I’ve worked in politics for a long time. Long enough to have met good candidates, bad candidates, candidates who absolutely should be in office, and candidates who should perhaps be lovingly encouraged to explore ceramics (and they shall forever remain nameless… here). I’ve met people who can deliver a flawless stump speech and then become an entirely different human being the second the microphone turns off. I’ve met candidates who can say “working families” with tremendous conviction but seem mildly alarmed when any actual working family enters the room.

And then, every once in a while, you meet somebody and think: Oh. You actually mean this.

Justin J. Pearson is one of those people.

Last Thursday night, Justin won the Democratic primary for Congress in Tennessee’s newly redrawn 9th Congressional District, and there are approximately 47 ways I could explain why that matters.

I could tell you about Memphis, or about a congressional map redrawn in ways that fracture Black political power. I could tell you about Justin being expelled from the Tennessee legislature after joining a protest demanding action on gun violence, only for his community to basically say, “Cute. Put him back.” I could tell you about a young Black man from Memphis looking at a political system that has repeatedly suggested he might consider being quieter, smaller, more polite, perhaps less Black, and definitely less disruptive — and deciding to run for Congress anyway.

All of that matters. But if you want to understand why I think Justin is the real deal, you need to know what he did when they changed his district.

He got on a bus.

And no, this is not a metaphor. I’m not being literary. The man literally got on a bus.

The new district stretches across 15 counties and nearly 200 miles. The standard political response to that kind of redistricting is fairly predictable: a press conference, maybe a lawsuit, definitely a fundraising email with a subject line like BREAKING: THEY’RE TRYING TO SILENCE US, followed by seven exclamation points and somebody asking me if we can squeeze in another text before dinner.

Listen, I work in digital politics. I’m not judging. I’ve participated in the emergency subject-line industrial complex. I know what I’ve done. This is partially my fault.

But Justin did something else. He went to meet the people he was now asking to represent. He went to churches, community centers, diners, courthouses, and front porches in places most national political reporters couldn’t find with both hands and Google Maps. Most importantly, he listened.

I keep thinking about that bus, partly because I’ve been on a version of it myself.

Earlier this spring, I rode with the Georgia Working Families Party from Atlanta to Montgomery for All Roads Lead to the South. The bus was full of organizers, faith leaders, labor folks, movement people, coffee, and Krispy Kreme. At one point, I accidentally sat on a donut. Movements contain multitudes. And somewhere between Georgia and Alabama — perhaps while peeling glaze off my pants — I found myself thinking about how profoundly low-tech movement work in the South actually is.

We love talking about infrastructure in politics — voter files, digital tools, money, campaign plans, data — they’re all infrastructure. Yes, fine, all true. But Southern movement work has always understood another kind of infrastructure: relationships.

It’s the woman who knows everybody at church, the organizer who has been showing up in the same county for ten years, and the auntie who knows which family just lost somebody. It’s the conversation after service, the beauty shop, the fish fry, the folding chair, the front porch, and the long phone call when somebody’s mama gets sick. It’s the slow, often profoundly unglamorous work of being around people long enough that they trust you enough to tell you what they actually need. The South understands something national politics routinely forgets: you can’t organize people you haven’t listened to.

This sounds painfully obvious. Apparently, it’s not.

Most political communications work is built around speaking: find the message, test the message, deliver the message, repeat the message, target the message, optimize the message, and, for the love of God, whatever you do, stay on message. We’ve built entire industries around figuring out how to talk at people more efficiently.

Movement work starts somewhere else. It starts with listening.

That matters when you think about Justin’s path into politics, because he wasn’t created in a lab where six consultants stood around a whiteboard and said, “What if we found a young Black guy with glasses?” Before the Tennessee Three, before the national television interviews, before this congressional campaign, Justin was organizing alongside his community in Memphis, including in the fight against the Byhalia Connection pipeline.

His politics didn’t begin with a campaign announcement. They began with the belief that ordinary people should have power over the decisions shaping their lives. That distinction matters because movement work teaches you something electoral politics occasionally forgets: the people aren’t scenery. They’re not props for your campaign commercial, rows in a voter file, “low-propensity universes,” or an audience sitting around waiting for your perfectly tested message to arrive. They’re the whole damn point.

When your politics begin there, the question changes. Instead of simply asking, How do I convince these people to vote for me?, you start asking, What are we fighting for together, and how do we build enough power to get it?

That’s what I mean when I say a campaign is community-rooted. I don’t mean that the candidate has mastered the word “community”. Everybody in politics knows how to say community. Put six political consultants in a room for 20 minutes, and somebody will eventually write PEOPLE-POWERED, COMMUNITY-DRIVEN LEADERSHIP on a whiteboard. I promise, and I’m eternally sorry.

What matters is whether the campaign itself is built differently. You show up, sit down, and listen, and then — this is the part people sometimes skip — you demonstrate that the listening changed something. It changed what you fought for, how you organized, who you brought to the table, or what you thought was possible.

Which brings me to the date: August 6, 2026.

Exactly 61 years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. And if you have known me for any meaningful length of time, you know I’m physically incapable of allowing historical irony to mind its own business, so here we are.

Every August, we remember the Voting Rights Act as if it were a completed group project. Somebody posts a black-and-white picture of John Lewis (brick not pictured). Somebody else posts footage from Bloody Sunday. We get Fannie Lou Hamer (still sick and tired of being sick and tired after all these years). We get Martin Luther King, Jr. (especially if you’re in Atlanta). If the algorithm is feeling adventurous, somebody remembers Diane Nash existed. Everybody agrees Selma was terrible, everybody agrees the Voting Rights Act was important, and then somehow we return to our regularly scheduled programming as though the story had a happy ending.

Spoiler alert: It did not.

The Voting Rights Act may be one of the only laws Americans celebrate annually while watching it be dismantled in real time. Imagine having a birthday party at your house while someone is taking the roof off. Happy birthday to the kitchen! Ma’am, there is no longer a wall in here.

Somewhere along the way, we turned the Voting Rights Act into proof that eventually the system works. I think that’s almost exactly the wrong lesson. The Voting Rights Act is actually proof that organized people can force systems to change.

The federal government didn’t wake up one morning in 1965, stretch, pour itself a cup of coffee, gaze thoughtfully out the window, and say, You know what? Racism is bad. Let’s knock this off.

Nahhhhhh… What actually happened is that people organized. They marched, registered voters, went to jail, got beaten, lost their lives, and kept going anyway. This country was dragged toward democracy kicking and screaming. Some days, you can still hear the screaming. Some days it’s me.

This distinction matters. If you believe the system eventually fixes itself, your political job is to wait. If you believe organized people change systems, your job is to build.

Get into that math.

Which brings me right back to Justin on that bus. The people who redrew his district drew lines on a map, and Justin’s response was to build relationships across those lines.

Think about that for a minute. A legislature can declare that 15 counties are now a congressional district, but it can’t make those 15 counties a political community. A map can’t manufacture solidarity. A redistricting committee can’t create trust. People have to do that themselves, conversation by conversation, church by church, county by county, folding chair by folding chair.

That’s what makes his response so politically interesting to me. When somebody attacks your political power, you can respond only defensively, or you can defend what you have while building something they didn’t anticipate.

There is, of course, a particular kind of advice progressive candidates in the South tend to get: be careful, don’t say too much, don’t talk about race too much, definitely don’t talk about class too much, and please don’t make anybody uncomfortable. Do not, under any circumstances, have an opinion that has not been workshopped by somebody who lives 700 miles away. Sand yourself down until you’re smooth enough to squeeze through whatever tiny opening conventional political wisdom has decided is available to you.

Justin offers a different proposition. What if you tell people what you actually believe? What if you’re clear about who you’re fighting for and why? What if you listen before deciding you already know what everybody needs? What if your politics sound like they came from the place you’re trying to represent instead of a focus group in Washington?

What if your values aren’t the thing standing between you and power? What if they’re part of the reason people trust you with it?

Look, I work for the Working Families Party. I’m also a dues-paying member, voluntarily, which in this economy should tell you something. One of the reasons I joined WFP before I ever worked there was that I believed the South isn’t a place to harvest votes. It’s a place to build power. The question can’t be only how many people we can turn out on Election Day. It also has to be, what can those people do together the day after?

That’s why the Voting Rights Act anniversary matters to me, too.

The people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge weren’t trying to become historical figures. They were trying to vote. The people organizing Freedom Summer weren’t thinking, I hope this looks good in the museum exhibit. They were trying to survive long enough to change their communities and their country.

And most movement work doesn’t look historic while you’re doing it.

I know because I’ve spent years working in voting rights, and mostly it looks like spreadsheets, volunteer trainings, field plans, somebody asking whether the RSVP link works, arguments about button colors, six versions of the same email, text messages, Google Docs, too much coffee, not enough sleep, and someone inevitably saying, “Can everybody see my screen?”

History is almost never recognizable while you are standing inside of it.

That’s also why I think we misunderstand political victories when all we look at is Election Night. We see the speech, percentages on a screen, and the victory graphic somebody made in Canva six hours earlier but was afraid to export because we don’t tempt God before polls close.

But victories are built long before anybody calls the race. They’re built when somebody knocks on a door, when someone volunteers for the first time, when an organizer remembers a name, and when one neighbor brings another neighbor. They’re built when a candidate gets on a bus because the boundaries of the community they’re asking to represent have changed — and then sits down and listens.

Justin’s story isn’t finished. November is coming, and the terrain is difficult by design.

But if we only believe in organizing in places where victory has already been made convenient for us, that’s not actually organizing — that’s shopping.

You build where your people are because people deserve political power whether somebody in Washington has decided their district is “winnable” or not. You build because campaigns can leave behind more than candidates. They can leave behind leaders, volunteers, donors, organizers, relationships, confidence, infrastructure, and a community that has practiced using its own power.

We’ve always understood that in the South, which is why it makes me a little crazy when people talk about this region as though it’s a political problem some national institution needs to solve. Every election cycle, somebody discovers the South all over again. Then they lose something. Then somebody writes a memo saying the South is impossible. Then the money leaves. Meanwhile, Southern organizers keep working. This has been happening approximately since Reconstruction.

The South has never lacked people willing to fight. What it has lacked is sustained investment in the people already doing it: the aunties, organizers, faith leaders, workers, students, candidates, the person who knows everybody on the block, and the person who knows you have to knock twice at Miss So-and-So’s house because she won’t hear you the first time. These are the people building the slow infrastructure of democracy while the rest of the country periodically remembers we exist.

So, yes, Justin J. Pearson won his primary on August 6, 2026, sixty-one years to the day after the Voting Rights Act was signed. It’s almost offensively on the nose, and I love it.

Sixty-one years ago, Black Southerners organized until this country was forced to expand the boundaries of its democracy. Sixty-one years later, a young Black movement leader from Memphis ran in a congressional district whose boundaries had been radically changed — and won his primary.

I don’t believe history bends itself toward justice. History has no muscles. People bend it to their will. Organized people. Stubborn people. People willing to sit in folding chairs, knock on doors, argue about RSVP links, ride buses, listen to each other, and keep building when somebody moves the line.

Last Thursday night in Tennessee, Justin J. Pearson bent it a little further.

Now comes the next part.

As another hurricane season hurtles toward the Gulf Coast, a new article in Nature Sustainability has declared that South Louisiana has reached a “point of no return.” Experts project that Louisiana’s coastline could collapse inland by more than 62 miles because of rising sea levels, increasingly destructive hurricanes, climate change, and decades of environmental degradation accelerated by the oil and gas industry. The projections are grim.

But guess what? The people of Louisiana know this. Trust me. We know.

New Yorkers don’t need annual reminders about rats. Floridians don’t require studies confirming the existence of humidity. And Louisianians do not need a peer-reviewed journal article to inform us that the coast is disappearing. We’ve been watching it happen. We know about the wetlands. We know about the storms. We know that our homes sit on what experts call the most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world. We’ve seen the maps before.

What fascinates me is not the diagnosis. It’s the proposed treatment.

After feeding decades of climate data into sophisticated models and consulting some of the finest institutions in the world, the experts arrived at a stunning conclusion: maybe Louisiana should just... go away. Not in those words, of course. The preferred language is “voluntary relocation,” “managed retreat,” “shoreline retreat,” and “coastal depopulation.” The kind of language that sounds reasonable if you’ve spent too much time in conference rooms and not enough time sitting on somebody’s porch.

One thing I’ve noticed about certain climate conversations is that they sometimes sound less like discussions about communities and more like discussions about underperforming startups. The numbers don’t work. The future isn’t viable. We need an exit strategy. Pivot! Sunset the project. Maximize efficiencies. Which is a fascinating way to describe the homeland of millions of people.

