The Joy of Resistance
Finding warmth in a cold world
“I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recongize at the time; I mean joy.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness”
The next four years will feel a lot like hauling sledge hundreds of miles across an ice-sheet. The cold biting wind of MAGA nonsense constantly in our faces. Blizzards of fear and hatred spun up out of nothing by the fools in charge. Waking up each morning, against the odds and conditions, pulling on our boots, taking one step at a time, to survive and persist.
How though? Willpower is necessary but not sufficient. We must have sustenance of some sort, and outright wins at the federal level will be rare. So then we turn to where we have agency: community, regional, state levels. Together, in mutual aid, in cooperative defiance, we can find joy.
The aggression we face will galvanize in us a strength we didn’t have before. The strength to care for each other, to protect one another, to stand up and push back against a power that pretends to be inevitable, but in reality is fragile. Our strength and love and joy is precisely their weakness. Through it we can build a strong coalition that will endure beyond theirs, which is piecemeal, bound together by selfishness and hate.
No, resistance is not easy. Happiness will be scarce against the backdrop of the man-made disaster at the national level. Fascist tactics aim to wear us down, to sap our strength. They expect that we will give in to the cold, each of us curling up alone. But we won’t. Together we will find energy, warmth, joy—despite it all. So when they come to just take what we cherish, we will make them grind, and scrape, and claw for every bit.
