Performative activism has become the norm in American society thanks to a social media landscape where liking a post or buying a cosmetic item in a game supposedly helps a cause. It also fosters the notion that yelling at bots on Twitter (the website currently known as X) is a noble endeavor. Hopefully I don’t have to get too deep into explaining why this idea is absolute bullshit. The “cause” that people support the most when participating in social media…is social media. A benefit campaign for the victims of a hurricane might provide a few thousand dollars to those affected – a drop in the bucket for what will actually be needed – but it means millions for companies like Twitter and Meta. It means their ads reach more people. It means more people are on their site. And they can use these efforts as a smokescreen to tell more wary consumers that their platforms “help people” and serve as a “town square.” They’ve dodged significant government regulation playing this shell game. But worse, they’ve convinced a lot of people that all they need to do to change the world…is tap a button.
Obviously, there’s nothing new about this mindset. I still have memories of the 1990 Gulf War where Americans at home “did their part” by hanging yellow ribbons everywhere to “support the troops.” It was also used in the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, where 52 Americans were held captive in Tehran for 444 days. But I saw in 1991 as a nine-year-old how fleeting and performative all this ribbon-tying was as kids at school started asking me why my family still had ribbons up just over a year since the Gulf War started. One day I boarded my bus and the driver bluntly asked me the same question. Even this small, ultimately meaningless gesture had become “yesterday’s fashion.” It didn’t matter to them that American soldiers were still over in the Middle East, fighting and dying in (what was at best a questionable) war. The yellow ribbons were out of style. We were committing a faux pas as grave as having our Christmas lights up in June. The war that began with great fanfare and 24-hour live coverage on CNN was tired and boring. Americans had moved on.
I saw this pattern repeat again after the attack on September 11th, 2001. American flag pins were everywhere. Eventually, any politician caught without a flag pin on their lapel would be accused of anything up to and including treason. The validity of whatever they were saying could be called into question simply for not wearing one. Pin-makers of the nation must have rejoiced and slept on mattresses stuffed with cash in the early 2000s. Now, this ties in with the human animal’s disturbing tendency to “groupthink,” which is a whole other kettle of fish, but it was during this period that performative activism turned a sinister corner. Because the Internet had arrived on the scene, and with it a whole new way of doing nothing to “help” someone else.
Bake sales were once the best (and sometimes only) way for a small organization to raise funds. The organization bakes cupcakes, sells them at somewhat inflated prices, and uses or donates the proceeds to whatever they’re trying to help. On a local level, these are a perfectly decent, wholesome-as-Rockwell way of fundraising. You buy a yummy treat from someone you know in your town, and someone in need gets some help. It’s a small chain with links that can be easily checked. If the local homeless shelter doesn’t get the beds they were promised and someone else in town suddenly buys a new car…then you know things went wrong and who’s responsible.
The Internet created a nation- or even world-wide bake sale where you can only ascertain who actually benefits if you’re willing to put in quite a lot of time and effort into finding out. I saw this with my own eyes in 2011 when an EF5 tornado hit Joplin, Missouri, destroying practically half of the town. My family and I had lived there until I was six before moving north to Kansas City, but I still watched the news in horror. Fundraisers to help the victims popped up everywhere. The grocery store I worked at allowed several individuals to set up tables outside the doors so they could collect donations to “help” Joplin. Social media was also clogged with donation-seeking organizations. The problem was…a lot of them were fake. A lot of this “bake sale” money ended up not in the hands of traumatized tornado survivors trying to pick up the pieces…but people who bought a new car. I think of this period a lot, especially as fundraisers for “the Palestinian people” seem to be the new fashionable trend.
But despite the rapidly-shrinking ability to tell who actually benefited from “bake sale activism,” there seemed to be a drastic change in the way people perceived themselves. The $5 they threw into the pot is a drop in the bucket and may not even be going to who they think it is, but they believe they have cancelled the apocalypse. Or they may not be able to donate anything, but instead repost a link to help a “poor disadvantaged youth,” believing that’s all they need do to save this person’s life. And then…most disturbingly…start taking great offense when someone insinuates the obvious: This is not meaningful activism.
