5 Acts for Self-Care and Resistance this Week

Sunday is usually the time I do my Media Rundown, but I’m swamped! My agent contacted me with an opportunity for some IP work. If you’ve never heard of that it’s basically writing for hire. Usually books about Marvel superheroes are IP work. The company gives you the title and an outline and you write it. Sometimes it’s ghostwriting but other times you get a writing credit. In any case, I’ll need to get them 20-25 pages in the next two weeks or so. There’s no guarantee I’ll get the work, it’s basically an audition. The only problem is that I’m currently neck deep in my adult romance novel that I’m writing and I hate to work on two projects at once. It affects the flow and I have trouble keeping my plots and voices separate so I’m not really reading. I’m furiously writing. I am listening to a few podcasts like Pop Culture Happy Hour, but that’s about it.

But even in the midst of my mad dash I thought about the little things we can do for self-care and resistance. We can’t shout down our representatives every week and it remains to be seen if protest under this administration is going to be met with extreme force so here is a little list of little things.

5 acts for self-care & resistance this week

1. Renew your passport

My passport expires this year and with the immediate changes to the system that that man put in action as soon as he got into office spurred me to get it done as early as possible. We don’t know if there will be new requirements coming soon, but we do know that there is need for more documentation about your citizenship as Mississippi puts forth a bill to deputize bounty hunters to “arrest” suspected undocumented people where they’d be imprisoned for life. Be wary of scams while trying to renew. The government only uses sites with a .gov address.

2. Get a library card

The entire library world is bracing for cuts to the Institute of Library and Museum Science. The federal agency issues grants that keep a lot of library’s doors open and this administration has supported the removal books about history and the lived experiences of many Americans. Getting a library card can justify the existing budget of your local library by signaling its worth to current county officials. You may want to join your local library’s Friends of the Library group to stay up on any county changes.

3. Print out your photos

What would happen to the archive of your family photos if you lost your phone? Can you really trust the cloud? It’s time to print out all those photos and put them in physical albums. This is also one of the steps that will lead you to finally break up with FB and Instagram if you’ve been thinking about cutting the cord. It’s time to go analog so you can actually invite people over to show them your pictures of your trip to Costa Rica. I love to use Shutterfly. They have sales and they have a cool system to make your own photo albums.

4. Buy a banned book

The rate of banned books in America has skyrocketed since about 2022. Those were the midterms after Biden was elected. With Stop the Steal rhetoric in the air, those who were irritated by the Black Lives Matter movement organized and they meant to make sure that books about Black people and queer people weren’t made available to kids in schools. As you may or may not know, any parent can limit what their own child reads in a library. A simple note to the librarian about off-limits topics will accomplish that. But banning books is about changing public thought and keeping books away from ALL children.

Embarrassed by the actions of people who enslaved and tortured Black folks from the time the country was founded to well into the Jim Crow era and bothered by the idea that racism still affects people today, many people want to erase history altogether. The federal government has been instructed not to recognize any racial or ethnic months or holidays. So bye bye Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, etc. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t start your own library and archive, just in case books start disappearing from libraries and bookstores. The American Library Association keeps a list of all the challenged and banned books across America. You can join the fight against banned books with United Against Banned Books.

And expect more bans to be proposed. I’ve been told my Middle Grades Fantasy about a boy who fights Confederate demons should be banned because it’s indoctrination.

5. Subscribe to your state newspaper

The cable news stations have ceded all power to the attention economy. Much of the blame for the rise of Donald Trump lies at their feet for legitimizing a candidate with so little qualifications and avoiding questioning him in the same ways that they question other politicians. As someone with a degree in Journalism you may not know that what stories get told is not a democratic process. It works very much like a pitch session for a TV show. Each reporter tosses their idea into the pool and the head producers makes a decision. Balanced reporting has gone by the wayside in favor of what gets attention the most and that’s not news, that’s a reality tv show. No wonder we have a reality star as a president now, but journalism isn’t dead. It lives on in the slower mediums. Magazines like The Atlantic and Mother Jones are doing long form journalism where the facts are checked and double checked before publication. What’s going on in your state legislature and schools won’t be picked up by CNN. That’s local. To make sure that slow and focused journalism still has a place we’re going to have to go back to print. At the very least print articles can’t be altered after a powerful tech oligarch calls the office to have an expose pulled from the internet.

I’ll be thinking of more next week, but this is a start.

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