I met some long time friends for pizza and beer tonight and i thought it was a fun night but right before we parted ways the two of them held an intervention with me. They said i was bringing up "socialist stuff" too much and it was making them depressed. They said to keep the conversation exclusively to things like games and anime. That if i didnt stop they didnt want to be friends anymore. Have you guys/gals/nonbinary pals experienced something like this before?

  • aqwxcvbnji [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago
    1. Fortunatly it's just two people in the group, so whatever they might decide, don't give up on the rest of them.
    2. It's easy to become depressed if you think about the climate, war etc. but if you're actively engaged in one way or another in campaigns, it's much harder to get lost in those feelings yourself and you can more easily counter those feelings in others with a concrete ask to be part of that campaign.

    I don't know what the context was, or the tone in which those people responded to you, but if they lament certain results of capitalist society, they might even be prime targets for recruitment in such campaigns.

    Semi-related: you'll probably never reach people with a "Support the DPRK!"-campaign, but you will with the ones that are closer to their direct experience, like the M4M4A-marches which were just happening. I found this short text to be very helpfull in deciding priorities in my activism.

    • EthicalHumanMeat [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Semi-related: you’ll probably never reach people with a “Support the DPRK!”-campaign

      I dunno, I usually find it pretty easy to convince people that we're the aggressors. Not so much that they're a model to follow, but that our sanctions are hurting them and that their nuclear weapons program is obviously a deterrent.