A quick glance at the headlines any given morning probably gives all of us a similar feeling: powerlessness. 

Just this week, gas prices have skyrocketed (again), the GOP held a midterm convention where they threw thirsttrap photos of Hasan Piker on the Jumbotron, Heather Cox Richardson unlocked a new level of fascist hell in her most recent Substack, and an Anthropic researcher quit, warning that "[t]he people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."  

At the state level, municipalities are swapping out one surveillance technology for another, TPUSA is putting out deepfakes of progressive candidates, and a sitting state senator spread a conspiracy theory that it wasn’t an airplane that hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, but a missile. 

That barely covers the daily onslaught of bad news happening around us every damn day, and my morning ritual of drinking coffee and listening to NPR leaves me feeling more powerless than informed these days. 

After a daily morning meeting where a bunch of us heathens set our SINtentions for the day, the never-ending conveyor belt of information just keeps doling out little shit sandwiches, and suddenly, I feel like a 50s housewife who just wants some pocket money. 

I’ve found myself becoming incredibly nostalgic lately. Maybe it’s because of my grandson and remembering young motherhood or the recent anniversary of 9/11. My kids were toddlers at the time, so parenthood for people my age happened at the same time the neverending “War on Terror started. 

At the time, I worked at a breastfeeding supply store in west Phoenix where we were able to bring our babies to work. We were a diverse staff, but the strong desire to help other moms navigate lactation was our common thread. The moms who worked there ranged from crunchy earth mommas to staunch, full-lengthed everything evangelical mommas. I belonged to the former, of course. 

When I first started working there in 1997, I only saw our commonalities. Many of us made our own babyfood, most of us practiced child-led weaning, some folks either delayed or rejected vaccinations, and a lot of us opted for either a homebirth or birthing center birth with midwives rather than OB/GYNs. 

The owner was a VERY devout Catholic and former software engineer who was a bit odd, but devoted to helping other women. She definitely leaned to the right, but it wasn’t something she led with or anything. 

As time went on, I definitely saw differences in parenting styles with some of us embracing an authoritative, attachment parenting style, and others adopting a more controlling, authoritarian style. I also realized that it was usually the evangelical mommas who chose that authoritarian style. I kept my mouth shut because it’s not my place to tell others how to raise their kids, but their punitive tactics went against every book about brain development and child psychology I’d ever read. 

I chose Dr Sears over Dr Dobson.

At the end of 2000, the nightly news was about the presidential election and Florida and things in the workplace started to get political. 

I would come into work and turn on the radio only to find my boss had tuned into conservative talk working late the night before. The Drudge Report would still be open on Internet Explorer. We all had each other’s email addresses, and suddenly, email “chain letters” and joke threads were replaced with biased political posts. 

Then 9/11 happened. I would wake up to emails about flag burning, Israel, the dangers of socialism, and the importance of “backing the blue.” Some of the husbands got involved in email threads, and I got a glimpse into what some of my coworkers’ home lives were like. 

Kids’ birthdays and work parties weren’t as fun as they used to be, and there was just a general shift in the workplace dynamic. 

It wasn’t unique to my workplace. It was happening to communities and families all across the country. Fox “News” was created in 1996, and was primed and ready for an event like 9/11. My family and my ex-husband’s rarely ever talked about politics or religion before that, but suddenly, favorite aunts and uncles were spouting off some of the most hateful shit I’d ever heard. 

30 years of Fox, 20 years of social media, and 10 years of MAGA have done some serious damage to our country and to our society. More importantly, they’ve damaged our humanity. 

Recently, a friend and I were talking and she said something to me that really struck me: they’ve colonized our minds. Capitalists love colonizing things, but they’re running out of things to plunder. That’s why billionaires are racing to the moon rather than racing to end homelessness or world hunger. The unhoused and the hungry have already been plundered, so they offer nothing to the billionaire class. 

Facebook and other social media seemed fun and innocent in the beginning, but now, we can’t even cultivate our own feed. Billionaires decide what our eyeballs will see and use our data to drive our attention (and hopefully our money) to the companies who advertise on our feed. It’s wild when you think about it. We all collectively handed out our most personal information to a bunch of billionaires like nothing bad could possibly happen. 

It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so dystopian. 

Even without succumbing to the advertisers on my feed, I still give the billionaires acres of land in my brain by spending any amount of time on their apps. My comments, views, clicks, and likes keep the machine moving, and I’m not getting anything in return except for agita. 

Recently, a friend called me after a difficult visit to the Midwest to see family. Her father is in his 90s, and her family wanted to organize a family reunion of sorts. Over the last ten years, she and her siblings have grown apart, and the trip ended with a big fight between her and her favorite sibling where some REALLY racist and xenophobic things were said. 

She’s not the only friend of mine going through this, and all of us who have lost family members to Christian nationalist ideology are in different stages of grief. She knew it was inevitable, but hoped that they could continue communication at least for as long as their father is still alive. 

Generally speaking, these families weren’t overtly political when they were growing up. Nearly all of them considered themselves “religious” and/or attended church regularly, but politics wasn’t a big topic of conversation. Over the last ten years or so, however, the religious and political devotion of some of their family members resembles NFL fandom more than any kind of deep personal connection to a deity or the issues. 

Some of them even don their team’s jersey or ragepost and comment about their “opponents.” My sisters and I may not have always gotten along over the years, but it stings when you realize that your own family sees you as the enemy in an algorithmically-driven Holy War. 

All the things that are happening in the world are going to keep happening whether we’re watching them unfold or not. At this point, I see no value in most of my social media channels, so I’m taking a break from them. I deleted the apps off of my phone, and my goal is to create more and consume less. 

No matter how much we doomscroll, post, comment, or like, the world is going to keep turning because the internet isn’t a real place. The real change happens when we connect with other humans. Last night, I was talking with my friend again, and she had just come from a very well-attended event with the parents in Peoria (PUSD) who are organizing for positive change in their community. 

THAT’S real activism. Imagine if everyone exchanged their slacktivism for the actual work. Knocking doors, writing postcards, making phone calls, and text/media banking will save us from the conveyor belt of shit sandwiches stacking up, so get out there, Secular FAM, and stop giving billionaires all of your power.