The thing that keeps bothering me about this conversation is that I’ve heard it before. After Hurricane Katrina, one of the comments that stuck with me wasn’t about the levees or FEMA or the floodwaters. It was people asking whether New Orleans should exist at all. Maybe we don’t need New Orleans? Maybe people shouldn’t rebuild? Maybe it’s time to move on? I remember hearing versions of that over and over again and thinking: excuse me? Maybe you shouldn’t exist. What a profoundly bizarre thing to say about somebody else’s home. What a tone-deaf nightmare. Imagine telling New Yorkers that Manhattan is inconvenient, and perhaps we should simply call it a day. Imagine looking at San Francisco after an earthquake and suggesting California just give up. Imagine telling Floridians that Miami seems like a lot of trouble, and maybe we should pack it in. Yet somehow people felt perfectly comfortable saying it about New Orleans.

What I realize now is that many people weren’t really talking about New Orleans. They were revealing something about themselves. They were revealing how easy it is to confuse vulnerability with disposability. How easy it is to look at a place facing real danger and decide the simplest solution is to stop caring about it.

Twenty years later, I hear echoes of that same impulse in some climate conversations. The language is more sophisticated now. The maps are prettier. The modeling is better. The PowerPoints have improved dramatically. But sometimes the underlying message feels remarkably familiar.

Maybe we don’t need New Orleans? Maybe we don’t need coastal Louisiana? Maybe we should stop trying?

And if that’s the best answer one of the wealthiest societies in human history can come up with, then honestly, we’re cooked.

The climate crisis isn’t unsolvable. But because we’ve apparently decided that surrendering entire communities is more realistic than confronting the industries and political failures that helped create the problem, we’ll just say it is. That should scare everyone.

Because once you’ve decided one community is expendable, it’s only a matter of time before somebody decides yours is too. Because the problem isn’t that these experts misunderstand the climate science. The problem is that many of them fundamentally misunderstand Louisiana.

Louisiana makes perfect sense to people who live there and almost no sense to people who don’t. It’s a place where entire family histories can be traced through recipes. A place where funerals sometimes involve brass bands. A place where a stranger can become your cousin in the span of a single conversation. A place where people will drive two hours for a plate of seafood and consider that normal behavior. A place where “Where’d you go to high school?” can function as both a greeting and a background check. And perhaps most importantly, a place where people understand themselves as part of the landscape rather than separate from it.

A few years ago, I took a swamp tour through the Atchafalaya Basin with my brother and sister-in-law. I’ve spent my whole life in and around Louisiana, but being out there felt different. The water was impossibly still. The cypress trees rose out of the swamp like ancient sentinels. Spanish moss hung from branches that looked older than memory itself. The air felt alive. The kind of alive that reminds you humans are not the main characters of the story. As we moved through the basin, I felt something that’s difficult to explain to people who didn’t grow up around water. I didn’t feel like I was visiting nature. I felt like I was visiting family. The swamp didn’t feel foreign, it felt familiar and inherited. It felt like something I belonged to and something that belonged to me. That’s not a policy argument, it’s a relationship.

And that’s the thing that gets lost when people start talking about relocating entire communities as though they’re moving pieces around a Monopoly board. The Atchafalaya Basin isn’t just beautiful scenery. It’s one of the most important ecological systems in North America. It’s a massive floodway. A carbon sink. A habitat for countless species. A critical part of the Mississippi River system. People often call it the lungs of Louisiana. But honestly, that’s underselling it. The Atchafalaya is one of the reasons the entire region can still breathe. When people talk about Louisiana as though it’s some quaint local problem, they miss the point.

Louisiana isn’t decorative. It’s infrastructure — ecological infrastructure, cultural infrastructure, and economic infrastructure. The rest of the country benefits from Louisiana every single day — from fisheries, shipping, ports, energy, wetlands that buffer storms, and ecosystems that support life far beyond state lines. You don’t get to spend generations benefiting from Louisiana and then act surprised when somebody asks whether it’s worth saving.

One expert quoted in the article described New Orleans as being in a terminal condition and in need of palliative care. I actually think that’s a useful metaphor. Just not in the way people seem to mean it. Because palliative care is not abandonment. Palliative care doesn’t mean giving up. Palliative care doesn’t mean handing somebody a pamphlet about moving to Houston and calling it a day. Palliative care means preserving dignity, autonomy, and quality life. It means meeting people where they are and supporting them in making decisions about their own future.

The people of South Louisiana deserve that dignity. They deserve more than condescension disguised as realism. More than PowerPoint presentations about strategic retreat. More than being treated like collateral damage in a climate model.

Maybe the coast will continue disappearing. Maybe some places truly can’t be saved in their current form. But there is a difference between accepting reality and accepting abandonment. And too often, our political system confuses the two.

What frustrates me most is that America can imagine the disappearance of Louisiana far more easily than it can imagine holding powerful industries accountable. We’re told to be realistic about losing our homes. Nobody asks Exxon to be realistic. We’re told to be realistic about disappearing wetlands. Nobody asks politicians to be realistic about decades of regulatory failure. We’re told to be realistic about retreat. Nobody asks billion-dollar corporations to retreat. Funny how that works.

As hurricane season begins once again, Louisianians don’t need another lecture about vulnerability. We know exactly how vulnerable we are. What we need is a country capable of understanding that places have value beyond their market efficiency.

The people proposing retreat see a coastline. The people who live there see home.

And those are not the same thing.

Here’s my submission —

The greatest act of love anyone has ever performed for me involved jellybeans.

My father died in 2019. Every year on February 2, the anniversary of his death, I celebrate what I jokingly call Happy Death Day. It sounds morbid, but it isn’t. My father was a musician, a teacher, and the kind of person who left behind stories so large they occasionally enter a room before he does.

His favorite candy was jellybeans.

The first February after he died, I bought a bag and ate them while looking through old photographs. The next year, I did it again. Somewhere along the way, it became a ritual.

A few years ago, someone I was dating asked why there were six industrial-sized bags of jellybeans sitting on my kitchen counter in the middle of winter.

I explained.

The following February 2, they showed up at my house carrying what appeared to be enough jellybeans to survive a minor apocalypse.

Not a romantic card. Not flowers. Not a dramatic speech about grief and healing.

Just jellybeans.

I laughed so hard I cried.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about love. Most of the time it isn’t grand. Nobody hires a blimp. Nobody stands outside your window holding a boombox. Love is often just someone paying attention.

Someone noticing the weird little rituals that help you carry your sadness.

Someone remembering what matters to you when it would have been easier not to.

The jellybeans didn’t bring my father back.

But every February, when I open a bag and remember him, I also remember that someone once loved me enough to notice why I needed them.

And honestly, that’s its own kind of miracle.

This year, we’re living through something different and substantially darker.

We’ve watched voting rights protections weakened after the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais v. Louisiana. We’ve watched federal power openly threaten local self-government in places like Washington, D.C. We’ve watched attacks on immigrants, trans people, universities, journalists, public servants, and anyone deemed inconvenient to the project of consolidating power. The mask is gone. And that changes how Juneteenth lands.

Juneteenth has always been a story about information withheld. About powerful people deciding that other people didn’t deserve access to the truth. About freedom existing on paper while violence continued in practice. And that honestly feels less like history and more like a user manual now.

The plantation owners in Texas knew and the enslaved people there didn’t. That information delay was the point. That’s what Juneteenth asks us to understand — it’s not merely that freedom arrived late, but that powerful people often profit from making sure other people don’t know what’s possible.

Today, that looks like people telling you that your vote doesn’t matter. It looks like convincing people democracy is already dead so they stop fighting for it. It looks like overwhelming people with so much crisis, outrage, and catastrophe that they lose track of what’s actually happening. We’re all drowning trying to drink from a firehose.

And if last year’s essay was about space-time compression, this year’s essay might be about something else entirely: the politics of disorientation.

Every day brings another headline that would’ve been unthinkable five years ago. A president threatens a city’s self-government? Federal agents raid voting rights organizations? Climate scientists tell us places like New Orleans may be approaching a point of no return? Families disappear into detention systems? Billionaires buy influence while working people struggle to keep the lights on? It’s wild to me. The news cycle moves so fast that yesterday’s constitutional crisis becomes today’s forgotten story. Power benefits when people lose their sense of sequence and when everything feels unprecedented, and nothing feels actionable. When every alarm is ringing, eventually people stop listening.

But Black people — especially Black Southerners — have practice with this. We come from people who learned how to identify reality underneath propaganda. We’ve learned that official timelines and actual timelines are often two different things.

The government said freedom arrived in 1863. The people of Galveston learned about it in 1865. The date on the paper wasn’t the date freedom became real and that distinction matters. But freedom isn’t an announcement if there’s no implementation.

And that’s where I find myself thinking less about Octavia Butler’s prophecy and more about her discipline. Everybody talks about how Butler predicted the future. Not enough people talk about what she actually did — paid attention, studied patterns, and refused denial. She looked directly at the world as it existed and followed the logic to its conclusion.

Juneteenth still offers a lesson for us if we’re listening. History doesn’t automatically bend toward justice. Progress is not inevitable. Freedom will not eventually arrive if we wait long enough. Juneteenth shows us that freedom required people to carry the news. It required people to organize to enforce what was already supposed to be true.

And that’s still the assignment.

If 2025 was the year many people realized democracy was more fragile than they thought, 2026 is the year we’re learning that democracy isn’t a destination at all; it’s a practice. You either do it or lose it.

Juneteenth will always feel like a time machine to me because it collapses the distance between then and now. A holiday commemorating delayed freedom lands differently when politicians are openly discussing whose votes should count, whose communities deserve representation, whose cities deserve self-government, and whose humanity is negotiable. The technology might change but the underlying struggle remains remarkably familiar.

Which brings me back to something I wrote last year — Black joy remains expansive. I believe that even more now because the circumstances are so much worse. Joy has never been evidence that things are ok, but it’s evidence that people refuse to surrender their humanity in the face of destruction.

The people celebrating the first Juneteenth in Texas weren’t celebrating the end of struggle. Reconstruction’s betrayals were already waiting around the corner with Jim Crow fast on its heels. But they understood that hope is a discipline.

So, this Juneteenth, I’m thinking less about delayed freedom and more about unfinished freedom. I’m thinking about New Orleans and Washington, D.C. I’m thinking about voting rights organizers and climate organizers. I’m thinking about Black women who have spent generations carrying warnings nobody wanted to hear until it was too late. And I’m thinking about what it means to remain soft enough to love people while being clear-eyed enough to understand exactly what we’re up against.

The point of Juneteenth isn’t that freedom arrived. The point is that people kept fighting until it did.

And then they kept fighting after that, too.

I wish I were exaggerating. I am not.

What began as casual curiosity quickly became the kind of viewing experience where you look up six hours later and realize you’ve consumed enough livestream archives, reaction videos, exposés, former member interviews, police footage, relationship drama, and amateur internet detective work to qualify for three college credits.

Friends, what a ride.

For those unfamiliar, NatureBoy built an online following around a mix of Black spirituality, wellness culture, conspiracy theories, pseudo-philosophy, charisma, manipulation, and increasingly alarming behavior. Over time, he gathered followers who relocated to live with him in what became a deeply controlling and abusive cult environment. The details are quite literally wild.

But what fascinated me wasn’t just him. It was the ecosystem.

Watching the saga unfold felt like discovering an entire hidden internet that exists adjacent to the internet most people think they use. There is an entire Black online universe built around wellness, spirituality, alternative healing, masculinity, femininity, manifestation, hotep ideology, veganism, consciousness, numerology, astrology, anti-colonial politics, trauma, self-help, and outright grifting. Some of it is thoughtful. Some of it is healing. Some of it is community-building. And some of it is a straight shot into the abyss.

NatureBoy wasn’t an anomaly. He was an extreme example of something much larger.

One of the things cult documentaries often miss is that people don’t join cults because they’re stupid. They join because they’re looking for something. It could be lots of things: meaning, community, belonging, healing, answers, a framework that explains why their life sucks, or a family. And, if we’re being honest, Black people have been sold a lot of reasons to go looking. American institutions haven’t exactly earned our universal trust. Healthcare fails us. Schools fail us. Churches sometimes fail us. Politics definitely fails us. The economy sure as shit fails us. So people go searching.

The problem is that when legitimate questions meet charismatic certainty, things can get dangerous fast. Especially online. Because the internet rewards confidence far more than wisdom.

NatureBoy understood something that a lot of influencers understand now: if you livestream your life long enough, people stop feeling like followers and start feeling like participants. Parasocial relationships become real relationships. Viewers become supporters. Supporters become defenders. Defenders become disciples. And suddenly you’re not building an audience anymore. You’re building a reality.

Watching this documentary also made me realize how much livestream culture has quietly changed our relationship to intimacy. There was a time when cult leaders needed compounds. Now all they need is wi-fi.

