Make Care Visible
There’s a rather popular flavor of social media content focused on helping unhoused people.
The creator will give out sleeping bags, socks, and care kits; sit down and have a meal; or take the unhoused person shopping. Sometimes they help them find work or start a GoFundMe to get them off the streets.
It does a lot of good. But it’s also gross AF!
Imagine you’re cold, hungry, and desperate, and someone offers to get you all the things you need… if you consent to having a camera shoved in your face and the footage of you at your lowest blasted on the internet.
There are inherent power dynamics at play that make this coercive, even if the person being helped gives “consent.”
Care is Contagious
The flip-side of this is that helping others is contagious.
Fascism loves to use a flood-the-zone strategy: throw so much bad shit at people that their brains get overloaded, shut off, and tune out.
Visible, public acts of care are like flushing your brain’s RAM or force quitting a bunch of lagging applications.
It’s important, necessary even, to make care of others as visible as possible.
But not by shoving a camera in some desperate person’s face.
Good Alternatives
I learned about this years Make Care Visible campaign after it had already happened, but I love this so much!
It focuses on shifting acts of care away from quietly donating to causes and towards doing care in public, in full sight of everyone.
- Create a free little art or trinket station
- Hand out food and water/coffee in a park on a hot or cold day
- Make sidewalk chalk art
- Wear pins and badges
- Create a rock art snake
- Go say hi to some local unhoused folks, ask what they need, and get it for them
- Volunteer to walk dogs at your local animal shelter, wear a shirt that advertises what you’re doing, and give them the best fucking day ever
- Walk up to a stranger who looks said ask them if they’re OK
The Make Care Visible website has some great examples if you need inspiration.
Don’t take on more than you can handle
This is an important concept I learned from studying anarchy.
It’s really easy, especially if you’re a fellow ADHD/AuDHDer like me, to try to do all the things right out the gate. That’s a surefire path to burnout.
Start small, and work your way up. Make friends. Build a network of comrades who help.
And take breaks. I was driving around many weekends handing out sleeping bags and care kits over the winter. But then my life got busy as I started planning a move, and I took some time off.
I still stop whenever I see someone, but I’m not actively driving around looking for folks right now.
It’s hard to know folks are struggling and I could be doing more, but if you burn yourself out, you can’t help anyone at all. Prioritize your wellness, too.
But most importantly, spread joy
Get out there, and engage in small acts of visible care.
It’s how we dismantle systems of oppression from within.