Vice President JD Vance was met with hundreds of pro-Ukraine protesters while visiting a Vermont ski resort on Saturday, following his public dust up with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House.
Vance and his family, on a trip to Sugarbush Resort, were greeted by the outraged protesters lining the snow-covered streets of the small Vermont town of Waitsfield.
Protestors displayed signs that labeled Vance a “national disgrace,” accused him of being a “traitor” and encouraged the family to “go ski in Russia.”
I’m European and I’m thankful for each American showing their disgust with Trump, Vance or Musk.
And I truly hope for more getting to the other side.
I’m curious though, what exactly are you doing to contribute to do something against Trump, Vance or Musk?
Started in 2003 when I was 13 and would fundraise at middleschool against the war in Iraq.
Somewhat prioritized political literacy and critical thinking as a young lad, though I was lofty and idealistic in those days I was at least trying to do something. Genocide in Sudan and watching Schindlers List when I was 13-14 also fueled that fire.
Got extreme at one point, friends and I used to attack-on-sight Nazi’s and KKK every chance we could get, in some cases endangering their lives. I cooled off that stuff and attended the Occupy protests in 2011, was one of the 800+ people that got herded onto the Brooklyn Bridge by police and mass arrested. Did you hear about that one?
2013 I (naively) worked for Greenpeace for a few years, alongside environmentalist charities and activists in the SW Pacific (New Zealand, Fiji, Australia). Got there with $15 to my name after hitching a ride on a sailboat, ended up dressing up as an Orangutan in the boiling Australian sun and making police chase me (they never did catch me.) Worked with the Wilderness Society, worked alongside Bob Irwin (Steve Irwin’s dad) on the Fight for the Reef campaign to protect the GBR from getting dredged for coal shipping (our campaign successfully delayed them for a year, after which they dredged a world heritage site anyway.)
Since then I worked small, working with various charities from deaf kids to blind persons, attending every protest I could physically attend. A recent diagnosis of Graves Disease has put me on my arse for a while, but despite that I still stood up to the pogroms in the UK, using my body to block protestors from bricks. A brick hit my bad knee too, but i’d take a million more.
Does my resume satisfy you? Now lets see your card, what have you done?
That’s an impressive „CV of resistance“, although I only asked what you’ve done specifically against trump, Vance and musk, and if I’m nitpicking, I can’t see much apart from protesting. The same thing you expressed your disgust about saying „is that the best you can do“.
I do hope, that you continue to do as much as you’ve already done and I’m thankful for every single thing you do.
I also hope, that you start to inspire others to follow in your footsteps instead of making them feel bad for not doing enough.
I mean to quote them:
They’ve got their excuse.
To be fair those are two sides of the same coin. If you can’t get people to think “I’m not doing enough and that’s a problem” you’ll never get them to get off their asses. This is particularly relevant in America because Americans have forgotten what it means to actually resist their government.
Thank you. I just want to add that they saw all that and said “just looks like protesting” as if personally helping organize action against the coal industry using grassroots techniques to some small success is “just protesting,” or raising money for disabled people in community “not much apart from protesting.” The gall, from someone who probably hasn’t been to even a measley protest. And yes, I am saying protesting isn’t enough, speaking from someone who’s done it for 14 years. Waving signs does fucking nothing. It disrupts nothing. You have to put your bodies on the road and your safety on the line like we did.
Maybe you should run for office. Probably would have been far more effective, and if America is short on anything it’s leadership.
If I ran for office and mentioned anything about the $36 TRILLION in offshore tax havens to help pay for things like infrastructure, UBI, and universal healthcare, i’d be fucking assassinated. The problem about wanting change and working within the system to achieve that, is that it’s never you who changes the system, it’s the system that’ll inevitably change you. There’s nothing wrong with compromise in a situation, but compromising yourself in a situation is another story completely.
To be fair to them too, they were specifically asking what you did to resist Trump and co. As to everything else they said:
I get that you’re angry—hell, I’m angry and I’ve never been to the United States—but it seems you’re responding to something other than what the other person actually said. Also getting Americans to get off their asses is one thing, but you do have a bit of a holier than thou attitude you should probably work on if you want to be successful at getting them off their asses. If you don’t want to succeed at it then you do you I guess; like I said, you and everyone else who has been fighting this fight since the beginning have the right to be angry.
