Epilogue

Getting Started

The secret of our success is that we never, never give up. —Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee chief

As the saying goes, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. Sometimes the hardest part of doing something is just getting started. The more ambitious and challenging the journey, the more daunting the first steps may seem, and bringing down civilization is definitely an ambitious undertaking.

Personal productivity writer David Allen (of Getting Things Done) often asks people working on a project to write down two things: the ultimate goal of the project, and the next step they need to take in order to make progress on that project. We’ve defined the goal. For most people, the obstacle is that next step. Thousands of people write to us or ask us at talks and conferences: “But what do I do now?” Hopefully having read this far, you have a pretty good idea. But it never hurts to have a list to choose from.

To that end, here is a not-even-remotely-exhaustive list of some (low-risk) entry points to the grand strategy, a few ways of getting started or expanding your resistance activity, out of the thousands or hundreds of thousands of options available. We’ve broken it down into aboveground and underground actions, but the lists are not mutually exclusive.

INITIAL ACTIONS AND ENTRY POINTS

Aboveground:

Read or watch inspiring and informative media about resistance. Organize a movie night or series of movie nights to watch films with others, and to discuss them and how they apply to action in the here and now.

Make a list of the skills you want to learn. Once you have a list, make a plan for how to learn the skills and where you can get them from. Prepare a schedule and set aside time each day or at least each week to learn and practice.

Engage in prisoner support and general solidarity work. Writing to political prisoners is a good way of getting started, and there’s certainly no shortage of them. General solidarity work with various struggles is also a good way of getting experience, building alliances, and seeing different perspectives and methods of struggle.

Be a distributor of propaganda. Pass on your favorite political books, movies, and other media to receptive friends and acquaintances.

Start or join a radical community sufficiency group in your area.

Start or join an affinity group for political action and mutual support. Meet on a regular basis to assess political activism in your area, to identify actions you can undertake that would improve that situation, and to develop long-term goals and strategies. An affinity group can help you keep focused and accountable. (A word of caution from experience: it’s not necessarily a good idea to live with and/or polyamorously date everyone in your affinity group.)

Practice being interrogated. Take turns playing “police” and “activist” in an arrest situation. Remember that the police threaten, manipulate, and lie.

Role play breaches of security culture. Pretend someone in your social circle has bad security behaviors like asking if Jane is an agent or if Jorge is involved in the underground. How do you confront and educate this person?

Go back to the lists of aboveground tactics in the previous chapter. Pick out something you want to do, plan it, and do it.

Get your household prepared for when the grid crashes.

Get to know your landbase and the other creatures who live on it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to pack a field guide on edible plants, a pair of binoculars, and a water bottle, and just go and spend some time in a relatively wild area near you.

Build community sufficiency in your area.

Mobilize people to undertake civil disobedience or related tactics for current struggles in your area. This will help build aboveground movements and train people in how to fight power. You will want as many allies as possible in your area for collapse.

Volunteer for, or join the aboveground Deep Green Resistance organization.

Read more ideas on the DGR Take Action page.

Underground: