Embed Notice

@CosmicTrigger I would just add to this an important caveat, which is that there's care and CARE. You can still passively care about an issue enough to recognize the importance of it and the struggles regarding it and even be willing to lend a hand to the people leading the charge on that issue without deeply caring about it as your own primary personal crusade. And I think that even if you choose a few primary issues to deeply care about and let others handle the rest, you should still have strong solidarity with those other people who are fighting those other fights. You need to be willing to lend them a hand, and to recognize the importance of their struggles, even if that's not what you primarily care about, bc if you dismiss the importance or meaningfulness of other people's struggles, or refuse to help them if they ask because you only care about your one issue, then that does actually make you a dick, because those are real other people that are dealing with some form of oppression or exploitation and by denying the importance of their struggle you would be telling them that you don't care about their own oppression right to their faces. (Except in the case of the vegans, where they are struggling not to liberate themselves from any oppression or exploitation, but on behalf of a third party who has taken no initiative in liberating themselves or articulating their own oppression or exploitation because they CAN'T, they're not conscious, and so vegans are just taking up a secondhand crusade that wouldn't exist without them deciding that it needed to be done. It's second hand saviorism deciding that something needs to be rectified not because anyone in that situation is speaking out against it or because they have actually formed meaningful persons to person relations of equals where a real exchange of ideas and compassion can happen, but because they went looking for a cause and found one. I'll start caring about supposed animal Liberation when animals start asking fot their own liberation)

That's how you build a strong movement, through solidarity and mutual aid. I've often thought that a truly strong leftist movement will have a variety of people with their own primary issues they care about and primary struggles to fight that all help back each other up in those struggles but also focus and push forward in the things that they care about, that way the movement can have people that deeply care about every issue, a real diversity of thought and goals and cares, that can leverage the whole movement together to pursue them.