They don’t have to isolate followers from the world if they can become the world. The livestream never ends. The discourse never stops. The algorithm always has another video. And before you know it, you’ve watched 500 parts of a documentary series and started referring to people you’ve never met by their first names.

Not that I would know anything about that.

The other thing I kept thinking about is how many of the conversations happening in these spaces start from real wounds. Black people deserve healing. Black people deserve spiritual exploration. Black people deserve wellness practices that aren’t rooted in exploitation. Black people deserve community. The tragedy is that those legitimate desires often become entry points for people selling certainty rather than liberation. And certainty is one hell of a drug.

Anyway, if anyone needs me, I’ll be spending the next several weeks explaining to my friends why I suddenly know way too much about a cult I never joined.

The internet is a strange place.

And YouTube remains one of the most effective educational institutions and psychological warfare programs ever created.

Be careful out there, kids.

Emma Goldman never got stranded at a tiki bar in Farmington, NM, after an emergency plane landing, but I think she would have understood the assignment.

A few weeks ago, I went on what can only be described as a Great Western Adventure™. There was a wedding in Santa Fe. There was an emergency landing. There was a three-hour bus ride through rural New Mexico. There were mountains, open mics, sand dunes, hot tubs, navigation decisions that, for me, hinged solely on snacks, and enough laughter to temporarily restore my faith in humanity.

And somewhere between New Mexico and Colorado, I kept thinking about that quote.

Not because this was a political trip. It was quite the opposite, in fact. That’s what made it feel important to me. I spend most of my life thinking about politics, organizing, elections, democracy, fascism, narrative strategy, coalition building, and the general fate of the republic. You know, light work. My browser history alone should qualify me for workers’ comp.

And the work matters. I believe that deeply. But two things can definitely be true because I also think movement spaces sometimes develop a bad habit of not talking about what we’re fighting for. We’ll talk your ear off all day about what we’re fighting against. Billionaires? Racism? Exploitation? Authoritarianism? Fascism? We’re experts at laying all that out. And, yes- good! I love that for us. But what’s the destination? Because if the answer isn’t joy, I think we’ve lost the plot.

The wedding was beautiful. The road trip afterward was even better. I got to spend a week on the open road with friends who are family and family who are friends. That car was filled with road snacks (courtesy of the trusty feed bag), good music, inside jokes, and farts. It was the kind of trip where nobody knows what day it is anymore, and every stop takes forty-five minutes longer than expected because somebody saw a cute store. (That somebody was probably me.)

One of the gifts of travel is that it reminds you America is much bigger than whatever discourse is happening online. The country changes every few hundred miles. The food changes. The accents change. The landscape and the architecture change. And the pace changes. The assumptions people make about what matters change. What’s cooler than that? The more I travel this country, the more I realize America is not one thing. It’s thousands of cultures stacked on top of one another. We’ve got Indigenous histories mixing and mingling with Black histories and immigrant histories and rural histories and urban histories. Layers upon layers of people figuring out how to survive, adapt, and make meaning.

The more I get out into the country, the more I love America. Not because I become blind to its failures. Not because I forget its violence. Not because I stop wanting it to be better. But because I’m reminded that the people are often better than the systems. There’s so much beauty, creativity, weirdness, and resilience out here. It’s mind-boggling if you think about it.

We drove through New Mexico and Colorado, and I have to tell you: this country is also just offensively beautiful. Every turn looked fake. We were constantly being accosted by tiny towns that looked like a lesbian bookstore owner somehow became the city planner. And then we stopped at the Great Sand Dunes. Just enormous dunes sitting in Colorado like somebody accidentally dropped the Sahara Desert into a Bob Ross painting.

And standing there, looking at all of it, I kept thinking about belonging. Because there is something complicated about being a Black woman moving through these wide-open Western landscapes. America loves telling stories about freedom and the open road. But Black people — and Black women especially — are often taught that public space belongs to us only when we’re working inside of it. Sometimes you can feel that lingering glance and the subtle surprise that you’re there. There’s an assumption that nature, leisure, wandering, and discovery belong more naturally to someone else. Americans have spent centuries trying to convince people that ownership equals belonging. But nature exposes the lie. The mountains don’t recognize property lines. The rivers don’t care about nationalism. The desert doesn’t ask who your people are before allowing you to witness its beauty.

Nobody owns the land. At best, we’re temporary guests passing through ancient places that existed long before the United States and will exist long after whatever version of it we’re currently arguing about. Something in that remembrance feels healing when you think about how there are already so many forces in this country designed to make Black women feel out of place and too much. But standing under a huge Western sky, looking at mountains older than capitalism itself, you remember that you’re not the disruption. You belong here, too.

And maybe that’s why the trip felt emotional. I got to feel expansive in a world that often asks Black women to shrink. Which is how I found myself in Crested Butte, CO, hiking three and a half miles up a mountain despite several past orthopedic objections from my lower body.

I know some of y’all are outdoorsy, so that means nothing to you. Congratulations. Your hamstrings must love you. But for me that was a major cinematic event. There were so many years when chronic pain made my world smaller. And when mere survival felt like enough. And yet there I was, in spite of it all: sweaty, breathing hard, and walking on a mountain — joyfully!

What if this is the revolution? Not the vacation but the ability to experience life fully? To laugh. To wander. To learn. To dance. To celebrate weddings. To rest. To spend time with people who make your life better. To walk farther than you thought you could. To experience awe.

I find that we often talk about liberation as if it’s an abstraction or a policy framework. But it’s also leisure and public land and friendship and mobility. It’s having enough freedom and support to become the fullest version of yourself.

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

Because, despite everything happening in this country, I spent a week dancing. And that’s what it’s all about.

I’ve been part of this weird little digital movement ecosystem for more than a decade now. I can remember when digital organizing was still trying to convince people it was real organizing. I’ve been here long enough to remember when everybody’s job title was some variation of “new media.”

Remember when Twitter was fun? There was a time when Twitter wasn’t a fascist website owned by the world’s richest monster populated largely by Nazi chatbots. There was a time when Facebook pages reached people organically and wasn’t just a bunch of Boomer-landmines for romance scams and Occupy Democrat memes. There was a time when email open rates were good. Like, really good. Even I read my emails back then. There was a time when we genuinely believed technology was going to democratize information and make the world more connected. Bless our little hearts.

Back then, digital organizing felt a little like being in a garage band. Nobody had much money. Nobody knew exactly what they were doing. Everybody was experimenting. The tools were clunky. The metrics were questionable. The vibes were immaculate. And honestly, that spirit is still what I love most about Netroots.

It’s not the panels or the happy hours. It’s not the shocking lack of coffee given the exorbitant ticket price. It’s always the people — the nerds, the weirdos, the true believers. The folks who looked at a blog, a livestream, a text message platform, a meme, a social network, or a YouTube channel and thought: “What if we used this for organizing?”

I’ve built most of my career alongside those people. When I started doing this work, digital was often treated like the side dish. Communications made the decisions. Field ran the campaign. Digital posted the graphics. And now? Digital is everywhere. It’s the air we breathe. I used to open a lot of my trainings with the idea that digital is a realm of the world. People meet online, fall in love online, get divorced online, learn languages, do whole jobs, etc. It’s not imaginary. It’s a real place. And once we understand that, we can understand the gravity of what we’re doing here.

Every campaign is a digital campaign. Every organizing effort is a digital organizing effort. Every fundraising program is a digital fundraising program. Every narrative battle begins online before it appears anywhere else. The internet didn’t become separate from politics. The internet became politics.

And that’s part of what makes being a digital strategist in 2026 so fascinating. Because the job barely resembles the one I started with. When I first entered this work, success often meant getting attention. If you could get a story covered, go viral, or build a following, you were made in the shade. Now, we’re operating inside a completely different environment. The platforms are collapsing. Trust is collapsing. Attention is fragmented. Algorithms change weekly. AI is rewriting how information moves. People consume media through creators more than institutions. And yet, the fundamental question remains the same: how do you help people find each other?

That’s it. That’s the whole job.

It isn’t content or clicks or impressions. It’s connection. Go figure. Classic organizing strikes again.

How do people discover they’re not alone? How do they find community? How do they find a political home? How do they move from consuming information to taking action? The technology changes, but the question never does.

Working at a left political party in this moment has made that especially clear to me. Because we’re living through a period where institutions are failing all around us. Trust in government is low. Trust in media is low. Trust in corporations is low. Trust in political parties is probably the lowest it’s ever been. And frankly, most of that distrust is earned.

People are struggling. Everything feels precarious. People need belonging and community. They need a reason to believe collective action can still improve their lives. That’s why I still care about digital organizing after all these years. It’s not because I love technology. I actually find most techology deeply annoying. What I love is people. (Even the ones who annoy me.) What I love is seeing somebody realize they aren’t the only one who feels the way they do. I love watching strangers become collaborators and co-conspirators and colleagues and comrades. I love watching collaborators become friends. And I desperately love watching friends become movements.

The best digital organizing has never been about technology — it’s been about relationships. The technology is just the delivery mechanism. And that’s actually another thing Netroots never fails to remind me of. For all our talk about innovation, the movement is still fundamentally built by and for and made up of people. It’s the people who show up. The people who care. The people who stay. The people who spend years and years trying to make the world a little more just.

A lot of us have gotten older together. We’ve changed jobs, cities, platforms, and titles more times than we can count. Some of us have gray hair now (or some of us dye it brown because it looks so cute that way… don’t judge me!). Some of us have replaced our revolutionary optimism with revolutionary realism. But you know what? We’re still here. We’re still arguing and experimenting and building and showing up to hotels and convention centers to talk about democracy and strategy and the future.

There’s a tendency to tell movement stories through institutions and organizations and campaigns and candidates. But movements are about communities that hold histories — histories that include inside jokes and relationships and, as the kids say, lore.

And guess what? We did it, Joe! The internet left has its own lore now, y’all. We have our own elders, and I happily count myself among them. We have our own traditions. Which means Netroots isn’t just a conference anymore. It’s become a reminder of where we’ve been and how much has changed. It’s a reminder that despite everything — the platform collapses, the algorithm changes, the political setbacks, the endless chaos — there are still thousands of people committed to building a more just world.

A bunch of nerds, honestly. Trying to save democracy with Google Docs.

What a privilege and a gift it’s been to grow up with them.

I was on a bus headed from Atlanta to Montgomery with the Georgia chapter of the Working Families Party for “All Roads Lead to the South,” a gathering of organizers, faith leaders, labor activists, and movement folks from across the region. And as we rolled through small Southern towns over stretches of highway, I kept thinking about how much movement work in the South actually looks like this.

It isn’t glamorous. It’s not optimized for MSNBC panels or consultant decks. It’s mostly people deciding, over and over again, that they’re going to show up for each other anyway. And right now, that matters more than people think. Because you can’t travel through the South in this political moment without noticing the contradiction at the heart of American democracy.

The same region this country treats like an afterthought is somehow still expected to save it every election cycle. Every few years, America rediscovers voter suppression like it’s a shocking new development. Suddenly there are emergency cable news graphics, concerned op-eds about democratic norms, and earnest think pieces explaining that maybe disenfranchising people is bad. Meanwhile, Black Southerners are sitting there like, “Oh wow. Y’all finally caught up?” We’ve been saying this.

And after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the rest of the country is about to find out once again what Southern organizers have known for generations: the South is often where the future gets tested first. What’s happening after Callais isn’t just a legal disagreement about maps. The maps are never just maps.

The maps determine who gets hospitals. Who gets schools. Who gets public transit. Who gets environmental protections. Who gets criminalized. Who gets abandoned after the hurricane. Who gets poisoned water and then gets told to stay resilient. The maps determine who gets to live with dignity and who gets left to die politely inside a budget compromise.

That’s why I’ve always found it strange when people talk about voting rights as though it’s a niche issue for nonprofit webinars and people who own tote bags with the word “democracy” printed on them. Voting rights has always been about material survival. The South understands that because the South has lived the consequences.

And one thing this moment is forcing movement spaces to confront is that the opposition has evolved. The backlash doesn’t always arrive wearing a white hood anymore. Now, it shows up wrapped in bureaucratic language designed to make people mentally leave their bodies. They say things like: race-neutral; administrative adjustment; procedural review; and election integrity. The language sounds boring on purpose.

Because if people think these are technical disputes, they disengage. But if people understand that these decisions affect whether their rent goes up, whether their grandmother’s hospital closes, whether reproductive healthcare disappears, whether ICE collaborates with local law enforcement, whether climate disasters receive recovery support, or whether their schools receive funding, suddenly the stakes become very real. Because that’s how people actually experience democracy. Not through court filings, but through their daily lives.

