Resistance is dead/ long live the resistance
5 things I'm reading and thinking about this week that give me hope
I’ve been trying to keep my Monday letters light and jaunty, but phew, there is a lot going on. On the home front, I have been teaching so much and feel like I am perpetually behind on all the things. It feels like I’m at an inflection point with my writing and my next book. My broader life is at an inflection point, too. And feminism is undoubtedly at an inflection point in this country and globally.
Meanwhile, the president is yelling at anyone he can get in a room with cameras, and the VP is such a little child I really cannot stand it. I have volumes to say about men and emotional regulation and power, but I’ll save it for another day.
Lately, I’ve been troubled, too, to see lots of sentiments online like “X is resistance”—wherein X is literally anything that we all do everyday. Breathing is resistance!
And I mean, sure, literally persisting right now is a form of resistance. But I fear we’re on the edge of losing the plot, as we often do in moments like this, when it comes to ideas of both “community” and “resistance”. I can already see the “coffee is resistance” mugs queuing up in Bonfire.
Perhaps I’ll go long on some of these observations soon, but for now, it feels like a good time to get offline as much as possible, read, and really think about the small, everyday acts of feminism we can engage in.
Here’s some of what I’m turning to help me think all this through:
Freedom of the press doesn’t exist in America anymore, and
wrote so smartly about the WaPo op-ed section’s new direction and the question of whose “personal liberties and free markets” Bezos is protecting. This has me thinking big thoughts about this column and our community, and my commitment to it. I’ll say more about this soon, but it’s clear that independent media is becoming more important than ever, and that we cannot trust the big spots to get us out of this mess or publish the thinking that will help us through the coming years.