This is how to foment a resistance. A resistance can be good or bad depending on the context. Resisting temptation to do harm for example is a noble affair, and one that many religions have as a foundational tenet. But a resistance to ideology gets a bit murkier. The ideology and the ideologue are what we question. There can be a message of love or hate or unity or division, and the interpretations of those things is up to the consumer. Is the act inherently beneficial to the majority, or does it prioritize the minority? Majorities, we have been taught, generally rule.
We have learned, through stubborn compassion, that majority rule can often times subdue or otherwise silence those that are unseen and denies them substance and inclusion. Suffrage, Civil Rights, Marriage Equality, all noble efforts to bring to the table the ignored and the underrepresented. All examples of elevating he minority in order to provide a more fair and equal society. We have a long history of this, fighting amongst ourselves, stoking our ideologies, a clear dichotomy of results at the end. It’s the American way, and I appreciate that part of our history despite its blood and tears that had to be shed to get to where we are. Converting the minority from under representation to equality to coincide with the majority doesn’t have to be about giving up who you are, it is about realizing the value in community and compassion for your neighbor.
Modern history has revealed a strange trend in prioritizing the minority. That in and of itself isn’t dangerous. In fact I think that it is a noble thing to try and give a voice to the oftentimes voiceless. The intentions are noble, but the results are sometimes not what is intended. We have seen in recent history a small portion of that minority who become emboldened with their newly minted prioritization, and where humans congregate, ill will can happen. An unfortunate side effect of a large conglomeration of individual personalities is that almost at every turn there is a segment of chaos who prefer to burn everything down and start over. This creates an imbalance where the minority can harm the majority, and any way you slice it, that isn’t ever going to be okay. It promotes a mass sense of unrest and a lack of justice, and you can see those wounds fester and begin to harm the majority in question.
I do not admonish a group of people on principle. Stereotypes are dangerous as hell, and although they can often be correct, I believe that it is folly to apply them generally. That is a sure fire way to be proven wrong about the things that you believe about any group or individual. I cannot and will never be able to understand how a person unlike myself lives their life and the sacrifices and struggles that they endure to live it. We are all so unique that though we can share the feeling of suffering, the cause of that suffering is deeply personal.
Humans are historically a stoic species. We can endure a lot of suffering with the promise of relief at the end of that dark tunnel. Life, of course, isn’t always suffering, but we all know that we are all going to experience it as a byproduct of living. It’s the cost of humanity and life itself. I, along with most other people that I know in my life have endured many things that go unspoken, because we have a promise of an end to that suffering if we can just suffer a little bit longer.
I am sure you, as have I, have felt things being off kilter for a long time. I can only think of my own life. I am 43 years old as I write this, and being of that age, I can almost pinpoint the beginning of this fracture happening for me personally to when two planes crashed into the side of a building on live television as the world looked on with wrenching guts and uncertainty.
I feel like we have been trying to figure out how to shake those emotions and feelings ever since. Walking in the dark, hoping not to fall.
That is a bizarre thing for me to ponder, considering when the towers fell, social media barely existed, and you were pretty wealthy if you had a phone with a 2MP camera attached to it. So much has changed. We now all carry supercomputers in our pockets with access to the world literally at our fingertips. Just today I ordered concert tickets, booked a hotel, and made dinner reservations months in advance in less than 20 minutes time. We can order a tube of toothpaste and it is sitting in the mailbox by morning. The world has sped up while we all scrambled to remember what it felt like to be normal. It’s a fleeting feeling, especially since so much time has passed. It’s more a memory that we can’t trust, a ghost of nostalgia, and a specter of reality that some days, I personally can’t trust to be real rather than imagined.
September 12, 2001 gave me hope. Real hope. Pennants of country flying high, mass prayer in the streets, a collective mourning and a sense of communal resolve. We remembered that we can get things done so much better as a group.
I personally have been chasing that feeling for 24 years now. My entire adulthood has been stuck in the mire of one disaster after another, and woefully the feeling that I felt on September 12th would be an unfortunate precipice to that feeling of collective unity for the foreseeable future. I didn’t know then that I would be looking for it for so long after it had passed.
24 years later, almost on the dot, something happened. Again I found myself staring at a screen and wondering what was going on in this sick sad world. My instinct was to be angry and sad and vengeful as I’m sure many people were at that moment. It’s a strange thing to feel like you know a human just from seeing the 30 second sound bites, the YouTube videos, text bubbles and thoughts on the fly that camera phones and social media puts in our lap like amazon toothpaste in the mailbox. It’s not real but it isn’t fake either.
It wasn’t the man. As much as I admired his willingness to just simply talk about it, it was the end of the man that caught a lot of us off guard. I watched him. I watched hard questions tossed like footballs, and hats thrown to an awaiting crowd. It was entertaining theater with a dash of possibility. Something felt wrong seeing him die. It was like somebody unplugged a video game that you were in the middle of and its jarring to be back in reality. Everything is out of focus and the smallest sounds are screaming loudly.
On September 14th 2025, I am feeling something strange in the air. It smells almost like a favorite dish that you forgot that you loved, hot out of the oven and wafting an invitation of satiety to the waiting recipient. You can’t believe you forgot about it, its one of your favorites.
I think that feeling is hope. I hope we can hang on to it a little bit longer this time.