And frankly, Southern organizers have known forever that national organizations love using the South rhetorically while underinvesting in it structurally. Everybody remembers Alabama during a crisis. Everybody tweets that Georgia saved democracy every four years. Mississippi becomes a trending topic whenever something horrifying happens. But year-round organizing infrastructure? Leadership development? Political education? Narrative ecosystems? Long-term funding?

Uhhhh ... crickets.

Which is wild considering the future rules of American democracy are basically beta-tested down here first. The South is where they test voter suppression. The South is where they test attacks on public education. The South is where they test criminalizing protest. The South is where they test how much abandonment communities will tolerate after environmental disasters. And if it works here, trust me, they’ll franchise it nationally like a Chick-fil-A.

That’s part of why I keep coming back to that bus ride.

Because despite everything, people are still showing up. They’re still organizing fish fries and mass meetings. They’re still texting voters at 11:47 p.m. with messages that read, “Hey cuz pls vote tomorrow.” They’re still building turnout operations out of churches, unions, barber shops, beauty salons, campuses, and community centers. They’re still believing ordinary people deserve power. They’re still fighting like hell for it.

And if you’d asked me beforehand, I probably would have spent all the time, money, and energy it took to get people to Alabama sending organizers to Louisiana to knock doors instead. I remain deeply suspicious of any gathering where movement leaders spend hours speechifying in the hot sun.

But movements aren’t built entirely through efficiency.

Sometimes people need to physically remember they’re part of something larger than their local crisis. They need to laugh together and travel together. They need to argue strategy together. And they need to stand in the heat together in order to remember they’re not isolated.

In the South especially, organizing has always depended as much on relationships, collective memory, spiritual endurance, and trust as it has on campaign metrics. Sitting in the grass on a lawn in front of City Hall in Montgomery, I found myself thinking about a question someone asked recently at a gathering hosted by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration in Washington, D.C. —

What have Black Americans given this country that we still use today?

It took me a second to answer because the truth felt almost too large to say out loud. I mean, it’s literally everything: music, food, language, fashion, dance, transportation, agriculture, internet culture, political organizing, mutual aid, comedy, beauty standards, labor movements, spiritual traditions, ways of surviving collapse, and ways of loving each other through it.

Everything people love about this country has been shaped by Black creativity, Black labor, Black imagination, and Black survival. Black people are masters of making a way out of no way because America has repeatedly forced us to. And underneath all of these attacks on Black political power — the maps, the court rulings, the bureaucratic language — is a deeper fear about who gets to shape the future of this country.

The opposition understands something many people still refuse to admit: Black political power changes America. It always has. That’s why they work so hard to contain it. And that’s why the South always matters.

The story of the South isn’t that we’re perpetually behind the rest of the country. It’s that we’re often living in its future first. The battles over voting rights, representation, public education, immigration, labor, climate, and democracy itself aren’t coming, they’re already here. And that means if you want to know where this country is headed next, stop looking at Washington.

Look South.

I’ve spent my time over the past year and change treating this Substack like a public notebook, a digital front porch, and occasionally a group chat with my closest internet friends. I started writing here because I had things rattling around in my head that needed somewhere to go. I didn’t have a grand strategy. I just wanted to write more. And to remember why I loved writing in the first place.

And somehow, in the process, y’all tricked me into believing I could actually do this.

This piece started as one of those ideas I couldn’t stop thinking about. The kind that follows you around while you’re washing dishes or walking the dog or watching yet another episode of Love Island and yelling at the television. Thanks to the confidence I’ve built here — and the encouragement from all of you — I finally pitched it.

And they said yes!

So before I share the article, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for indulging my essays about politics, reality television, road trips, grief, Blackness, weird internet rabbit holes, and whatever else I’m obsessing over that week.

This one belongs to all of us a little bit.

We up!

‘The Last of Us’ and the Gulf South’s Dystopian Collapse

By: Aimee Castenell

Dystopian stories have taught us to expect certain things when the world falls apart: resource-hoarding governments, militarized borders, poisoned landscapes, and the dangerous myth that survival is something we do alone. We watch these futures unfold in books and on screen and think, thank God that’s fiction.

But even these fictional worlds are built from real political realities. The creators of The Last of Us have openly acknowledged drawing inspiration from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, particularly its militarized checkpoints, surveillance systems, and containment infrastructure. The architecture of dystopia rarely appears out of nowhere; it’s borrowed from systems already being tested on real people in real time.

The shortages, the surveillance, the abandonment of entire communities – these aren’t cautionary tales; they’re documentation. That’s why The Last of Us, in some ways, feels less like a fantasy and more like a mirror.

The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic series based on the video game of the same name. After a fungal outbreak wipes out humanity, survivors navigate a country controlled by a federal agency called the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA), unpredictable militias, and the scraps of communities trying to rebuild. But here in the Gulf South, we don’t need CGI set pieces or infected hordes to imagine catastrophe. We’ve lived through enough storms, spills, and state failures to recognize the plot.

The Last of Us gives us collapse as spectacle. The Gulf South gives us collapse as daily life.

Let’s be clear: The same pipelines that poison the South also help fuel global oppression. The creators of The Last of Us have openly named Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine as inspiration for the show’s quarantine zones and militarized control. That’s not subtext – it’s a blueprint.

And the connection runs through our backyards.

The Port of Houston has been identified as a major exporter of weapons, fuel, and aircraft components used in Israel’s assault on Gaza. Southern politicians vote to send billions in military aid to a settler colony committing genocide, while claiming there’s not enough money to keep the lights on after a hurricane in Louisiana.

In July 2025, the global BDS movement won a rare victory when Maersk – one of the largest shipping companies on earth – announced it would end all operations in illegal Israeli settlements. The BDS movement stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions and is a Palestinian-led global campaign to pressure Israel to end its occupation and grant full equality to Palestinian citizens. This win with Maersk means one of the biggest players in global shipping is withdrawing support from companies operating on stolen Palestinian land, disrupting part of the economic pipeline that sustains occupation.

But even with that, U.S. ports – including Houston’s – remain key transfer points for fighter jet parts and military machinery. The political will to stop the genocide supply chain has yet to emerge.

Climate violence at home and state violence abroad share the same foundations: extraction, profit, impunity, and governments that treat entire populations as disposable.

Disaster Capitalism Is the Southern Economy

In The Last of Us, FEDRA hoards medicine, rations food, and rules through scarcity. Militias steal resources under the banner of liberation. Ordinary people are told they’re on their own.

Swap the cordyceps for crude oil. Spores for refinery flares. The plot aligns.

Corporations swoop in. Developers “revitalize.” Politicians facilitate. Frontline communities lose everything.

Our collapse didn’t come from a mutation – it came from policy. From profit. From decades of calculated neglect.

We don’t need infected cities or quarantine zones to understand devastation. We know it by the blackouts after every storm. By petrochemical leaks that rarely make the news. By heatwaves that leave elders gasping while utility companies rake in record profits. In the Gulf South, survival isn’t an emergency. It’s an economy. One designed to discard the very people who make this region run.

From Cancer Alley in Louisiana to the coal ash pits of Georgia, this region is a masterclass in environmental racism, complete with a syllabus written by BP, Shell, Entergy, and every governor who’s ever uttered “economic development,” while sacrificing Black, Indigenous, and working-class communities. Dirty energy is everywhere down here. Not because it’s efficient, but because our lives were deemed expendable generations ago.

Pollution is found in the water. The air. The zoning laws. It’s disproportionate rates of asthma in Black kids. It’s cancer clusters along the river. It’s black mold behind unrepaired drywall. It’s the lie that “jobs” justify mass poisoning. Look no further than BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 that left 11 workers dead, caused ecological devastation, and added up to $60 billion in payouts for corporations, while the communities most affected were gaslit, undercompensated, and left to fend for themselves.

This isn’t mismanagement. It’s the business model.

Corporations down here no longer pretend they don’t wield unchecked power over us. Oil companies write the disaster response plans. Refineries set the air quality standards. Hedge funds buy up land, reroute evacuations, and flip public trauma into private profit.

And utility companies – Entergy, Georgia Power, Florida Power & Light – operate like extraction cartels blessed by regulatory bodies that behave more like shareholders than watchdogs.

During Hurricane Beryl, CenterPoint Energy left Houston residents without power for over a week, including medically vulnerable people who needed electricity to survive. Then they billed customers for it. Rate hikes during storms. Shutoffs during heatwaves. Reconnection fees punish the poor while shareholders celebrate record quarters.

The energy lobby loves to paint nuclear power as a clean, carbon-free silver bullet. But they never mention the radioactive waste, groundwater contamination, and massive cost overruns.

Take Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Its costs have ballooned to over $17 billion above their initial projected budget, it’s seven years late, and still not fully operational. While that boondoggle continues, Black families in Atlanta and Macon face record shutoffs and late fees.

This isn’t innovation. It’s theft.

And now, this model of overbuild, overcharge, and underdeliver is being exported across the country with utility companies lobbying Congress for ratepayer-funded bailouts while they privatize the profits.

Trump’s Energy Agenda: Drill, Displace, and Deny

Donald Trump’s second-term energy plan is a death sentence for the Gulf South and reads like a corporate wishlist:

• Expand Gulf drilling

• Open new oil leases

• Gut the EPA

• Slash disaster aid unless you pledge political loyalty

This is extraction. It’s about letting the South burn while Wall Street buys beachfronts.

Who pays the price? Black coastal communities. Indigenous communities. Immigrant families. People who can’t evacuate. People they’ve decided can die.

Building Something Better

If The Last of Us gives us FEDRA and raiders, it also gives us something else: the reminder that survival is a collective project.

In the show, we get Jackson – a multiracial, cooperative, solar-powered commune built on shared labor and shared care. We also get the Fireflies – an organized resistance network built on the understanding that empire will never save the people it harms.

We have both here.

• In Puerto Rico, community groups like Casa Pueblo run towns with solar microgrids.

• In New Orleans, Together New Orleans is constructing “community lighthouses,” or solar-powered hubs that stay on during blackouts.

• In Alabama’s Black Belt, residents are organizing with Black Belt Citizens to fight for clean energy access and local control.

These aren’t charity projects. They’re survival infrastructures. They’re political strategies. They’re the opposite of collapse; they’re construction.

And this is where the dystopian narratives fall short: they love the lone hero wandering the ruins, but they ignore the truth Southerners know best: we’re not lone heroes in the ruins. We are each other’s answer.

Mutual aid networks are our Jackson commune. Tenant unions are our Fireflies. Black moms protesting utility shutoffs are our frontline fighters. Indigenous water protectors are our sentries. Neighbors checking on neighbors after hurricanes are our infrastructure.

And now, with Georgia’s Public Service Commission newly flipped, there’s a chance to bring that same energy democracy to scale — literally. For the first time, regulators might actually regulate, holding Georgia Power accountable to the people it serves instead of the shareholders it enriches.

It’s proof that even in collapse, organizing works. The tide can turn.

We survive because we choose each other.

We survive because we refuse to abandon the future we’re already building.

Aimée Castenell is a New Orleans-born, Atlanta-rooted digital strategist who writes about power, survival, and how the South keeps saving itself.

The Pitt is one of my favorite shows on TV right now. Not just because it’s good (it is), not just because it’s stressful in a way that feels earned (it is), but because at its core — it’s a show about empathy. It’s about what it means to witness people in their most fragile, unguarded moments. About the quiet, relentless labor of care. About how systems strain, but people still choose to show up for each other anyway.

There is a very specific hour in the South when the world becomes fluorescent and a little bit unserious.

2:13 a.m.

Not late. Not early. Just… decisions.

The sign is buzzing. The parking lot is doing that thing where it’s half full but somehow still feels ominous. Inside, the waffle iron is glowing like it has tenure.

The door opens.

It will not stop opening.

OPENING SHOT

Wide angle: a Waffle House holding the line.

Camera pans:

• A man asleep in a booth like he pays rent there

• Two women in heels negotiating the emotional aftermath of a man named Marcus (he will not recover from this)

• A cook already sweating like it’s part of the uniform

• And HER

The server.

Her name tag says Keisha.

Everyone calls her “baby,” which is both affectionate and incorrect. She’s running this place like a field general with a coffee pot.

TRIAGE

The door opens.

You walk in.

Keisha looks at you once — just once — and immediately categorizes you with the accuracy of a seasoned clinician.

Hungry. Not drunk. Spiritually tired. Needs coffee before conversation. Will tip if raised right.

“Coffee?”

You nod, because you respect expertise.

Triage complete.

THE CASES

2:22 a.m. — Case #14: Warehouse Man
Steel-toed boots. Orders steak and eggs like it’s a prescription. Does not make eye contact. We respect that.

2:37 a.m. — Case #17: Hot Girl Debrief
Two women slide into a booth like the floor owes them money.

“Do you think he hates me?”
Keisha, already pouring water: “Yes. What do you want to eat?”

