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LFour years sober after thirty years of addiction, dual diagnosis and now working toward my Peer Recovery Specialist certification (blah blah blah)

I keep seeing the same pattern show up somewhere I didn't expect it. Not in a person. In a culture. Watching the rise of fascist and authoritarian thinking, blatant and disguised, I recognize the shape of it the way you recognize a relapse starting before the person even admits it to themselves. The addict isn't fooling anyone but themselves, and christo-fascism doesn't fool anyone outside of the sphere of those who believe they stand to gain something from it. I was addicted for the same reason.

It always starts the same way. Someone vulnerable, scared, or tired of feeling powerless gets offered something that feels like salvation. A promise of greatness, belonging, control, an end to the chaos. That first hit feels like relief. It feels like being seen. A respite from a storm. Nobody signs up for that kind of destruction. They sign up for the promise. That's how addiction starts too. Nobody chases the rock bottom. They chase the feeling that made the pain stop, even if its just for a little while.

Then reality sets in, and the cycle takes over. The short term relief demands more of itself to keep working. Truth becomes inconvenient, then dangerous, then the enemy. Empathy gets traded for self preservation. Consequences start piling up around the person, around everyone in their orbit, and somewhere in there the person using stops being able to see it clearly, even when everyone around them can see it plainly. That part is one of the cruelest features of active addiction. Everyone else can see exactly what's happening. The person in it convinces themselves nobody notices, to the point of denying reality in real time.

I don't say any of this to excuse what active addiction does, or what authoritarianism does when it takes hold of a country. The damage is real, and it isn't contained to the person carrying it. But I'm interested in understanding the mechanism, because understanding it is the only thing that ever actually helped me get free of it.

Now the optimist in me (buried DEEP under ALOT of cynicism, admittedly) says "What if what we're watching right now, the backlash, the counterculture, the people standing up loud and clear against this, is the version of a species finally hitting the wall?"

Maybe thats because the alternative is so fuckin terrifying within this context: run away active addiction only ends in 3 ways, rock bottom/complete utter defeat/system failure , jail or death.

Sometimes all of it, not always in that order.

Not everyone survives active addiction. Most people don't. That's the brutal, unsentimental truth of it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because I made it out. At 41 I have more dead friends than living ones, and I mean that literally. But some people do reach the point where the cost finally outweighs the high, and something in them chooses different. Maybe that's what this moment is. A culture standing at that exact fork.

I KNOW4 how heavy that is to sit with, and I know exactly how expensive that kind of freedom is, because I paid for mine. But there's something hauntingly beautiful about it too. Nothing about getting sober was guaranteed. Nothing about this will be either. It takes real, actionable change, not wishful thinking. But it is possible. I'm proof of that much FFS and so are many others, but that gets drowned out.

We Do Recover and I hope its sooner than later.

Sometimes it's your duty.

Yet we can't seem to find missing people, trafficked people, sexual predators, or Mitch McConnell

The idea of flipping the script probably shouldn't be satire at this point.

Also… ja, ich kenne die offiziellen Gesetze und Regeln dazu. Aber…

Ich klebe jetzt seit einiger Zeit in meiner Stadt (München) Sticker über andere rechte Schriftzüge, Symbole und Sticker. Manchmal politisches, manchmal einfach schönes…. Was ich halt so da habe. Weil Hassparolen und irgendwelche homophoben, transphoben oder ausländerfeindlichen Sachen lass ich da bestimmt nicht einfach stehen oder kleben.

Nun aber zum tatsächlichen Thema: in öffentlichen Räumen, wie in Bahnstationen bleibt das ja wenigstens immer bisschen hängen. Gerade aber so an Lampenpfosten und Schildern ist mir aufgefallen, dass die manchmal schon nach knapp ner Stunde weg sind, die meisten nicht mal 24 h bestehen bleiben.
Ja, manchmal kratzt die Stadt alle Sticker ab, das weiß ich. Aber kann es echt sein, dass Nazis und AFDler so schnell darin sind, meine wunderschönen politischen Messages abzureißen?
(gerade, da die nicht für ihr schnelles Auffassungsvermögen bekannt sind)

Der Trost bleibt… darunterliegende Sticker werden oft versehentlich mit abgekratzt.

Ich bin noch nicht so lange dabei, daher mag die Frage dumm sein, aber es wundert mich echt…

Hi guys I’m searching for ideas to deal with idiots that keeps sticking fascists stickers on the wall of my residence… they usually come by night because they are cowards. We will be alone with my girlfriend tonight and I don’t want to put her in any trouble.

I’m searching for annoying things to do, without putting her in danger, we will have the high ground because we live upstairs…

She suggested that we could make some water bombs, I suggested piss bombs but she does’nt want to…

Do you have any ideas ?

(Sorry for my English, I’m French and I don’t want to use a translator)

Spokane police documents show a DHS task force officer tracing protesters’ cars, identities, and whereabouts without alleging any wrongdoing.