I am responding to something other than what the person actually said. People like myself (and the countless nameless faces who actually stick their necks out) have been screaming about this to people who metaphorically can’t see or hear, for decades, only for them to be the “holier than thou” one trying to look for hypocrisy or hatred in other people who’ve done more than them. Why focus on idols like Trump and Co when they’re just symptoms of the greater problems - capitalistic greed/corporate irresponsibility - and then after listing our many years of efforts to fight it and then say “Yeah but what did you do to stop Trump and Musk specifically?” That sort of nitpicking, missing the forest for the trees attitude is what angers me so, it’s proof of how blind people are to the realities of what it means to be in a democracy. “If you want a democracy, you have to be a player.”
Oh, I see; you’re a dyed in the wool “down with capitalism” lefty. In this part of history it’ll be necessary to tolerate the presence of normies—people who want to stop the backsliding of democracy but don’t really understand or care about the down with capitalism stuff. Those people can then be radicalized into full fledged lefties, but at least at present it’s important to accept their aims not being as ambitious as yours, even though as you said they’re missing the forest for the trees. They with proper education can and do stop going after individual trees and start burning the whole forest, but you have to be patient (or not, you do you). That aside the holier than thou attitude I’m talking about is mostly the bragging. That’s probably not what it feels to you, but to an external observer you definitely sound like you’re bragging about the fascist bricks you got hit with, so… uh… yeah.
Not bragging, just proud.
If you feel bad for not doing enough that’s on you.
So you honestly think, that it is more beneficial to the cause to look down on people not doing enough instead of encouraging them to continue what they’re doing?
I’ll believe it when I see it. People are not doing enough, myself included. The reality around us is proof of this.
I know, it is frustrating, I also feel like everything’s doomed a lot of times, but I refuse to get drowned in this frustration.
If we can encourage others to engage more, then that’s a lot. Don’t underestimate what you’ve done so far. You can be an inspiration to others!
Even if they think organizing the community to raise local funds for deaf and blind kids, as well as grassroots organizations to delay big coal for a year, laying our in front of bulldozers and police cars, as “just protesting”? The same way these people are peacefully and safely holding signs outside a goddamn ski resort?! I’m not special, yet even I and others like me can risk our safety to get real results instead of peacefully be taken unseriously by the opposition. Just look at all the critical enlightened centrists in this thread.
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You can’t win without them, you’ve got to work with them.
Only if you work with them then you have the chance to radicalise some of them. If you don’t work with them the movement stays as small as it is.
Kind of but not really relevant: As someone from an authoritarian state where you don’t really get to protest, I’d always wondered just how the whole protesting thing is supposed to work. Like you go out, hold some signs and chant some slogans and then politicians just listen to you??? Is that how democracy works??? In the last few years as I grew to understand how all that stuff works I learned the answer to that question, but I think many Westerners and Americans specifically really need to start thinking once about how what they’re doing is supposed to lead to results.
I’m very happy that people like you exist. It’s just not as easy as you make it seem. I live in Germany and we face a very similar political fate. I feel pretty helpless. I go to protests, I donate money to causes that work against nazi shit. I invested heavily in changing my lifestyle to a much greener one. But all of that has just a tiny impact unfortunately. I’m too old to get physical plus I have to take care of my daughter. Many people are reliant on a functioning society.
As long as social media exists the way it does now, nothing will really change. I will be writing EU officials to boycott American tech. If Europe stops using that shit, propaganda is reduced to traditional media, which isn’t nearly as effective. But again, this is just a tiny drop in an ocean of things we would have to do.
Everything you mentioned is 1000x better than occupying a sidewalk (that oligarchs dont walk on) with signs that try and make JD Vance feel shook. I’m not against occupying sidewalks with signs, just think we should be doing outside mansions and gated communities, where billionaires in their pajamas can see us. Megaphones all night long, i’d be helping to hand out free coffee.
Wouldn’t the fediverse actually be a good starting point for getting organized? That always seems to be the most difficult part. The Nazis have it easy because they have plenty of money to use the algorithms for their own advantage.
Obligatory https://sopuli.xyz/c/Civic_Engagement