Healing comes in many forms.

2:51 a.m. — Case #21: Couple in a 10-Year Argument
They are whisper-fighting. Which is worse than yelling because it means this is advanced.

3:04 a.m. — Case #25: Road Trip Family
Two sleeping kids. One parent holding it together. One barely blinking.

“Can we push these tables together?”

Keisha is already doing it.

3:11 a.m. — Case #27: The Thinker
Orders water. Sits for 45 minutes. Processing something life-altering or absolutely nothing.

Both are valid.

The door keeps opening.

Nobody is turned away.

No reservations. No dress code. No “we’re closed.” Just open seats and waffles.

STAFFING (OR: A CRISIS BUT MAKE IT NORMAL)

If this were a hospital, somebody would be on the news.

Instead, it’s just… a shift.

One cook. One server. Twenty-seven emotional situations and a waffle iron that refuses to mind its business.

Keisha is moving like she’s been doing this since birth: Coffee. Plate. Syrup. Refill. De-escalate. Smile. Pivot. Swipe. Turn. Repeat.

The cook yells “ORDER UP,” and Keisha is already halfway there because she lives in the future.

CODE LANGUAGE

There are no overhead announcements here, but there is a system:

• “Hold on a second, baby” = I see you, but I am one woman

• “You good?” = Do I need to fight?

• “Drop a waffle” = We are in the trenches now

• “You want a box?” = You don’t have to explain anything to me

It’s a language of care. And also boundaries. And also a mild threat if necessary.

THE INCIDENT (MINOR BUT DRAMATIC)

3:26 a.m.

A man gets loud.

Not dangerous yet. Just… edging toward embarrassing.

The room shifts.

Keisha walks over like she has handled this exact situation in at least three previous timelines.

“Hey. We're not doing that tonight.” Not loud. Not soft. Just correct. The man pauses. Reconsiders his life and sits down.

Order restored.

The waffle iron continues beeping like, “this is above me.”

THE QUIET PART

Around 3:40 a.m., everything softens. The loud ones leave. The arguments downgrade. The road trip continues.

What’s left are the workers and the watchers.

The cook wipes the grill slowly. Keisha leans on the counter for six seconds (earned).

Somebody says “thank you” like it matters.

And it does.

SYSTEM FAILURE (BUT FUNNIER THAN IT SHOULD BE)

Sitting there, halfway through your coffee, you realize something: This is not just a restaurant.

This is what happens when everything else closes.

No community centers open at 2 a.m. No affordable late-night anything. No public place to just… exist under light without buying something complicated.

So this becomes the place.

Servers become therapists. Cooks become security. Waffle Houses become the South’s unofficial emergency rooms — with better hash browns.

And the people holding it together? Underpaid. Overworked. Extremely competent. And still asking if you need a refill.

CLOSING (THERE IS NONE)

4:07 a.m.

Dawn is thinking about it.

You pay. You tip well. Not enough, but well.

Keisha hands you your receipt. And says, “Be safe.”

And she means it in a way that feels like both a blessing and a warning.

END SCENE

The door opens.

Again.

Because it always does.

Fade out.

Like gravity. Or taxes. Or the fact that if you were born here, you’re from here. No questions. No paperwork. No “well actually…” Or at least — that’s how it used to feel. Because now Donald Trump is back with a case that basically said: what if we… tried it? As in, what if we just reinterpreted birthright citizenship like it’s a Terms & Conditions nobody read?

And the wild part? It made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

So, let’s break this down because you know they’re banking on none of us actually doing that.

Birthright citizenship comes from the 14th Amendment.

Which — quick history break — was written after slavery because America had to be forced to admit that formerly enslaved Black people were, in fact, citizens. Not “kind of.” Not “case by case.” Not “if we feel like it.” Citizens. Period. So, the amendment said: if you’re born here, you’re a citizen.

End of discussion.

And now here come folks like: but what if we actually meant… something else?

Oh, so now we’re doing remix culture with the Constitution? The argument hinges on this phrase: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

And suddenly everybody is acting brand new like we don’t know what that means. The goal is to exclude children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. But let’s not play dumb. Because every time this country starts slicing and dicing citizenship, it starts with one group — and then quietly expands. Immigrants today. Somebody else tomorrow.

History has entered the chat like: you rang?

Let me say this plainly: this is not just about immigration. This is about whether citizenship is automatic or conditional. Because once you introduce conditions, you introduce questions. And once you introduce questions, you introduce gatekeepers. And once you introduce gatekeepers… Well, now we’re all standing in line proving we deserve to be here. And I don’t know about you, but this country already loves asking Black people for receipts and making us wait in lines.

Now I need you to just begin to imagine the logistics of this thing. If they actually pull this off, here’s what we’re looking at:

• Babies being born and immediately needing a background check like they’re applying for a federal job

• Parents having to prove status at the hospital (congratulations on your bundle of joy, now show us your paperwork)

• Kids born here… not actually being citizens anywhere. Stateless. In 2026. Epstein’s dream, I suppose. Be serious.

And you already know who this would hit hardest. Because policy in America might be written neutrally, but it always lands specifically. People love to roll their eyes at “slippery slope.” But this country has a résumé.

• Reconstruction rights? Rolled back.

• Voting protections? Undermined.

• Whole communities? Interned. Displaced. Erased.

There is always a legal argument. Always a “this is different.” And every time Black people are like: oh, I’ve seen this episode before.

Birthright citizenship has always been one of the few things in this country that didn’t require approval. You were born. That was enough. And that makes some people… uncomfortable. Because if belonging is automatic, then control is limited. And if control is limited, then hierarchy gets shaky. And we cannot have that, apparently.

This hits so differently for me because the 14th Amendment exists specifically because this country once decided that being born here wasn’t enough for Black people. They quite literally had to write it down. And spell it out. And put it in the whole ass Constitution.

And now we’re watching folks try to reinterpret it like it’s a vague subtweet.

No, beloved. It was very clear.

Because that’s really the question, isn’t it? Who has to prove it? Who has to document it? Who has to justify their existence? And who just… gets to be?

Birthright citizenship is not a loophole. It is one of the few promises this country made that was actually straightforward. And now we’re watching people try to put an asterisk on it. Which should concern everybody. Not just the people they’re targeting first. Because once you start negotiating who belongs… You never really stop.

This week, it’s “you the birthday.”

And I love that this happened during my birthday week. What I also love about it is how simple it is. No extra words. No unnecessary structure. Just a clean, efficient re-centering of reality.

You. The. Birthday.

Not around it. Not near it. Not celebrating it.

You are it.

And if that feels correct in your spirit, congratulations — you are experiencing AAVE (African American Vernacular English) working exactly as designed. Long-maligned as slang, broken English, or “incorrect,” it’s a fully developed, rule-governed dialect with its own grammar, logic, and structure — built by Black people in the United States over generations.

Not chaos. Design.

AAVE is what happens when people take a language that was forced on them and remake it into something sharper, more efficient, and more expressive.

It has rules.

• “You the birthday” drops the verb because the meaning is already clear.

• “I been knew” tells you how long something’s been true.

• “It be like that” signals a pattern, not a one-time event.

That’s not random. That’s structure.

AAVE compresses grammar and expands meaning at the same time. It carries tone, rhythm, context, and relationship in ways standard English often can’t.

And — this part matters — it’s one of the most copied, borrowed-from, and miscredited language systems on the planet. So when something feels “internet-y” or “Gen Z coded”? Babe, you can bet it’s been Black.

So, back to the birthday.

Standard English treats a birthday like a date. A square on a calendar. Something external that happens to you.

“You the birthday” rejects all of that.

It doesn’t locate meaning in the day. It locates meaning in you.

You’re not experiencing the birthday. You’re not adjacent to it. You’re not even centered on it.

You are the birthday.

Which is, if we’re being honest, exactly correct. Because what is a birthday without the person? Just a Tuesday with cake and a calendar notification nobody asked for.

The day doesn’t matter. The person does.

And AAVE — cleanly and efficiently — cuts straight to that truth.

Now zoom out with me. Because this isn’t just about language. It’s about how we think.

The same logic that gives us “you the birthday” is the same logic Black people have always used: center the human, build meaning from there.

That’s technology.

The drum was technology. The Underground Railroad ran on coded songs, quilts, and trust. Our people built communication networks out of whatever was available — landlines, church fans, shared meals.

That’s infrastructure.

AAVE is part of that lineage. It’s a system that compresses information, increases efficiency, and carries layered meaning across networks of people who understand it.

That’s code.

And like any system, it reveals something else: who gets understood, and who gets misread.

The systems running the world right now misread us the same way people misread our language. ICE has algorithms. Facial recognition struggles to see us correctly and calls it accuracy. Surveillance gets sold as safety. Borders get coded like they’re natural law. We know what it means to be misinterpreted by a system that was never built for us. The problem isn’t that we don’t understand technology. The problem is that we’ve let the wrong people write the code.

And when technology is built without us, it becomes another border. Another wall. Another weapon. Another high-definition way to say: you don’t belong here.

But here’s what they never account for: we remix everything. We take what exists and make it do something else. We build systems inside systems. We create meaning where there wasn’t any. We turn limitation into design.

That’s engineering. That’s innovation. That’s survival as practice. That’s Black people.

So yeah… you the birthday. Of course.

We don’t separate people from the moment. We don’t separate meaning from embodiment. We don’t separate language from power.

We’re the center. We’re the reason the moment exists.

We’re the birthday and the birth certificate. The archive and the infrastructure.

We’re the technology.

And I love this for us.

I especially love when the internet accidentally proves it.

Not a dog whistle. Not a policy trial balloon. Not even the usual fascist-adjacent vagueness that lets his defenders say, “that’s not what he meant.”

No. Just… straight to the point.

And then, as if that wasn’t enough, we watched him escalate.

Threatening to wipe out “a whole civilization.” Ninety million people. Launching an illegal war. Bombing civilian infrastructure — including a school. Racking up tens of thousands of casualties, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

And I need to be very clear: a tentative ceasefire does not undo genocidal intent. A pause does not erase what was said — or what was done.

This isn’t chaos. This is a crisis.

Let me ground us, because the narratives are wild right now — group chats on fire, statements flying, everyone trying to keep up with the latest escalation like this is just another news cycle.

It’s not.

This is simple.

This is an impeach, remove, and rebuild moment. This is a Congress, get back to DC and do your job moment. This is a stop this illegal war immediately moment. This is disqualifying behavior that requires immediate removal.

Full stop.

Now.

Let’s talk about the tools we should be using. The Constitution is not a suggestion. The 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution exists for this exact scenario — when a president is unable or unwilling to carry out the duties of the office in a way that preserves human life and the nation itself.

Section 4 allows the Vice President and Cabinet to act. Impeachment allows Congress to act. A War Powers Resolution allows Congress to stop an unauthorized war. These are not theoretical options. They are responsibilities.

But here’s the part we can’t afford to be delusional about: none of those options are happening. Not right now. Not with this cast of characters. Not in this economy.

Because Republicans control the House. Republicans control the Senate. And Republicans — from Mike Johnson to John Thune and the rest of this spineless chorus — have made it abundantly clear that they will do nothing.

No impeachment. No removal. No 25th Amendment. No meaningful check on war powers. Nothing.

Let’s call that what it is. Not gridlock. Not dysfunction. Straight up old-fashinoned complicity.

Because if threatening the destruction of an entire civilization and launching an illegal war that kills civilians — including children — doesn’t trigger immediate action, then what does?

Their silence is not neutrality. It’s permission. It’s endorsement. It’s participation.

So yes — in a functioning democracy, this would be a remove-him-now moment. But we’re not in a functioning version of that system right now. And pretending otherwise is part of how they keep us stuck.

So what’s left?

The answer isn’t abstract. It’s not theoretical. It’s not something someone else is going to fix for us behind closed doors.

The answer is November. The answer is to not re-elect these people. The answer is to strip power from every single elected official who looked at this and chose cowardice over responsibility. The answer is to make complicity politically fatal.

Full stop.

Because let’s be honest about what this is:

• A war nobody voted for.

• A war nobody asked for.

• A war already costing tens of billions, rocketing towards trillions.

• A war driven by ego, impunity, and alignment with other authoritarian actors.

And if Congress won’t act, then the electorate has to.

If you’re an elected official, a movement leader, a strategist, a communicator: lock in. We need to say it plainly with our whole chests: this is illegal, immoral, and disqualifying.

But we also have to be just as clear about the path forward. They won’t save us from this. We have to vote them out of it.

Confusion, overwhelm, and fragmentation have always been the tactic. Clarity is how we fight back.

The only thing more dangerous than a leader willing to flirt with genocide is a system unwilling to stop him — and a political party committed to protecting him no matter the cost.

I wanted soft life energy on my birthday. A little cake. Some joy. Maybe a brief flirtation with delusion about aging gracefully.

