Finding Motivation In Dark Times
As furries, and as communists, it's a long history of us facing problem after problem, setback after setback. Prominent communist projects lead to extreme pushback from the other side, prominent furries are attacked online. Through it all, it can be difficult to find the ability to look towards a better world. It's difficult to support freedoms in your society when you see fascists winning around you. It's hard to organize furry conventions and groups in places that are actively hostile to our community. Nihilism is exceptionally easy to fall victim to.
When we wake up each day, we expect things to go as we hope they will. Things will get better, maybe not quickly but, gradually at least. A smooth day at work, an easy workload from school, a better than usual coffee/tea to start your day. Little things. We also hope for bigger things. Better rights, court victories, new furry happenings and meetups, more community acceptance, so on and so forth. Yet, it seems these days, each day we wake up things are getting worse. The great coffee/tea you had wanted costs more now and you can't afford it, Your employer is shoving AI down your throat, expecting you to do twice the work in half the time with no compensation. Your school is trying to keep up with the changing market by flooding you with work for careers that billionaires are desperately trying to eliminate. Fascists keep winning, supposed opposition parties spend more time fighting their own side than the criminal corruption, furries and therians are attacked and slandered day in and day out because hate against us has been normalized. Everything is going terribly, it seems.
Social media screams at you day in and day out, encouraging the nihilistic focus on negativity through algorithms and unending advertisements. News constantly spends more time attacking your very identity than bringing to light the crimes of the regime in your country. Friends and family would rather alienate you for some semblance of "normal" than fight by your side for a better world.
How, in all this, can you find positivity? How can you find motivation? This is a dilemma I have struggled with for months leading FurInform as a project. How do I personally overcome my own existential dread in order to organize and post newsletters filled with critical but uplifting narratives about society around us. What do I say to encourage you to go out and be active in your community? What do I write to inspire you to explore local furry artists to support your own community and make friends in the process? Which words do I choose to show you and my own self that although things look terrible, nothing is permanent and we can overcome them? I am but one therian bear living in Mexico, why do my words matter more than others? How can I make sure my perspective fighting nihilism doesn't get drowned out by the general malaise of the world?
Unfortunately, I don't have the answer. Or rather, I do not have the one sole answer. Every day, my answers to those questions might be different, just as every day you wake up with different hopes and dreams. That, I believe, is the solution. Not an answer, but a pathway. A track you can teach yourself to follow to combat the negativity around you, in the way that works best for you. We communists rarely support individualism, but, an individualist approach to figuring out the best personal weapons to use against the negativity is our best way out of this. Permanence is a farse, and fascists absolutely love to pretend it's fact. We furries have survived the largest chemical terrorist attack in the US, we therians survived the "Great Therian Scare" earlier this year, we communists survived McCarthyism and its clones, we LGBTQ+ people survived centuries of erasure and persecution. As individuals, we feel our impacts are small. How can one gay man fight against criminalization, how have one furry fight against mainstream media libel, how can one communist prevent the next fascist leader from exploiting corruption? Yet, as a collective, we can and have done all of those things.
Nihilism tells you that you're worthless or unimportant. A cog in the machine with millions of gears. It's a weapon of our enemies, but also a fatal flaw of the human/therian mind. Finding your own way through it, by finding examples of success, of optimism in the world around you, is your best defense as nobody else can access your mind. Once enough of us overcome it, we form that collective that cannot be stopped. A momentum against those who seek to keep us down. Every victory was one that someone sometime said was impossible. People believed Russia was too backwards for evolution, but became the most progressive country in the world in the 1920's. People like Anita Bryant spent all their time and energy fighting our right to exist as LGBTQ+ people, and yet we are more accepted today than at most other points in history. The KKK fights every day to "return" the Southern US to it's former slavery status, yet it's the black community fighting hardest and winning against fascists right now. A battle is only truly lost when you choose not to continue fighting.
Wake up each day with your little hopes, wake up each day with your big ones too. Accept that things are bad, fight for your survival, flee your situation if you need to. Allow yourself to struggle, and find yourself space to hurt and be angry. But after you do all that, look for ways to fight back. Look for ways to win against the enemies. Look for the good that exists in the darkness. A small victory is a victory all the same, and can give you motivation to fight for greater ones. Acknowledging the bad does not mean relenting to it. Accepting that a victory was small, or not enough, does not detract from its importance and movement in a better direction.
As the world seems to be collapsing around us, and victories seem too little too late, it is important to know that history has not yet ended. The Russian proletariat was at the point where all was lost, and then suddenly it wasn't. It's not because things changed magically from terrible to great, but because the people did not give up on fighting for a better world. Climate change is melting the planet, but we are seeing exponential growth in the green energy sector. Fascism controls the US, but we are seeing left wing victories in some of the most unexpected places. Just because everything is terrible, does not mean it will be that permanently.
It's been a difficult path running FurInform. How do I educate, use my voice for good, run this project with my friends. What do I write about? Other writers might be interested in highlighting pessimistic news reports, but I cannot bring myself to write those articles. How do I encourage communist discourse for the people a country actively targeting communists? But it's that very nihilism that I have fallen victim to, that allows the fascists to win. Allows capitalists to continue exploiting us. They want us to feel like that, that our voice doesn't matter, that our efforts are in vain. That our voice is drowned out by the droning pessimism they create, while we're punished for having a voice and standing up for other human beings. That's what brings me to write this today. My own journey, my own realization that even if only one person were to read this newsletter, it is still with writing. Change is always possible, we just need to believe it is, and put in the work to achieve it.
Thank you to everyone who has stuck around through this absence from newsletters from FurInform. We can build a better world together, and we can empower furries across the world to take their rights into their own hands. As an LGBTQ+ therian, I have suffered directly at the hands of ostracization of my identity, and my right to exist. But we must fight back against that. We must empower furries to look at the true enemies of our rights and our existence, rather than those in our community. We need to give a voice and a call to action for furries to use their unique position at the center of many disadvantaged communities to unify for a fight for the betterment of everyone. Communism isn't just platitudes about taking back the means of production, it is a daily fight for the rights of our fellow beings that we share this planet with. A daily flight against nihilism, and capitalism.
In Solidarity,
FurInform
