Rowanisrowin.

https://twitter.com/coff33detective/status/1271463582312673281

you may not know this, but i bet your city or town or municipality has a website. i bet that website has some contact forms or email addresses on it. i bet you can use them to put together a message in about 5 minutes! i bet it’s almost as easy as signing a national petition.

which is to say: i’m noticing, like most other people, that the national level discussion on really important and long overdue issues is flagging. but the internet and news cycle is not the only battleground, and you will be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to—

—fight those battles at home, on your own turf, with much more immediate impact, and they are so, so important.

A few guys voicing their anxiety about speeding on a street where their children play and suggesting a radar speed sign. Despite catching all of two meetings where this was mentioned, I walked back home one day and–yep–there was a radar speed sign up.

A persistent force of 3-5ish loud residents coming to zoning and council meetings because they did not want a drive through style restaurant moving into a particular area where there were already major issues with traffic congestion and safety. This eventually resulted in a Chik-fil-a having its planning proposal shot down by council such that the lot is now likely to house an Aldi. I am getting low cost groceries instead of bigotry chicken in my neighborhood because of a D&D party’s worth of regular speakers.

A turnout of residents shouting down an attempt to reduce the amount of funding for the community Juneteenth celebration until Council backed down. One meeting. Roughly a dozen people + their kids speaking about the significance of the holiday. The celebration ended up having its full funding restored.

For a lot of people, it's the first time they've been able to directly interact with foreigners and make use of the mandatory English classes that they've been taking since elementary school

This is a special in moment in time, where the people in both countries can just converse and see just how similar they really are. Many people are staying up late to really get the most out of it because we don't know how long this can last

Lots of misconceptions being corrected, including but not limited to: Americans don't get period cramps, Christmas and Jesus are Korean, all Americans have big houses like on TV, work in the U.S. is easygoing

Finding similarities between parents, like asking if they're digging a hole to the U.S., or saying that when they were little they had to walk uphill to school in the snow both ways

Two things they were shocked by: cost of university (in China, the better the school, the less you pay), and learning about rural food deserts in the U.S. ("aren't they farmers?")

Lots of comparisons on the cost of rent/groceries/medical costs/salary/work hours etc, with the resulting sentiment that the common people everywhere really are the same and have a common enemy

Lots of them have changed their typing habits so that it's easier to machine translate and are now stuck with a sort of "translation accent" in their Chinese from reading so much machine translated Chinese

After the Americans joined, the quality of the posts have gone way up ("Rednote algorithm knows there's guests here and so is serving the best dishes now" / "Why has Rednote been hiding the good stuff? The guests are worthy but we aren't?")

Which is a sign of domestication, btw. And why you should keep them inside.