Instead, I’m here. We’re all here.

So here’s my (revised) birthday wish: That we stop waiting for courage from people who have none. That we use every tool we do have. That we refuse to normalize this. Because this isn’t normal. This isn’t politics as usual. This is a line.

And in November, we decide whether it holds.

Mine is simpler.

My favorite holiday is my birthday.

And not in the narcissistic way people assume when you say that out loud.

It’s not because I expect fireworks or a parade (although I wouldn’t object, of course). A birthday hates to see me coming. It’s because birthdays are the one day where the question of whether you matter gets answered out loud.

For 24 hours, the world pauses just enough to say: Yes. You’re here. We see you.

And if you think about it, that’s actually what most of politics is about too. Not the cable news version. Not the election-night maps. But the deeper thing underneath all of it. The question of who gets seen.

When people say politics is about resources, they’re right. But resources follow recognition. If the system doesn’t see you, it doesn’t fund you. It can’t and won’t protect you. It doesn’t design policy for you. It pretends you don’t exist.

Which is why so many political fights in this country are actually about visibility. Whose neighborhoods get investment? Whose labor gets respected? Whose grief counts? Whose safety matters? Whose children deserve a future?

A lot of my work — whether at the Working Families Party or alongside organizers in immigrant justice movements — ultimately comes down to forcing institutions to recognize something simple: Working people are here. Black migrants are here. Our communities are here. And our lives should matter in the decisions that shape this country.

Visibility isn’t just symbolic.

Visibility is infrastructure.

Which brings me back to birthdays, of course.

My love languages (since you didn’t ask) are acts of service and gifts. But not in the way people often interpret that. When I say gifts, I don’t mean expensive jewelry or elaborate surprises. I mean the kind of gift that tells me someone was paying attention. I’m talking about the book you mentioned wanting three months ago. Your favorite candy from childhood. A playlist someone made because they know exactly which songs will hit your nervous system right.

Those things say: I see you.

Acts of service work the same way. It’s not transactional. It’s attentive. It’s someone cooking when you’re exhausted. Helping carry something heavy. Checking in before you have to ask. It’s active caring. Not a grand gesture, but a pattern of presence.

In politics, we talk a lot about “care” as an abstract value. But care, like love, is measurable. You can see it in whether people have healthcare. You can see it in whether someone can afford rent. You can see it in whether a mother can take a sick day without losing her job.

Care isn’t a slogan. Care is policy.

And if you zoom out, you’ll notice something really cool: the communities doing the most caring for each other are often the ones the government pretends not to see. Black communities, immigrant communities, and working-class communities holding entire neighborhoods together through sheer willpower and mutual aid. You’ll always find people caring for each other because the system refuses to.

So, that’s why I love birthdays. That’s why I love my birthday and your birthday, too. They’re a small rebellion against invisibility. They say, “Hey, you survived another year in this hellscape! Pop the champagne.” Which, depending on your life, isn’t a small thing.

For a lot of us — especially those of us who grew up Black, Southern, working class, or navigating systems that were never designed for us — making it another year is its own kind of victory. Another year of learning. Another year of loving people imperfectly. Another year of trying to make the world a little more livable than we found it.

Birthdays are proof of life.

So when April 7 rolls around, I don’t need anything extravagant. But I would like you to tell me you’re glad I’m here. (And if the way you want to do that is by being extravagant, well, I would hate to be the one to tell you how to live and love. Go crazy!)

Because the most powerful thing you can give someone isn’t money or objects or attention for show. It’s recognition.

The kind that says: I see you.

And in a world where entire political systems are organized around making certain people invisible…

Being seen might be the most radical gift of all.

And if you insist on getting me something tangible, don’t worry, I got you covered for that too, bookie. I would never leave my community hanging like that: https://www.giftster.com/gift/public/5BBEk/.

Like… not “I’m thinking about a pivot” low. Not “maybe I need a new challenge” low. I mean, subterranean. Basement. Below the Mariana Trench of LinkedIn confidence.

I needed a job — any job. Preferably one that didn’t require me to explain my entire professional existence to people who thought digital organizing was just tweeting with feelings. So, I did what many deeply overeducated women in professional freefall have done before me: I went to a temp agency.

It was called Staffing by Suzanne, which already sounded like a place where someone named Suzanne wore structured blazers and believed in you before you believed in yourself.

I went in expecting a standard intake: typing speed, Excel proficiency, “are you comfortable answering phones,” etc. Instead, I walked into what can only be described as a three-stage affirmation relay.

Stage 1: “Tell me about your last job”

The first staffer asked about my most recent role. I explained what I’d been doing at ColorOfChange — digital strategy, campaigns, narrative, organizing, all the things that are simultaneously very real and very difficult to summarize in corporate nouns.

She listened. She leaned forward. She asked follow-ups. Then she said something like: “You’re great. I want you to talk to my colleague.”

Reader, I was confused.

This was not how temp agencies I’d worked with in the past had operated. I thought we were going to discuss filing systems and Outlook calendars.

Stage 2: “So… grad school?”

The second person asked about graduate school. Why did I go? What did I study? What did I love about it? I told her about NYU, moving image archiving, the strange beautiful specificity of deciding that preserving stories — literal, physical but ephemeral objects — was worth dedicating years of my life to. She nodded like this was normal information to request from someone applying to temp.

Then I told her about the second time I went to graduate school. I moved to England and studied at the University of Leeds, in the School of Geography, where my focus was activism and social change — the study of movements, of power, of how ordinary people learn to organize themselves against forces that seem much bigger than they are.

The first degree was about preserving stories.

The second was about helping write new ones.

Then she said: “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to meet Suzanne.”

At this point I was certain I had either:

1. Accidentally applied for the wrong thing and was about to be gently redirected, or

2. Been selected for some kind of professional intervention.

Stage 3: Suzanne

Suzanne came in. Yes: structured blazer energy confirmed. She was warm, but direct with the unmistakable aura of a woman who had seen many careers rise and fall and knew which was which.

She didn’t ask about recent work. She went even further back — undergrad.

She asked me what drew me to the work I’d done. And wanted to know how my path had unfolded. And I remember sitting there thinking, why are we doing a full-life review for a temp job?

But I answered. Honestly. Probably more honestly than I’d been answering anyone at that point, because when your job confidence is shot you stop editing yourself. You just tell the truth and hope someone can still see you.

She listened for a long time.

Then she said something that landed in me like a tuning fork: “Highly intelligent people often have a hard time finding a career focus, because they’re good at so many things.”

I remember physically leaning back. Because I had not heard myself described that way in a long time.

At ColorOfChange — and let me be clear, work I’m proud of — I had internalized a very different story: You’re scattered. You’re not specialized enough. You’re hard to place. You don’t fit cleanly.

Which, let me pause here to say: movement spaces can be beautiful and visionary and still reproduce very corporate ideas about legibility, hierarchy, and specialization. Especially for Black women whose skill set is synthesis.

So to hear, in this fluorescent-lit temp office: Not unfocused. Not inconsistent. But capable across domains.

It rearranged something.

At the time, her comment felt like comfort. Now, years later, I understand it as diagnosis. See, some people have a lane. Some of us have a landscape. We’re good at strategy and storytelling. Policy and narrative. Movement and media. Analysis and feeling. We see connections. We move between worlds. We translate. And in systems built to reward narrow specialization, that can read as lack of focus. But, I’m here to testify that it isn’t. It’s multiplicity.

Here’s something I understand much more clearly now than I did then: mvement ecosystems often depend on generalists — bridge people, translators, connectors — while structurally rewarding specialists. So the people who see patterns, move across strategy and narrative, translate between base and policy, and hold political and cultural fluency are often labeled: hard to categorize. We’re seen as not technical enough, not academic enough, not field enough, and not comms enough. Which is just a bureaucratic way of saying, we don’t have a box for you.

Suzanne did.

The older I get — and the more seasoned I become in my career — the more I see the truth in what Suzanne was naming that day in a temp office I walked into feeling like a professional failure.

You can have many careers. You can have many chapters. You can be archivist and organizer. Writer and strategist. Builder and critic. Political and creative. You can pivot without betraying your past selves. You can expand without abandoning your core. There is no rule that says you only get one life’s work.

Some of us are plural by design.

I actually didn’t end up working at Staffing by Suzanne. That’s almost beside the point. What Suzanne gave me was something far more valuable than placement. She gave me back a coherent story about myself at a moment when mine had fractured. She reframed “too much” into “multi-skilled.” “Hard to categorize” into “wide-ranged.” “Nonlinear” into “expansive.” And once you see yourself that way, you can’t fully go back.

When I look back now — WITNESS, U.S. Human Rights Network, ColorOfChange, temp offices, digital strategy, movement narrative, electoral work, national campaigns — I don’t see fragmentation. Instead, I see continuity. The archivist became the strategist. The storyteller became the organizer. The nonlinear career became the integrative one. What Suzanne saw in a temp office — before titles, before seniority, before anything polished — is the same architecture I operate from now. The only difference is that now it has institutional legitimacy attached.

If you’re in a career moment that feels foggy, fragmented, or off-path, I want to offer you Suzanne’s sentence, preserved here like the archival artifact it is: You may not be unfocused. You may be multitudes. And multitudes take time to map. Trust me, I’m technically a geographer.

I actually started writing this right before getting on a plane to Vietnam, at a moment when — by all conventional standards — I should have been doing research.

I should have learned the names of neighborhoods.
I should have developed strong opinions about itineraries.
I should have been able to pronounce at least three dishes with confidence and humility battling it out in my mouth.

Instead, I went in knowing two things for sure:

There would be coffee.
And I would be fine.

I was the Type B friend on this trip. The vibes carrier. The one who shows up with a passport, good shoes, and a willingness to trust that someone else has the Google Doc handled. I did next to zero actual research, which meant I was completely free to imagine the trip not as it would be — but as it might be.

Which is to say: this was never a travel essay.

This is a speculative offering.
A soft spell cast before takeoff.
A rehearsal for pleasure.
A portal story disguised as a vacation.

It’s about possibility.

By the time Amara turned 46, time had started behaving differently around her.

Not aggressively. Not cruelly.
Just… selectively.

Some moments collapsed — emails answered before she remembered reading them, grief arriving before the memory that caused it. Other moments stretched wide and viscous, like honey warming in the sun. Time no longer marched. It pooled. It eddied. It waited for her to notice it.

This was not new.

Women in her family had always slipped sideways through time.

Her grandmother spoke to the dead like they were late for dinner.
Her mother knew storms were coming before the sky admitted it.
Amara herself had learned, young, that water remembered.

The Gulf taught her that.

Currents carry more than bodies.
They carry stories.
They carry instructions.

So when time bent in Vietnam, she recognized it as kin.

She arrived just before Christmas with a few friends — chosen family, really. People who had known her across decades, reinventions, heartbreaks, surgeries, moves. People who could read her silences as fluently as her jokes. All of them brilliant in ways the world underpaid. All of them tired in a way that didn’t show up on LinkedIn.

They landed in Hanoi after a flight so long it felt ceremonial — not transportation but crossing. As if the plane had cut through something thinner than air.

At the airport, the humidity wrapped around Amara like a silk shawl warmed by the sun.

“Okay,” someone whispered behind her. “This already feels expensive.”

They laughed — because they all knew what she meant.

Not money-expensive.
Intention-expensive.

Their hotel hid behind a courtyard of palms and confidence. No apology in its quiet. Someone handed Amara a chilled towel infused with citrus and something green she didn’t bother naming. Someone else placed an iced coffee in her hand — thick, dark, sweetened just enough, poured over ice that cracked like laughter.

Coffee first. Always coffee.

Vietnamese coffee didn’t ask permission. It announced itself. Bitter, syrupy, unapologetic. Condensed milk spiraled through it like a promise.

Amara drank it slowly, seated on a low stool the next morning, watching scooters blur past in choreographed chaos. That’s when she noticed it.

She had stopped counting.

Not money.
Not steps.
Not years.

They ate constantly. Not as tourists, but as participants.

Bowls of pho fragrant enough to feel medicinal.
Crispy bánh xèo folded around shrimp and herbs like secrets.
Late-night noodles. Early-morning pastries. Fruit she didn’t recognize but trusted immediately.

Each meal felt corrective — like the body remembering an earlier agreement.

In the afternoons, the city shimmered. Heat bent light. Time softened.

Amara noticed her phone stopped insisting on the date. Notifications arrived late. Her watch slipped an hour behind and never caught up.

No one panicked.

One friend joked that time had unionized.
Another said maybe the ancestors were running interference.
Someone ordered more coffee.

Christmas arrived quietly — no jingles, no performance of joy. Just linen dresses, a river cruise, and a chef who kept sending out courses “as a gift.”

