This movie was right on the money about this exact guy and his fans too.
(Doubly so for the ones who don’t have fans or celebrity status.)

I am a software developer (well, a senior technical analyst these days) and AI slop code is the bane of my existence.

They create their own golden calf the likes of which you’ve never seen before.

I mean, people have told me that the appeal of Dean Winchester is explicitly that 99% of every emotional conflict in the show is his fault, but show never asks him to do half the penance he should. They don’t say that they like that it blames the people who lash out after they’ve had enough, but…

It always comes back to some evangelical beliefs in ourselves and or others that we didn’t know we had.

Which is certainly true for THIS COUNTRY AS A WHOLE.

But I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you were taught that your activism/organizing was going to prevent all this?

Be gentle on yourself.

We are not in hell just because you played hooky on a phone bank shift once back in 2014.

And yes, we should feel bad about serious fuck ups.

But we should also be clear that fuck ups are a part of being human and will happen.

And that often fuck ups are a shared responsibility. And that usually they speak to a GROUP lack of training or preparedness.

And not for nothing, if a campaign lives or dies by *you personally as an organizer,* it is not a good campaign.

Effective large-scale campaigns (and orgs, and movements) have to be resilient. That means some level of redundancy in leadership, in case of incapacitation, death, arrest, vacation, etc

The truth is, organizers are not magical people whisperers, and we can't indulge that fantasy in the name of empowerment or motivation.

Some places and people are ready to be approached, some places and people aren't.

Or more accurately, the model(s) wrote organizers checks that reality just couldn't cash.

The Alinsky model in particular underestimates how much people will sometimes disregard their own self-interest, and how much they may resent it when you remind them of it.

It feels REALLY BAD when you've been told you can save Tinkerbell if you just believe and clap loudly enough, and then she dies anyway.

You will always wonder. Did I believe hard enough? Did I clap loudly enough?

The reality is, there are sometimes areas and communities that simply are not ripe for organizing, or at least organizing around liberatory values.

Sometimes they're just too hate pickled.

Sometimes they just haven't lost enough, yet.

Sometimes they've recently been burned by organizing.

The youth really need to get on making anti-corporate authenticity cool again