BranBucket
Small things you can do:
Document things. Download speeches and clips, save articles, pictures, record your own videos and photos. Keep your receipts, build a weather station, log the effects of this administration on yourself locally. Write a journal. Keep it all offline and be discreet about it. When they try to distance themselves from the inevitable fallout, you can share your own evidence, your own story, and throw it right back in their smug faces.
Take upward flowing money out of the economy any way you can. Repair, reuse, rebuild, swap, share, create, grow, buy local, take on a roommate, do anything you can to avoid pumping cash into the orphan killing, billionare making, machine. Stop feeding Google/Amazon/Meta clicks and advertising dollars. Get a used laptop. Put Linux on it. Get VPN incorporated in a country that doesn’t give a fuck about the US and pirate media. Better yet, make your own media and give it away. Starve the people who will profit off this administration and the chaos it’ll create as much as you can.
Practice opsec. Limit your online profile. Keep location services off. Don’t talk about how you can’t agree with Trump’s policies because the trans kid next door is a good person. Don’t tell people a trans kid lives next door to you. Get a dumb phone or use a privacy focused OS on your smart phone. You can learn how to install a custom ROM, I have faith in you. Help others do the same, make it harder for them to dox people and reduce the data they have to target propaganda and manipulative media with.
The ship was built as simply as possible and fueled with the precise amount needed for it’s weight, there was nothing else to jettison besides the young woman. The plot was intentionally structured around an impossible scenario because the editor of the magazine the story originally appeared in wanted to subvert the “engineer action hero saves the day with a clever idea” trope that was common when it was written. The heavily contrived scenario is the weak point by most people’s estimation, but overall the writing is well done and characterizations are very good.
The story bugs a lot of people due to the total lack of any safety margin for such an important mission as delivering emergency medical supplies. A guy named Don Sakers even wrote a rebuttal called The Cold Solution that was meant to point out a few things the original story overlooked without the idea of a bare minimum ship being changed.
“Cherokee” is a common family legend in the South East, much like having Wyatt Earp’s illegitimate child in the family tree in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
I was always taught that the claim of having a Cherokee princess in the family tree was often used to give nativism and white supremacy more credibility through self-Indigenization, which is what helped it spread and survive to the current day. And as others have pointed out, it was also used as a way to hide race mixing. It’s likely that a lot of people aren’t aware of this, and just think they’re sharing a fun but if family trivia.
And, as I pointed out in another comment, the Cherokee Nation has no requirement for any percentage of native ancestry, so there are a lot of people in Oklahoma and the surrounding area who are more or less white, but are legit members of the Nation under it’s bylaws. Which can add some confusion to the issue.
In Oklahoma, if you can trace your ancestry back to someone who was on the Dawes Rolls, you can apply to be a member of the Cherokee Nation regardless of your percentage of native ancestry. So there are a lot of people who are effectively white, but are part of the Nation and consider themselves part Cherokee.
This is distinct from the “part Cherokee” or “descended form a Cherokee princess” claims that were used to try and legitimize white supremacy in the south.