Lobster dressed in lemongrass.
Wine she couldn’t pronounce and didn’t need to.
Laughter that landed deep, the kind that loosens grief.

That night, asleep on crisp white sheets, Amara dreamed of calendars dissolving into the Mekong. Dates melting like sugar. Years unfastening.

She woke up lighter.

By the time they crossed into Cambodia, New Year’s Eve had begun to feel optional — a suggestion rather than a demand.

Siem Reap greeted them with dusk-colored skies and hotels that understood the assignment. Stone. Water. Candlelight. Staff who remembered names. A bathtub carved from something ancient and smooth enough to feel reverent.

Angkor Wat at sunrise rearranged Amara’s sense of scale.

The temples did not rush.
They did not explain themselves.
They did not ask to be understood.

They simply stood — patient, intricate, uninterested in collapse.

“This,” Amara thought, “is what endurance looks like.”

They moved slowly. Stopped often. Drank iced coffee from places that felt like portals. Ate meals that lasted hours because no one was keeping score.

There were massages that unknotted grief Amara hadn’t realized she’d been carrying since the Gulf. Since storms. Since loss. Since learning to survive faster than she was meant to.

Silk robes waited in rooms she hadn’t booked with guilt — only gratitude.

On New Year’s Eve, they gathered on a rooftop overlooking water and lanterns. Someone asked what time it was.

Phones disagreed.
Watches shrugged.

At midnight — or something near it — fireworks bloomed like extravagant flowers. Light fractured the sky. Amara felt a click inside her, subtle but decisive.

She understood then.

This trip wasn’t escape.

It was recalibration.

Back home, time had always demanded proof — productivity, urgency, usefulness. Here, time curved around pleasure. Made room for rest without punishment. Allowed abundance to arrive without interrogation.

When they toasted, Amara didn’t wish for anything new.

She wished to keep this technology.

On the flight home, the calendar snapped back into place.

But something stayed bent.

Sometimes now, back in her ordinary life, Amara takes a sip of coffee and feels Vietnam rise in her chest. Sometimes she smells lemongrass and hears scooters and feels stone warmed by centuries of sun.

Time still loops around her.

She knows why.

She learned — somewhere between Christmas and New Year’s, between water and stone, between friendship and inheritance — that pleasure is not indulgence.

It’s infrastructure.
It’s memory.
It’s a portal.

And she plans to keep stepping through it.

Reader, I felt so seen.

There is something deeply liberating about being reminded that you are not, in fact, obligated to subject yourself to propaganda theater simply because it has a presidential seal on it.

So let me offer the same public service announcement, now in my own extremely unhinged register: You do not need to watch the State of the Union.

I repeat.

You do not need to watch the State of the Union.

I repeat: I do not need to watch the State of the Union. Phew.

Please step away from the remote. Put down the livestream. Close the news app. Protect your nervous system.

Because what you’re about to see tonight isn’t governance. It’s not information. It’s not even persuasion. It’s ratings content.

One of the most consistent mistakes the American public keeps making is treating Donald Trump like a normal president delivering a normal speech.

He’s absolutely not.

He’s a lifelong media figure/online troll whose entire operating system runs on attention metrics. Ratings are oxygen. Spectacle is strategy. Outrage is distribution.

The State of the Union, for Trump, is not a constitutional obligation.

It’s literally sweeps week.

The goal isn’t to inform you. The goal is to dominate the news cycle. The goal is to occupy your brain. And every viewer is a datapoint.

At this point, Donald Trump’s State of the Union could be an AI video of kittens eating peanut butter and it would still get wall-to-wall coverage.

We’re fully through the looking glass of American political media.

Because the content almost doesn’t matter anymore.

The spectacle is the point. The stagecraft is the product. The attention is the currency.

You could replace the speech with:

• AI kittens

• stock footage of eagles

• a CGI flag gently waving

• a looped applause track

• or a Diet Coke can slowly sweating under studio lights

— and cable news would still run the chyron: “TRUMP ADDRESSES NATION”

(The level to which this exact formula might actually show up on our screens tonight is high enough that I should publish this before 9pm tonight to make sure I can sue for copyright infringement if it comes to pass.)

Let’s be honest about what’s actually happening tonight — the State of the Union is now a television object more than a governing act. It’s a set. A backdrop. A performance environment. It’s the president as broadcast property.

Which is why the most honest question about the evening is not: What policies were announced?

But, instead: What narrative is being staged? And whose interests does it serve?

Friend, I love you. But, you aren’t getting informed tonight.

You’re getting:

• recycled grievances

• invented achievements

• statistical fan-fic

• blame confetti

• applause choreography

Trump has always understood something fundamental about media psychology: if you say something loudly enough, on a big enough stage, with enough cameras, a portion of the audience will internalize it regardless of truth.

The State of the Union is the largest amplification platform available to him.

So, why volunteer your attention?

Here’s the part we don’t talk about enough — watching is participation.

Every view, every clip share, every quote tweet, every “can you believe he said this” post extends the reach of the message.

Trump’s political strategy has always depended on opponents acting as unpaid distribution.

We hate-watch, rage-share, and clip for dunking purposes.

And the algorithm does the rest.

Congratulations! You’re now part of the media buy. Now, go take a shower. Yuck.

When he says: “America is thriving.”
You hear: “Please stop noticing inequality.”

When he says: “Our borders are under siege.”
You hear: “Fear mobilizes turnout.”

When he says: “We’ve restored greatness.”
You hear: “Applause line incoming.”

When he says: “The best numbers ever!”
You hear: “No numbers will be provided.”

You’re not missing information by skipping it. You’re skipping propaganda theater.

But there’s still good news. (Spoiler alert: there usually is if you look long enough.) You, personally, don’t need to sit through ninety minutes of grievance karaoke. Movement people will watch. Journalists will watch. Researchers will watch. Hell, I’ll probably hold my nose and watch with one eyebrow raised so high it leaves my face. You can simply read the summary. Or watch some clips. Or ignore it entirely.

You’re welcome.

However, if you want actual substance tonight — if you want truth, accountability, and governing vision — skip the Trump spectacle and listen to Rep. Summer Lee delivering the Working Families Party response to the State of the Union. How? Text SOTU to 30403 and you’ll get a link when she goes live and you can watch it on your phone, tablet, computer, TV, etc. You can also just watch it live here: http://wfpus.org/sotulive. We got you, boo!

Because while Trump performs for ratings, Summer Lee speaks for people. She’s one of the clearest voices in Congress naming inequality, corporate power and overreach, racial injustice, democracy threats, and working-class reality without the distortion field.

That’s information.
That’s perspective.
That’s governing values, not television.

TL;DR

Don’t give Donald Trump your attention metrics.

He lies.
He performs.
He thrives on viewership.

You’re not required to attend the spectacle.

If you want to stay informed, listen to Summer Lee’s WFP response instead.

We’re watching so you don’t have to.

The truth is that the state of the union isn’t determined by one speech.

It’s determined by whether working people can live with dignity. Whether communities have power. Whether democracy holds. No teleprompter can fabricate that reality. And no ratings spike can change it.

There’s something clarifying about watching your range drop faster than the miles to your destination.

If you’ve never road-tripped in an electric car across the American South, you may not know this particular flavor of awareness: the quiet mental math, the periodic glances at the dashboard, the recalibration of plans around chargers instead of exits.

The way the road stops being linear and becomes… conditional.

We drove from Atlanta to New Orleans and back in an EV, and somewhere around Alabama the trip changed genres.

It stopped being a drive and became an experience.

Electric road trips force you to slow down whether you wanted to or not.

You don’t just gas and go. You stop. You plug in. You wait. You sit. You stretch. You look around. You talk. You renegotiate timing. You discover diners you would have flown past at 80 mph in your fossil-fuel past life.

The car charges.

You marinate.

And something lovely happens in that forced pause.

The road stops being about conquering distance and starts being about inhabiting it.

We lingered at chargers in small Southern towns that did not expect to be lingered in. We wandered convenience stores like anthropologists of snacks. We sat longer than we would have if momentum had been frictionless. The travel day (or night) opened up, softened, expanded.

It wasn’t efficient. But somehow it was better.

It also deepens the relationship with the person beside you in a way that fast travel rarely does.

And in my case, this was the first road trip with my boyfriend — which already carries its own quiet stakes. The first time you share that much uninterrupted time. The first time logistics, moods, hunger, navigation, and decision-making all braid together in motion. The first time you see how someone travels, which is also how they live: patient or restless, improvisational or precise, generous with detours or rigid with plans.

I had spent some time worrying about how he would be received in New Orleans.

Turns out I also needed to worry a bit more about how we got there.

And by worry, I mean plan. EV travel amplified all of that.

Because EV time is relational time. You’re stopping together, waiting together, recalibrating together. The trip belongs to both of you equally — neither person fully in control, both of you negotiating with the road, the battery, the map, the day.

And something about that shared constraint softened everything.

We talked more than we would have at highway speed. We wandered charger towns side by side. We DJ’d long stretches of road, trading songs back and forth like offerings. We sang loudly — the kind of unselfconscious, windows-up belting that only happens when time loosens and joy has room. We noticed the same small Southern details and built a private geography of memory: the Waffle House that stretched into an hour, the sun slanting across a parking lot in rural Alabama, the moment the car clicked into charge and we both exhaled at once.

Relationships deepen easily in extended unscheduled time. Not the curated time of dates or weekends or visits — but the long, shapeless hours of shared movement, when nothing is happening except being together.

The road gave us that. Or maybe the battery did. Which is actually quite lovely when you think about it.

And very difficult to explain to my mother.

Because my mother belongs to the gas era of road logic — the highly optimized maternal tracking system where she knows exactly where you will stop, exactly when you will text, exactly how long each segment should take, and exactly how little time should be “wasted” between Point A and Point B.

Her travel map is made of exits and efficiency.

So how do you explain EV time to someone raised on speed?

How do you tell her, gently, that the schedule dissolved somewhere around Montgomery?

That there was an hour-long Waffle House detour that was not detour but event?

That we spent a few wayward hours wandering a train town in Atmore, Alabama, because the charger was there and the day opened and we followed it?

I could feel her confusion through the distance.

But… why so long?

But… what were you doing?

But… weren’t you trying to get there?

And the answer is yes.

And also no.

Because the road had already taught us that arrival was not the only metric.

This is the part American travel culture struggles with: time that is not optimized is read as lost.

But EV travel introduces a different arithmetic.

Charging time is not empty time.

It becomes relational time.

Observational time.

Wandering time.

Conversation that would not have existed at highway speed.

Shared noticing that becomes memory.

Still, I get my mother’s anxiety. Because there was also a moment. A very specific, very American-infrastructure moment.

Somewhere on the way to New Orleans, with the range dipping and the map showing more green land than charging pins, I opened my AAA app.

Just… to make sure.

To confirm my membership was current.

Because I was suddenly, viscerally aware of the possibility of being a woman on the side of a highway in an electric car with nary a charger in sight.

Gulp.

Range anxiety is not theoretical. It’s spatial.

You feel it when the charger network thins. When distance between stations stretches. When apps disagree. When a planned stop is out of service. When signage disappears and the battery percentage becomes louder than conversation.

It’s the infrastructure equivalent of “we are not yet where we need to be.”

And that is the political layer humming beneath the roses.

Because electric travel, at its best, invites a slower, more attentive relationship to movement — one that feels almost restorative in a country addicted to speed.

But that experience currently rests on uneven infrastructure.

Reliable charging corridors exist in some places. In others, you’re improvising between apps and hope. Planning becomes guesswork. Detours become necessity. Confidence becomes conditional.

We don’t yet have a truly national charging network.

You feel that fact in your chest when the battery drops.

Still — panic aside — I loved the trip.

I loved how it changed the texture of distance. How it insisted on presence. How it made the drive itself the thing instead of a hurdle to clear. How it stretched time just enough for conversation to deepen and landscapes to register.

The destination mattered.

But the road shaped us more.

Driving electric turned out to be a quiet argument against American haste.

It asked: what if movement were paced instead of optimized? What if travel allowed absorption? What if stops were not interruptions but part of the design? It felt old-tymey in a way. I think my dad would have enjoyed EV travel. He loved driving (to an unhinged degree, if you ask me) and it was always about the trip for him.

What if we trusted the journey enough to let it expand?

We need more chargers in this country.

That part is not poetic; it is practical. A consistent, visible, reliable national charging network would dissolve the moments of panic and widen who can adopt electric travel without fear. Infrastructure is adoption. Infrastructure is confidence. Infrastructure is equity.

But even in its patchwork state, the EV road trip revealed something I want to keep.

Stops and slowness can thicken companionship.

And sometimes the road knows better than you do how you should arrive.

Let me start with a confession: I’m not a catcher of Mardi Gras throws.

This is a matter of public record among my people.