My family, once maligned for keeping yellow ribbons up for too long, has also evolved with the times. My oldest brother, Gary Rhoades II, holds a party each year at his property in Leeton, MO called “Silofest.” So named for the large, derelict concrete silo that he inherited when he purchased the land, Silofest has evolved rather curiously into a “charity event,” with the proceeds benefiting the Midwest Music Foundation.
It started as a way for he and his well-to-do buddies from Los Angeles to get drunk and listen to country music while they “roughed it” in a Flyover State. It was also an act of petty revenge against his ex-wife, an attempt to “cleanse the land” after using it as the site of his 2013 wedding. Early Silofests featured a Kansas City band called the Starhaven Rounders as the lone musical performer. Gary would rent a stage, a large tent for dining and possible shelter from the mercurial Midwestern weather, and buy enough barbecue to feed around…50 people. This was Silofest. Gary, who lived, worked, and spent much of his time in the Los Angeles metro area, would fly back a couple days before the blessed day and issue orders to his local family and friends who would end up doing much of the labor and preparation for the event. My elderly and ailing parents were expected to maintain the grounds on which Silofest was held, following detailed and specific instructions to achieve what Gary felt was the best aesthetic presentation of his glorified farmland. Harvesting hay – a small source of income for non-farmers in the area – became an annual battle to time it correctly and do it to specifications. (Between Gary and our father, my family had alienated nearly anyone willing to pay to cut their hay after just a few years.) I was frequently recruited to make posters, flyers and social media posts to promote the events. One year I designed and created beer labels for a small-batch run he had brewed for the event. Another year, I designed a new label AND brewed AND bottled the beer. Each year the event seemed to expand. Gary would add new elements, increase the number of days, the number of performers. But curiously, the number of attendees…fell. The people that had made the first Silofests bearable-approaching-fun had stopped coming.
I attended the 2018 Silofest in the midst of a depression. My relationship with my fiancee was on its last legs, my failure to find employment weighed heavily on me, and the last thing that this quiet, introverted teetotaler wanted to do was drive an hour and a half into rural Missouri to hang out with a bunch of upper-middle-class drunks I barely knew. But I did, because I didn’t want to deal with the fallout from me not attending. I knew it was a mistake the second I arrived. Listening to the wildly-out-of-touch rambling of a group of people who each made more money in a year than I had in the previous ten did nothing to improve my mood. I quietly ate my plate of lukewarm pulled pork alone in a crowd. After two hours, I was done. I told Gary I was thinking of leaving, but he would have none of it. He insisted I stay, then promptly left to go talk to his friends. I milled around for another half hour, then got in my car and drove home without saying another word to anyone.
By the time of the 2019 Silofest, my life had only gotten worse. The relationship with my fiancee had ended, I was now working for less than $1000 a month for my other brother, Lee, and was staying in Gary’s house in Kansas City, expected to pay him $500 a month in rent. (For the record, Gary had three separate properties in two states at this point.) I had brewed the beer, made the labels, and made signage once again. Gary sent me a picture to be edited in advance of the event. It was a picture from an earlier Silofest, a group picture of everyone who attended. But despite knowing that I had attended, I wasn’t in the picture. My ex and her sister and everyone else was visible. But I was missing. He hadn’t noticed and hadn’t cared. About a week before, I decided to “reward” myself if I could make it though another Silofest by getting some nail polish and painting my nails for the first time. In trans parlance, this was my “egg cracking,” but I didn’t know that at the time. Understandably, a lot of the Silofests had started to blend together at this point, but I believe this one was marked by heavy rains that hampered the entire event. Still, I made it through. And I painted my nails.
