Many of us on platforms like this are introverts, or autistic, or have social anxiety, or for whatever reason, have trouble meeting new people or engaging with strangers. If someone wanted to engage you in conversation, what topic would you be happiest to talk about?
anyone who works in local politics who has any sanity doesn’t last very long. i have worked on it in the past a few times, and after about a year or three you just give up. my sister has been mayor of her village of 1000 people, and basically can’t wait for her term to end because the most vocal people are the ones who are the nastiest and stupidest.
when a smart person has a complaint she can reason with them and tell the limits of what she can do and they generally accept this. stupid people however, get hostile and will threaten legal action and often so so far as to waste their own tax money they are paying, on the town lawyer having to file to dimiss frivolous lawsuits. people also lose their shit over what goes on on public property and their neighbors property over which they have no legal rights. she’s even had people who had their own trees fall on their own houses after a bad storm and try to sue the village over it for not ‘identifying dangerous trees in the city’. and then when she has the town remove dangerous trees on town property that are a liability, those very same idiots, come out and PROTEST that the town is removing trees and destroying the environment. you cannot reason with these people at all all you can do is politely nod as they ramble to them and ignore them.
it’s INSANE. Just go to any local town or city meeting/hearing. at least 30% of the time involved will be complete idiotic weirdos going up to am microphone and yelling about microchips in the water, when the topic of bumping up the budget of the roads dept to fill some extra potholes. or there will be a discussion of re-doing a local park and someone will go up screaming about how making the park nicer for children will make them weak Satan worshipers because they grew up without any parks and they are good Christian.
It definitely takes deliberate balancing to do it in a way that doesn’t lead to burnout. Its an incredibly common problem in these orgs because people are passionate and throw themselves in completely without stepping back and making sure it’s healthy. I am working through this currently trying to delegate more things and guard more of my personal time for me and not political organizing.
for sure. i ran a community space for 8 years, and i had to quit because it became a bit of a political football and was attracting really unhinged people, both advocating for, and against us. i really could not tolerate it after about a year of that nonsense and it turned what was a fun positive place into a miserable one.
the most insane people were the one who had really no genuine interest in what we were doing, but just wanted to use as ‘proof’ of whatever weird conspiracy nonsense they believed. we were simultaneously ‘corrupting the children’, despite the fact no children were involve, BUT also we were ‘not doing our duty by not helping the children’ because we were an 18+ space. It was horrible. a lot of identity politics idiots got involved and accuses of being white supremacists, and then we were accused of pushing the queer bipoc agenda. one week we had this crazy young black woman harass us and then a week later it was some old white boomer lady…
we were just a makerspace/toolshare…
Some people just have broken brains man its wild. Sorry you had to deal with that.
there were some increasingly crazy people on the inside of that group. I didn’t have the energy to fight a battle on multiple fronts. Crazy people have infinite energy.
I decided to shift gears and now I go out into the woods and fix up hiking trails, but even there we come across crazy people who try to place traps to hurt people. We have one parcel of land where someone is cutting trees so that they fall on people hiking. This person has been doing this for years and never been caught, but we have to keep going in and cutting down trees because of this psycho. Thankfully it’s only one person in one place though and the trees and rocks and dirt don’t flip out at you and most people who see us say thank you.