My family knows. My friends know. Anyone who has ever gone to a parade with me knows. Riders absolutely know, apparently, because they simply don’t throw to me. I’ve spent my entire life on parade routes watching beads arc gracefully past my perfectly extended hands to land directly on the neck of a 6-year-old three feet behind me. Or within my brother’s famed “five-foot radius”.

It’s humbling.

It’s consistent.

At this point, it’s basically tradition.

My personal Mardi Gras economy has never been acquisition-based. I’m not diving into the fray. I’m not elbowing toddlers for beads. My brand is serving looks, drinking something cold (or room temp), and having a ball (sometimes literally, sometimes at a ball).

I’m what you would call vibes-forward, fashion-aligned, and loot-agnostic.

And yet.

Even I could tell there were fewer throws this year.

Which is how you know something real was happening.

If you’re from New Orleans, you know Mardi Gras isn’t just a holiday — it’s an economic model.

It’s seasonal wealth redistribution via plastic projectile.

It’s the one time of year when the city says: we’re going to rain objects on you from moving vehicles and you’ll scream for them and strangers will hand them to you and nobody will ask your income bracket.

Beads. Cups. Toys. Bags. Hand-crafted signature throws. Light-up nonsense that stops working before you get home. Food. Hell, sometimes even money. The theology of intentional excess.

Which is why Mardi Gras 2026 felt… fiscally conservative.

The first signals came to me from Tik Tok. People were reporting basic loot and that people didn’t seem to be throwing like they used to. Muses in particular was called out publicly. The photo evidence corroborated these anecdotal accounts: floats still rolling, bands still sounding, crowds still packed — but the air between float and crowd noticeably less… productive.

Less falling.

More waving.

Mardi Gras went from shower to sprinkle.

Now let me be clear: I’m not personally deprived by this.

I leave parades with roughly the same inventory every year: one stray bead someone put on me out of pity, a cup acquired through social connection, and the enduring knowledge that my true Mardi Gras gift is cheekbone highlight.

But even from my historically under-thrown-to vantage point, the difference was obvious.

Because Mardi Gras abundance isn’t about what you catch. It’s about what the air does.

And this year, the air was clearly budgeting.

Here’s the thing outsiders don’t always realize: Mardi Gras is a sensitive economic instrument.

Throws are expensive. Krewes buy in bulk. Riders pay dues. Costs stack: plastics, shipping, molds, storage, float construction, permits, police details, bands, fuel, insurance. Every global supply chain tremor eventually lands in the bead bag.

So when budgets tighten, throws thin.

Fewer specialty items. Cheaper beads. Less blanket tossing. More selective distribution. Riders stretching supply across route length like fiscal managers of joy.

To a tourist: invisible.

To a New Orleanian: screaming.

Because Mardi Gras is built on abundance by design.

Historically, it’s the inversion ritual: before Lent, before restraint, before “we all cutting back” — there is over-giving. Over-throwing. Over-everything.

Abundance before austerity.

So when Mardi Gras itself feels restrained, your cultural nervous system goes:

…wait.

If even Mardi Gras is tightening belts, what phase of capitalism are we in?

I’m not doing nostalgia math here. I’m not weighing bead density by decade (though: the 90s were elite). I’m talking about vibe — and vibe is data in New Orleans.

The vibe was: riders were rationing.

The vibe was: throws spaced out to last the route.

The vibe was: signature items scarce enough to create murmurs.

The vibe was: even the floats felt like they had a finance committee.

And that lands in a particular way in 2026 America.

Because we’re living in an economy where everything feels tight but nothing has officially declared itself tight. Prices up, wages uneven, insurance feral, housing absurd, public goods shrinking, private costs metastasizing — the long soft austerity that never gets named recession but lives like one.

Late-stage capitalism as court jester.

So when Mardi Gras — one of the last public rituals of collective excess — starts showing austerity symptoms, it reads less like a logistics issue and more like a cultural indicator.

Even joy is budgeting.

There’s also something tender here.

Krewes are communities. Riders are households pooling money for shared spectacle. When throws thin, it often means riders themselves are absorbing cost pressure: dues up, discretionary down, everything else eating the budget.

Less bead, more rent and grocery bills.

Less plush, more insurance premium.

The float becomes a mirror of household economics, just with sequins.

And politically — because I really can’t help myself — Mardi Gras has always been anti-austerity.

It’s collective spending for public joy. Pooled resources redistributed freely in shared space. Waste as celebration. Excess as belonging.

It says: there’s enough to throw.

Which is why austerity Mardi Gras hits weird.

It feels like neoliberalism reached the neutral ground.

Like even ritual now has a cost-containment strategy.

Let me reiterate: Mardi Gras 2026 was still joyful. Still bands. Still ladders zip-tied to fences. Still kids losing their minds for cups like tiny supply-chain analysts of desire. Still New Orleans refusing to be miserable on schedule.

Joy persists.

It always does.

But the texture of that joy was leaner.

And if you grew up in New Orleans, you know that texture is everything.

The best part of Mardi Gras for me is invariably Zulu on Mardi Gras morning.

Because even as a lifelong member of the riders-do-not-throw-to-me demographic, Zulu’s signature Blackness and abundance has historically rescued my personal Mardi Gras balance sheet. Zulu throws like generosity is a cultural principle. The coconuts come heavy. The beads come fast. The whole route feels less like distribution and more like overflow.

Most years, I finish the season abruptly rebranded: laden with coconuts, jangling with beads, temporarily passing as someone with catching skills.

But this year?

I barely got a single one.

I was one step away from the indignity of scrounging.

And if Zulu — the last reliable site of throw abundance for the under-thrown-to among us — felt thin, then the bead economy wasn’t just tight — it was speaking.

Maybe next year throws rebound. Maybe shipping stabilizes. Maybe krewes re-expand. Maybe this was a blip in the bead economy.

I hope so.

Because Mardi Gras’ job is to feel like more than enough. To suspend scarcity for a few weeks and let the city live inside abundance theater. But this year, from my extremely consistent position as a person riders don’t throw to, I still felt the shift. And that’s the part I can’t shake.

If even the girl who never catches beads noticed fewer beads, the economy might actually be saying something.

And it said it right before the State of the Union — as if we needed our dementor-in-chief to stand there and solemnly announce that water is wet and hell is hot, that things are tight, that people are stretched.

We know.

We saw it in the air between float and crowd.

Like many Black organizers of my generation, I have a small, improbable story about Rev. Jesse Jackson — one of those blink-and-you-miss-it moments that nonetheless rearrange you.

This is about him — and about us, again, at the edge of the franchise.

In 2010, I was the greenest digital director you’ve ever seen.

I mean green like baby kale. Like unseasoned cast iron. Like I had somehow been handed the keys to the internet for a national march and rally for Jobs, Education, and Justice in Washington, D.C., and nobody had yet realized I was mostly powered by good intentions and conjecture.

The campaign was called One Nation Working Together — a coalition of labor and civil rights groups trying to hold the line before the midterms swallowed everything. It was big-tent organizing in the old sense: buses, unions, church networks, hand-lettered signs, the smell of Sharpies and urgency. We were trying to remind the country that working people still existed — and that Black voters were not a seasonal resource.

And one day, I got called into a tiny room.

I mean tiny. Folding chairs. Fluorescent lights. The kind of borrowed office space where the carpet has seen too many movements and not enough vacuuming.

And there he was: Rev. Jesse Jackson.

By 2010, he was already obviously a legend twice over — civil rights lieutenant, presidential candidate, movement architect, keeper of a moral vocabulary America keeps trying to forget. But in that room, he wasn’t a statue. He was just… working. Reviewing plans. Asking questions. Doing the unglamorous, granular labor of coalition politics.

I remember two things.

First: how small the room felt around him. Not because he performed largeness (although he was not a small person), but because his presence carried decades — Selma, Rainbow Coalition, voter registration drives, labor fights, the stubborn insistence that democracy should actually include the people it claims.

Second: how seriously he took the work. The march wasn’t symbolic to him. It was infrastructure. It was turnout. It was narrative. It was pressure. It was the franchise made visible in bodies and banners.

I walked out of that room a different organizer than I walked in.

Because I realized something I’ve never unlearned: the vote is not abstract. It’s built. It’s defended. It’s coordinated. And it’s always — always — under threat.

I’ve been thinking about that room all week as the SAVE Act — the federal proof-of-citizenship bill I wrote about last year — slouches back into conversation like a zombie policy we keep failing to kill.

I wrote then about what it actually does beneath the polite language of “election integrity.” The analysis unfortunately still stands:

“The SAVE Act doesn’t protect elections — it restricts who can enter them. By requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register or remain registered, it creates a bureaucratic obstacle course that disproportionately hits married women, low-income voters, naturalized citizens, elders, students, rural voters, and Black voters whose documentation histories reflect this country’s exclusions. It is voter suppression with a cardigan on.”

What chills me isn’t just the policy. It’s the trajectory. Because the SAVE Act isn’t only about restricting access. It’s about federalizing the rules of the franchise in ways that override local access expansions and standardize exclusion nationwide.

They’re trying to nationalize disenfranchisement.

To take the slow, state-by-state erosion of voting rights — ID laws, purges, closures, criminalization — and scale it federally so access becomes uniformly narrow instead of unevenly contested.

That’s the nightmare.

That’s the thing Jesse Jackson spent his life fighting in reverse: expanding the electorate, expanding participation, expanding the moral claim of democracy.

Register more people. Bring more people in. Make the franchise wider than the gatekeepers wanted it.

And now we’re watching the gate narrow again, under legislative fluorescent lights not so different from that tiny room in 2010.

When I think about him, I don’t actually think about speeches first. I think about mechanics. About the fact that civil rights was always also election administration: registration drives, litigation, monitoring, protection, turnout. Democracy as logistics.

That’s what we forget when we romanticize the movement era. We remember marches. We forget clipboards.

But Jesse Jackson never forgot clipboards. He understood that power lives where access lives. And access lives in rules.

Which is why the SAVE Act — and the broader push to centralize control over voter eligibility — is not some procedural tweak. It’s a structural move in a long fight over who counts as the people.

And that fight isn’t theoretical to me.

I’ve spent my adult life inside coalitions trying to hold the franchise open — from that 2010 march to today’s organizing ecosystems — and I can feel the same pressure patterns returning: the narrative of fraud, the administrative choke points, the legal scaffolding for exclusion.

The machinery of suppression doesn’t just suppress the vote anymore.

It wants to federalize it.

Rev. Jackson had a phrase that still feels diagnostic: up with hope, down with dope.

And make no mistake — bureaucratic exclusion is a kind of democratic dope. It numbs participation. It narrows the electorate. It convinces people the system was never meant for them anyway.

The day of the march in 2010, the Mall filled the way it does when working people decide they’re done being quiet. Labor jackets. Church hats. Civil rights banners. Languages braided through megaphones. The long American tradition of people showing up to say: we are here, and we intend to count.

I remember looking out at that sea and understanding — viscerally — that democracy is not self-executing.

It exists because people build it and protect it and expand it across generations.

Jesse Jackson was one of the great expanders.

Not perfect. Not myth. But relentless in the direction of inclusion.

And now, at the very moment the franchise he helped widen is being threatened with federal contraction, there is something almost cruel in the timing.

Or maybe it’s just history doing what it does: handing the work forward again.

I keep coming back to that tiny room.

To the ordinariness of it. The paperwork. The planning. The sense that the moral arc everyone quotes is actually a series of meetings in borrowed spaces where people decide whether democracy will be larger or smaller when they’re done.

That’s where he lived his life: making it larger.

And now it’s our turn to decide whether we let it shrink.

Protecting voting rights isn’t nostalgia. It’s not tribute. It’s not symbolism.

It’s the frontline.

Because once you federalize exclusion, you lock it in. You take the fight out of the states, out of the communities, out of the hands of organizers, and you hard-code it into national eligibility.

That’s the endgame.

And it’s exactly the end Jesse Jackson spent decades refusing.

I only sat in a room with him once.

There’s zero chance he would’ve remembered me.

But I remember him — not as icon, but as worker in the machinery of democracy.

That memory feels heavier now.

Not because he’s gone.

But because the fight he taught us is back in its most dangerous form: not overtly denying the vote, but redesigning the rules so fewer people can ever reach it.

If we want to honor him, it won’t be with quotes.

It’ll be with access.

Keep the franchise wide.

Keep the gate open.

Keep hope alive — yes — but also keep the voter rolls reachable, the registration pathways intact, the eligibility humane, the rules local enough to contest.

Because the tiny rooms still exist.

And what we decide in them still determines who counts.

Up with hope. Down with dope.

He meant despair. He meant addiction. He meant anything that diminishes human possibility.

But he also meant this: keep democracy expansive. Keep it reachable. Keep it alive.