I do not mean this as a rhetorical question: I mean it literally. Tell us what’s stopping you! I don’t want to invalidate you, but the opposite. I’m sure people here would love to help if it’s possible. Post away!
Personally, I think Covid and the general amount of work everyone does are the two biggest obstacles to community building. Not just for me, but everybody I know. It’s nearly impossible to build a community when nobody has the energy to even play a video game together, and actually meeting up in person can literally kill you. There are definitely solutions, but we need to realize them as problems first to find them. If you have suggestions, please share them! Same goes for the issues everyone else shares (if they’re ok with help, of course).
Something that stops organizing around where I live is that no one actually lives here. I don't mean it's underpopulated or rural. I'll be open and say I live in Houston with 7 million people. It's a populated place with plenty of marginalized communities, a whole bunch of queer people, and a very working class character. You'd think it's ripe for organizing, and there are good people who've done good stuff (shout-out to the local IWW and the Starbucks union campaign), but getting anything big off the ground is like pulling teeth.
When I say no one lives here I mean no one stays here. It's a community by happenstance, everyone is here just long enough to move along to somewhere nicer. It's not a place to grind your feet into and refuse to back down, it's a place where you're already worn down and you're scraping up enough to move to a house in the suburbs just leave Texas in general. Not to mention the physical separation of people here. The whole city is a bunch of highways and HEBs masquerading as a society. Everything's so far apart and people are so scattered it's hard to coordinate anything, especially because these are poor, stressed, working class folk who already have a bunch on their plate. Everyone's tired and no one wants to be here.
Me personally I'm impacted by all of that. I dream about leaving, so it's sometimes hard to get too involved with organizing because it would chain me here. I do work around here the best I can, but a lot has to get done. I think a major thing would be getting more Latino people involved. I mean this as constructive, but the socialist orgs around here really do fit the nerdy white guy in college stereotype. That's not necessarily bad but it does mean outreach is a problem.
Non-white folk around here, if they have leftist tendencies, tend to filter into orgs with more focus on fighting racism rather than explicitly advancing socialism. Like there's a Brown Berets chapter here and some César Chávez folk. There are some really cool indigenous people's groups as well. I wish all the orgs here would coordinate more, that would really be a good first step. Most of the time when I see multiple orgs at the same thing it's more by happenstance and shared interests than coordination. Everyone tends to get along like comrades at events, but communication is poor and coherency is worse.
It's not all bad and there's a lot of room to improve. I'm hopeful and I'm gonna keep helping out where I can.
I think your point about the alienation of life in Houston is a good one. Most people haven’t been there that many generations, and especially not in the same neighborhood etc. which is really essential to having a city with a sense of place and a sense of community, which is where solidarity and organizing can spring from most easily.
Housing got really big really recently so i think it will take another couple of generations before people start to cohere into a real identity as a city and neighborhoods etc. Of course there are some communities there like that already, like the black community and probably some Latino areas. But in general it’s a lot of new-ish people without a lot of deep ties to each other.
America is hell.
i just try to stay hopeful. It's not all bad and I do believe in people, even people here where things seem impossible. You can't fool people forever, and there's a limit to how much people will take before something breaks. I try to think back to the sudden burst of energy in the summer of 2020 and how hopeful it felt. I try to think that soon enough we'll see more of that, more sustained and more focused, because most of those people who marched or broke a cop's windows are still around. Good moments will come, we just gotta be ready and we can't be mired down in defeatist fog. We can't miss our moments