Then 2020 came. I hope I don’t have to tell you that was a hard year for a lot of us. For me, it meant that Gary ousted me from his Kansas City home before the lockdowns and eviction moratoriums would kick in. Gary was a lawyer who dealt mainly in housing law, so it’s hard to see his actions as anything but self-serving in retrospect. He told me he had “some nurses” who wanted to rent the house during the global pandemic, and that I would have to move down to the farm and live with my other brother. The nurses never materialized. The house sat vacant for the entire lockdown. The house I moved to was a half-hour away from the nearest…anything. The internet was abysmal at best. Holding Zoom calls – the main way of communicating during the peak pandemic days – was impossible. Lee had no work for us, and I could not find work. We lived off our relief checks. I contemplated suicide often. I imagined them finding me hanging from the big maple tree out front. I had told my entire family if I ended up at the farm, I would very likely kill myself, but that is where they put me. I survived. I kept painting my nails. And rather than bolster my mental health, my family would take turns shitting on me for giving myself manicures. Silofest went “virtual” that year. I did not attend.
In 2021, I finally convinced my mother to give me enough money to leave. I confronted both her and Lee in the kitchen that she had grown up in. Told her how much I’d been making, how little I had. Her face fell. Lee paced back and forth like a wounded, angry gorilla. I got the sense that this was a disturbing revelation for my mother. I got the sense that my brothers didn’t want her to know how bad things were. She gave me the money. And I ran like hell. My partner and I rented a U-Haul, packed up our stuff, and rented an apartment sight-unseen in Portland, Oregon, a city I had never seen before. It didn’t matter. It had to be better than where I was. Gary allowed me extremely limited access to his Kansas City home so I could gather some of the belongings I’d left behind. I did so under the watchful eye of his “personal assistant.” I only managed to get a fraction of my possessions. On the day of the move, Lee grudgingly helped. He shook my hand and said “End of an era.” I agreed.
Then I drove a U-Haul towing my car across the country in July in 100-degree heat in less than 48 hours. A couple months later, another virtual Silofest was held. I still did not attend.
In 2022, I finally started hormone treatment therapy and did so without family or a community supporting me. I had stopped communicating with anyone back home aside from my mother. But I got a text out of the blue from Gary that summer. He sent me an image he’d made for that year’s Silofest and that in making it he tried to do what he thought I would have done. The image looked like crap. I told him he treated me like garbage and it was wildly irresponsible to be holding live events during the pandemic (the wave caused by the Omicron variant was in full force at the time). He deflected. I don’t know what happened at that Silofest, either.
In January 2023, I confronted them both via text message. I had finally come to realize just how much they had used and abused me and demanded that they both pay me what they owed me for the labor and ingenuity they had so blatantly taken advantage of. They refused. They accused me of “running” and that I should “be a man” and get a job. I told them I was a trans woman now. They told me to go fuck myself. And I told them to never contact me again in any way, shape or form. Gary immediately texted me again, ignoring a boundary I’d set just minutes before. That was the last time I heard anything from my “brothers,” Gary Wayne Rhoades II and Lee Shannon Rhoades. I don’t know if a Silofest was held in 2023.
It’s 2024 now. My father passed away in June. He had no funeral, because he had no friends. He was horrifically abusive to both my mother and myself. Most mental images I have of him are his face screaming at one or both of us. He couldn’t use a microwave but called me “stupid.” My brothers’ idea of what it is to “be a man” came directly from him. I felt mostly relief at news of his passing. I see two therapists once a week each to deal with my cPTSD. I’m trying desperately to get supports for autism. Between my mental state and my gender identity, my search for employment has been demoralizing and brutal. I have found Oregon far less “progressive” than advertised. In a few days, I will attend a hearing to try and hold off impending eviction for awhile longer. If I am forced to leave my apartment, I will have no one and nothing and will very likely die on the street, but I no longer have any desire to harm myself. That is where I am today, September 28th.
Gary Rhoades II loves Starbucks, has a copy of a Ta-Nehisi Coates book on his shelf, fundraised for Obama, and will tell you he has done his part. He retired from his job in Los Angeles and moved back to Missouri, a state where trans people are effectively illegal and they still kill Black men for no reason. He is the epitome of a performative white liberal, someone who can’t even be bothered to help his own family, but will make a big show out of giving a little to someone else. As I stare down homelessness today, he’s holding another Silofest.
I hope it rains.
