Last week was rough — a dismal foreshadowing of the years to come. Rights and protections were snatched with every scratch of Trump’s pen, and there were a lot of them. Hundreds of executive orders have been signed, many of which immediately impact the lives of marginalized groups across this country.
There is a degree of fear and anxiety present in people’s lives that is impossible to ignore. Hate is being legitimized at the highest levels of government and dehumanization is taking place to justify the mistreatment of already oppressed populations. These sentiments will only become more pronounced as weeks turn into months, and months into years.
Last week I wrote an article describing the new era of politics we have entered. Government, especially at the federal level, will no longer be able to fix our problems. Both parties are here to terrorize our immigrant community, as seen with the bipartisan cooperation in passing the Laken Riley Act.
We must now turn off the TVs and look to our neighbors, our community members and our friends. We need to stop listening to voices that live in distant cities and instead look to those already acting as leaders at a local level, or become one ourselves. Community building is now the name of the game and last week also showed me what that is going to look like.
On Saturday, over a thousand of these folks gathered in Aurora to stand in solidarity with our immigrant community. To stand in solidarity with our trans community. To stand with Palestine, and stand for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. This country is becoming increasingly hostile towards these communities, but in Aurora that day, everyone was safe. Everyone was loved.
People often think of protests as best associated with anger and other volatile emotions. We are conditioned to view it this way, and while it does take a degree of frustration, even rage, to attend a protest, the atmosphere always feels best associated with empowerment.
Our individual struggles and desires all morphed into a collective solidarity that day, and I could feel each individual feeding off of the passion and empathy of the person next to them. There was shouting, and there were chants. But more importantly, there were smiles everywhere I looked. We all found a political purpose in each other, and in turn, we found healing.
We are living in dark times and in dark times we must resist. But, resistance doesn’t have to be brutal, and it in no way has to be violent. This narrow definition of resistance is what most often comes to mind. But, the most effective resistance is rooted in love and empathy. Resistance, especially in these times, is also one of the most important sources of power.
Protests epitomize this relationship between resistance and empowerment along with the positive feelings and emotions associated with the two phenomena. But that is only a single form of resistance and one that requires more organization than most others do.
Resistance can be as simple as remaining conscious of what you consume. It can take the form of speaking up when no one else will or remaining silent when someone in a position of power seeks to extract a particular response from you. Resistance can even mean picking up a book that pushes against mainstream narratives, or it can take the form of sitting down and drawing what is on your mind.
All in all, resistance is exercising the freedoms that powerful people don’t want you to have.
It is for this reason that resistance is not complicated, and to stay sane in this new political era, we must simplify it for ourselves. We must all crave resistance so that we can identify it in the little things if we are to eventually resist even when we aren’t trying to.
That being said, the most important form of resistance, especially for those like me who have the option of hiding and blending in without fear of persecution, is solidarity. This means listening and making yourself visible instead of invisible. This means nurturing and taking care of your empathy and using it to push back against narratives that aim to turn you into a weapon of oppression. And, this means stomping your foot down when others tell you to do otherwise.
If we are to get through these times, we must not look at ourselves as individuals. We must have the ability to observe any one person and find a piece of ourselves in them and then hold on to those observations as tightly as possible, so when something happens to that stranger, you feel that pain and use it to fuel future struggles.
Resistance will be our freedom, as well as a source of power, but it only exists collectively. Together, we can use these tools to build a community of care. Separate from each other, we can’t build a thing.
