What a rowdy bunch of protestors. (Pretty good by Ballard standards, honestly. And we were the last strike of the day on the West Coast!)
Hey everyone, it’s climate strike time! Or Earthstrike. Or whatever you want to call it.
Today was the big event in the United States, and lots of people walked out all over the country, from their jobs and their schools (it is a youth-led movement, after all) to protest the world’s inaction on climate change. Because fucking seriously, if we can go to the moon in under a decade we can probably get 80% of the way to fixing stuff as much as we’ll be able to in the next 5-10 years. If we have that long. FUN TIMES.
Anyway.
In addition to the marches today, a friend of mine, emsenn, also proposed an extension of the idea of a general strike. Since many people are striking for the whole week of the 20th to the 27th (when the rest of the world is doing their strike), this general strike would take place over the entire week. It’d be a strike from participating in capitalism. Not only walking out on jobs, but on the entire system. They outline their reasoning here.
Seemed like a good idea to me. So I figured I’ll give it a go and talk about how it ended up working out. I’m not going to be able to completely eliminate my participation in capitalism, but I’m planning on vastly minimizing it. It’ll be fun. Or interesting. Or I’ll fuck it up somehow. But it’s definitely worth trying.
Day 0
Day 0 was a prep day, which got doubly interesting because I had a vet appointment, work, and a date. But I managed to figure out what I’d need to do ahead of time to buy nothing or almost nothing during the next week. I fueled up my car and did my grocery shopping. The only other expense on Thursday was getting my gecko checked out by the vet. Jerry is small, but an expensive little guy. The good thing is, the stuff he’s sick with is far more treatable than it could have been! Yay!
For the grocery shopping I followed another one of emsenn’s thoughts and went with buying local as much as I could. I was at the bougie-ass market in my neighborhood, which was nice in that they label all the local stuff, and was not so nice in that I was surrounded by rich WASPy retirees and near-retirees and felt out of place. I picked up food for myself, food for my gaming group on Sunday so we don’t buy takeout, and stocked up on food for the iguana. With any luck, the only food thing I’ll need to buy in the next week is more leaves for the iguana, if her current batch get old/gross, which they shouldn’t if I store them properly. The gas I got wasn’t local (can you even get gas from somewhere not owned by a multinational corporation at this point), but I think I can go for a whole week or so on the one tank.
I’m prepped and ready! Mostly. I think? Oh god.
Day 1
This is the 20th, and the start of the stike proper. I found out about it too late to take the whole day off, and am too disposable to just not show up, but I did leave early to go to a doctor’s appointment, so they only got half a day of productivity out of me. Take that, capitalism!
Small victories, right?
The doctor’s visit was free through insurance magic. Got a physical, got a flu shot, got told I need to do aerobic exercise, which is a very valid instruction but also: weh. The only thing I had to pay for was parking, which was like $3.68. Unfortunately, Amazon owns the parking lot. Gluh.
I also biked on down to the Ballard climate strike in the evening. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if your local PTA held a protest? Because that was the vibe! People showed, which was good, but I was one of the few people there who was both under fifty and not there with their children in tow. The crowd was also whiter than the walls of a Southern California condo. Still, about fifty people showed up, and I hung around awkwardly to show support and texted people, because it turns out just because you care about a cause doesn’t mean your social anxieties go away. But yay for protests! There were many honks of support from passing motorists, and cheers and such from pedestrians. The irony of people driving gas-powered cars as they supported a protest against climate change wasn’t lost on me, but it was still nice.
Then I hoofed it home through the locks before they closed, and now I’m here writing this! So I got through a day spending virtually no cash, and things are going smoothly so far. Tomorrow will involve some vet bills, but I’m hoping that’s it. Besides the vet the only plan I have is to go to a friend’s for a board game night, so I should be able to avoid spending any more cash post-vet.
Hell yeah hell yeah, let’s do this thing.
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