In this country, we live to produce in order to earn the right to consume. Any external meaning that our work grants us is stifled by corporations who seem not to care if we live or die, prioritizing the monetization of our health, cognition, passion, sociality and happiness serving the counsel of outdated profit doctrines.
Big-AI is taking our water; the ultra-processed food industry is purposefully fostering chemical addiction; big social media conglomerates knowingly use predatory algorithms to maintain chronic user engagement, causing widespread anxiety, depression and emotional numbness; our government representatives invest in defense contractors while voting to intensify war in order to extract profit from mass death; underfunded primary schools are forced to make branded curriculum deals with corporations, while governments continue cutting educational funding. The list of injustice goes on. The gradual, increasingly severe onset of contemporary dystopia leaves us with a nasty comorbidity of Boiling Frog Syndrome paired with extreme political distrust, fear and grief. We have no reason to trust anything beyond our individuality, no reason to hear any organization out or trust that any institution has good faith.
What I mean to say is, we have a right to complain about everything. But, as an aspiring political scientist with an enduring sense of hope for the day when we will all come to our civic senses, I am worried that recent popular indulgence in political wallowing will do nothing to rectify societal ills or ameliorate this predatory world. In its abundance, our political grief is often massively unconstructive and misplaced, directing critical thought away from true evils and depleting the credibility and potency of popular criticism. Rather than wielding directionless anger, this politically minded generation must make attempts to channel frustration and grief into tangible causes. If we recognize that emotional self-discipline is an important facet of political engagement, we can soothe our hysteria and find our personal paths of resistance.
Last fall, I spent time with a friend who was experiencing a lot of grief over the war in Gaza. The suffering abroad already seemed impossible to reconcile with the rhythms of everyday life. Then, the whole world’s attention suddenly shifted to the death of Charlie Kirk. Their final straw that week was not the state-sponsored proliferation of radical and hateful rhetoric , but the way it echoed on our own campus. Suddenly, the presence of far-right students in our liberal arts atmosphere was undeniable, and the ideological dissonance felt distressing. The breaking point came when they saw a new pal of theirs sitting beside a member of Turning Point Claremont. It wasn’t just who their pal was sitting with — it was what this action signaled in that moment.
My friend went to bed crying that night. From what I could gather, conservative discourse felt like an existential threat to social progress at this time, crowding out the language of empathy and peace with rhetoric that is harsher, louder and indifferent to suffering. Our peers’ apparent promotion of Kirk’s rhetoric felt hostile to the moral ground that social-activists have been building for decades, and the tolerance my friends’ pal had for Mr. Turning Point magnified the feeling of brutal disappointment in the face of ideological betrayal.
I felt some internal dissonance seeing my friend struggle with grief. I wanted to be consoling, but the Political Studies major in me couldn’t let go of the fact that this grief felt heavily unproductive and almost masochistic. Their fear seemed immobilizing, when I wanted them to feel empowered by their remarkable sense of empathy and conviction. I feel that our own wellbeing and the causes that we care about require us to be less reactive and more intentional with our grief.
Likely, we’ve all felt similar devastation about things near and dear to our hearts. In the face of debate over what many of us consider basic human rights, opposition feels menacing and even existential. You should’ve seen the way I cried on the toilet when a gay marriage case landed in the hands of our majority-conservative Supreme Court last year. I could bullshit and tell you to stop crying and go to the grassroots, but I won’t. Odds are, if you’re reading this, you already know that you should be “mobilizing,” and that it never feels like enough. We have a right to feel overwhelmed in every waking moment by forces larger than ourselves that do not listen, even when we plead.
I don’t mean to pull a Richard Nixon and accuse your disjointed, human emotion of being the root cause of the rise of illiberalism. But still, we have a responsibility to ourselves and the progress we want to see in this nation to be resilient in the face of disappointment, to compose ourselves for the sake of organization and lead lives of joy as a mode of resistance.
Depleting people’s ability to feel joy is a tool that’s been used to oppress and marginalize people throughout history, and that’s exactly what is happening to Americans right now. Political overwhelm is being weaponized by the right. But, in the words of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s important to maintain and exercise the right to cultivate joy: “In fact, you need to.”
Joy as resistance has taken physical, relational and emotional forms throughout history, sustaining communities through injustice and empowering them to endure and rise above. From Indigenous survival under colonialism, to Black resilience under segregation, to defiance against the Islamic Republic’s repression in Iran, joy has persisted — not just as survival, but as a force that creates culture, collective memory and foundations for future change. We need joy and hope in order to sustain the fight against a system designed to exhaust and attrite us.
Take, for example, Chris Smalls’ ability to unionize against Amazon, the second largest company in the world, even in the face of exploitative working conditions, the company’s million-dollar labor consultation and the loss of his job. Or Stacey Abrams’ ability to launch the New Georgia Project, which mobilized enough young non-Black voters to turn Georgia blue in the 2020 presidential election for the first time since 1992.
Grief is human, but to make a difference in this world, you must act beyond it. Sure, my idols organize at the grassroots level, but we all have a role to play even if organizing isn’t ours. Fighting can also mean producing critical art, taking care of yourself as a form of resistance against systems that profit from our sickness and exhaustion, or honoring personal values by boycotting, especially when it has been made inconvenient to do so. You don’t need to follow a specific manifesto to be the perfect revolutionary. Rather, I want you to think about how you live in opposition. What’s your method? Most importantly, is it empowering or immobilizing?
Many of us grew up being told to honor our feelings by expressing them, but in this increasingly life-or-death political context, your benchmark for productive grief and resistance must be empowerment. Cry if you have to, but you must go beyond that.
It’s frustrating, because I do believe that we deserve to live under leaders who see our grief, respect our grief and show that they’re listening through resonant action. Yet this is not the case, and to have our needs met at this moment demands that we act intentionally, which necessitates emotional self-restraint.
Unfortunately, social revolution has never been easy.
Celeste Cariker PZ ’28 loves forethought.
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