I’m a relentless idealist too, and I get where you’re coming from, but idealism alone isn’t a winning strategy. The state of the world right now proves that. Sometimes you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. This is important precisely because it is so minor and inconsequential: the stakes and consequences for failure are so low while there is absolutely no legitimate argument against it. Not to put too fine a point on it: People are losing hope in our ability to create any change at all. We need a win. We need to start getting traction, and start making progress somewhere. We need to show people that these battles against corporate interests CAN be won so that they are willing to try to fight more of them in the future, including eventually the bigger ones where there will be real consequences and really serious forces entrenched against any efforts for change.

This is just a first step, a tiny example of giving the finger to “the man” to prove that we still can, taking back a sliver of power and agency. It is not the last step, it is merely a beginning, an almost invisibly tiny crack in the armor of capitalism and corporate rights in favour of society and people’s rights. It’s certainly not going to fix the world on its own, but once we’ve got some cracks in the armor, we can keep working at them to make them bigger and eventually maybe we’ll start making real visible progress.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to solve the problems of the world overnight with a single petition too, but that’s not realistic given the scale of the opposition and resistance we are facing. Late stage capitalism and corpo-fascism are not weak or fragile and they have grown to a scale that is almost inconceivable. We will not beat them in a single blow. We will need to hammer at them for a long, long time before we even start making any serious progress. We have to be prepared for a long, long fight, and relish these small, small victories when we get them. Because every victory is valuable and every one counts. Especially ones where we don’t have to fight to the death to achieve them. Small, cheap victories are the best when our resources are so limited. It’s going to be a marathon not a sprint. Right now they’ve got all the money, all the power, all the media, all the organization. A single large decisive battle would almost certainly mean we lose, and lose big. This is guerilla warfare. We will fight on the fringes and fight them where they’re weakest not where they’re powerful. Eventually the balance of power will shift as long as we keep winning battles, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.