here. The calendar is both a way of seeing the broad spectrum of resistance that’s occurring throughout the city, and also offering you a helpful way to get specific about your own.
Of course, impromptu protests — like those which erupted across airports this weekend following the executive dump that seacucumbers-in-chief Trump and Bannon took upon some of the most vulnerable people in the world right now — are also crucial to attend. And, contrary to some things I’ve been seeing, even if you somehow were playing into a hypothetical strategy of sowing discord to distract from frightening intra-governmental shifts, you could both vocally oppose Trump’s orders while simultaneously drawing attention to the less publicized power-grabbing machinations of the Trump regime: