You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else

I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free

You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them

There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it

10 cans of peaches, 2 5lb cans of crushed tomatoes, 6 loaves of bread, a whole box of tuna packets, 8 mangoes, 6 1lb bags of rice, 10lbs of frozen chicken tenders or fajita meat. And it’s like wtf? They gave this to a family of 4??? They can’t even fit some if that in their fridges/freezers half the time so it gets donated to us.

I had my neighbors stop me before last distro to hand me all those items, plus other things. This one of many small examples, that pounded in my skull, that if I want/need it, I’m taking it.

I knew a rapist who was an absolute ride-or-die friend to his gamer bros. Like, give the last dollar from his pocket to a friend who got a flat tire, and then turn around and go rape a Freshman that evening.

I knew a vicious child abuser who wept like a baby when her dog died.

The nastiest human being on the planet nevertheless feels obscurely melancholy sometimes, or has high spirits when they step out doors on the first warm day of spring, or has opinions on their favorite TV show and which side the toilet paper should hang on and whether or not the room should be cold or warm when you go to sleep.

We're all still just people. Complex, with fully-realized interior worlds.

None of that will save you from becoming a monster, if you decide to do monstrous things.