What If Annoyance Is A Civic Duty

If you’ve ever looked at a corrupt local government and thought, “Nothing I do will matter,” we challenge that belief head-on with a tactic that’s almost absurdly simple: make corruption too uncomfortable to keep doing. I’m Heidi, and I’m walking through how sustained, nonviolent pressure can push bad actors to leave without threats, without fights, and without giving them the martyr story they want. 

We dig into Puerto Rico’s 2019 pots-and-pans movement and why a “noise protest” or cacerolazo works when petitions and complaints get ignored. The idea is to create a public spectacle that attracts attention, grows participation, and turns routine power into an ongoing embarrassment. When thousands of people show up consistently, the calculus changes fast. We also talk about using what most people overlook: public records requests and FOIA-style tactics to force transparency, drain time, and document patterns that institutions prefer to bury. 

Then we get personal and local. We talk about the culture that props up corruption, the way communities celebrate flashy wealth and excuse harm, and why that social approval keeps the worst people comfortable. The through-line is accountability: organize small, name your group, use the tools you already have, and accept some discomfort as the price of real change. 

If this hits a nerve, subscribe, share it with one person who’s fed up, and leave a review so more people find practical, nonviolent ways to demand government accountability. What would you do first in your town?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Well, hello there. It's Heidi. It's just a Surviving Changes podcast. All right, so let's continue on for 10 minutes about what we were talking about yesterday. And that is effective means of getting these um pieces of shits out of office. All of them. You don't you don't have to harm them. You don't even have to threaten to harm them. What you need to do

Welcome Back And The Goal

SPEAKER_00 0:44

is make it so uncomfortable and annoying that they choose to leave. Uh it's a strategy, and I can't pronounce it. I don't know how to pr look. I'm very smart some things, and I'm um not very smart in others. My brain power is utilized on the task at hand. So anyway. Puerto Ricans back in July of 2019 ended up getting their governor out by simply beating hots and pans together. That's all they did. Sat outside all of the government buildings for as long as it took. I think it took them, hold on, let me check. I think this one actually took them a couple weeks. Yeah, July 13th and July 24th.

The Pots And Pans Playbook

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Every single night they would go out and start banging all of their cookware. People stick at home would do it, elders would do it. Uh, if you could make it to the streets, then um you would actually go to these people's homes. But it creates such a fucking spectacle and such an annoyance that they're embarrassed. It gets worldwide attention. Imagine. Imagine. You live in a small town that's been corrupted for a long time. No one knows what can be done. Uh, they own the police, they own all of that. Well, and it is worked. Look at other countries have done it. Hold on. Let's see. Because there's a list. Canada has done it, Chile has done it, France has successfully done it, Mexico has done it, Puerto Rico has done it, and Spain has done it. It's essentially a noise protest. Um, but if you did that in the US, in a small town over some corrupt person, you would get local news, you would get international news, you would go viral, and those stupid pieces of shit would leave voluntarily. Right? No force, no force required. Um, it's a spectacle. You need to start making it uncomfortable for those people, um, making it difficult. There's far more of you than there is of them. Start overwhelming the systems. If there's lot cameras that go up in areas that you are at, um, and you can't bang a uh pot and pan together, or you can't make it to some of the other things. Simply put in a freedom of information request for those cameras. Make it difficult for these people to respond. Overflow them in the most annoying of ways, whether that be beating

Weaponizing Paperwork With FOIA

SPEAKER_00 3:23

pot and pans together, requiring them to do their job by sending you um all of the documents associated to that camera. Um, start asking. If you know there's a corrupt police officer, if you have experienced yourself a situation, and you know that cop is corrupt, start getting your friends and family to start making um information requests about that person. Get all the information back. Start asking about their patterns, get that stuff back. First of all, it's gonna be annoying, it's gonna bring attention to all of it. Eventually, those officers aren't gonna be able to testify on any other cases because they're gonna be proven to be corrupt. You're gonna save not just your ass, but all of the asses that have been abused by that police officer. Simple as that. Start making requests, then do something with requests. Go sit outside these fuckers' houses with pots and pans. March in the streets with pots and pans. There are a lot of things that you can do that are outside the box that will draw attention, first of all, to the situation, but it will get these guys to leave voluntarily. They should not be comfortable in these positions, let alone celebrated. Let's start there. Stop celebrating the scumbags like my brother, who drive around in a Lambo, that with money that they have embezzled from the cartel, stolen from good people, they laugh about it. He tells you that he's a family man on a post, and you don't actually pay attention to the people that say, no, you know what? He has a cocaine foster

Stop Celebrating Local Scumbags

SPEAKER_00 5:02

kid that he let age out of the system. Taxpayers were paying for that kid to live in a motel on Aurora Av. Now that kid's a gunslinging gangbanger in South Seattle. There's no helping him. That guy, my brother, is still running around with all of those real estate companies driving that Lambo, and you motherfuckers are saying, Woo-hoo-hoo, he's such a great guy. He's got a neat car. He stole that car from you. He stole that car from you, and he left every single person that he should have helped or should have paid back or should have done the right thing, he hurt them instead. And you celebrate that. Now, if you keep buying houses from people like that, you deserve what you get. Period. If you keep supporting the companies that you know to be bad, and you don't support the people in your community that you know to be good, what do you expect the balance to be in that community? What do you expect it to be? You don't need an IQ over 90 to figure that one out. So, um, but there are a lot of fun ways that you can get to these people. Um, and there's been a lot of countries that have been way farther gone than what you guys are experiencing. So get together, start creating groups, find a fun name, start. Um, there's plenty of ways you can communicate. You have you have so many resources that all those other people didn't pots and pans. Look at they don't even got water. They're actually starting to do that pots and pans thing again here because of water in San Juan. We have such a corrupt government.

Organize A Spectacle That Spreads

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Um, but that's how they drive them out. That's how they got the last governor gone. That's how, hey, Washington, you know, you should get your governor gone. Start going everywhere they go and start banging pots and pans. Make a damn spectacle of it. Embarrass the shit out of them. When there are thousands, tens of thousands of people banging pots and pans saying, go, he'll go. They'll go. You just have to decide that that's what you want to do. Uh, y'all worry, well, I'm gonna lose my job or I'm gonna, it's gonna cost me money. But what you don't understand is the only thing, the whole reason I've been able to survive in my situation all the way around the world is because I'm willing to be uncomfortable. The only thing money buys is comfort, period. It doesn't buy health, it doesn't buy um the only thing it buys is comfort. So, um, and our founders firmly

Comfort Versus Freedom And Urgency

SPEAKER_00 7:55

believed that if you're willing to give up your safety and security for comfort, then you don't deserve either. And that's the way the system is built. So, um you've had it pretty easy for a long time. I would suggest that it's you're running out of time. Um, but you're gonna want to start getting together and be a little uncomfortable and make these people that are in charge. The only way you're gonna win this, you're not gonna win it. Uh fighting them. You just need to get them gone and start fresh from the ground up. You need to rebuild from the ground up. And only you can do it, and you're gonna have to want to so I'm cheering for ya. I got uh take a shower before my masseuse comes over. So we're gonna cut this one minute early today. I'm hiding. This is surviving changes. Tomorrow I don't have um off. I'm working tomorrow, so we'll do a uh substantial podcast tomorrow. Have a great day.