It’s easy to feel uneasy right now. You don’t have to be a daily consumer of the news to know this. There’s been an undeniable vibe shift lately. Your peers, friends, family, colleagues and anyone you come across in your daily life are all affected by it.
You will be too.
I started writing this while observing the city of Minneapolis and the community response to the tragic killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
We all know what happened, and the footage doesn’t lie.
They were brutally murdered in front of us by ICE agents. Good and Pretti aren’t the only ones, though. Keith Porter, a 43-year-old Black father of two from Los Angeles, was also murdered by an off duty ICE agent on December 31, 2025.
We have to remember that law enforcement entities have been committing violence against our own citizens forever, and in response to this, there has always been community pushback.
I want to dive specifically into the community aspect in times of fear, violence and, to put it more bluntly, fascist takeover. Regardless of where you stand politically, I think it’s fair to say that none of us enjoy oppression.
Oppression is everywhere, for all people. If you do everything you can and still can’t afford basic needs, food, housing or daily living, then you are being oppressed. You’re being oppressed by a government that only cares about the richest elite — the rest of us are all below and will be treated as such. All of this sucks, so the question then becomes, “What do I do about this?”
What we need to be looking at instead is, “What do we do about this?”
There is no one person who is going to fix any of this. There is no one who is going to swoop in and save us because, even if we were somehow magically able to elect someone who can, there are still deeply rooted systemic problems that will not be undone with one person. There are things that we all have to work on within ourselves.
Turning inward toward the self means confronting things about ourselves that we might not like.
I want us to really ask ourselves whether we truly care and are doing enough for our communities in order to move forward in the fight against fascism. I think social media and a growing dependency on the internet over time has led us to become more withdrawn and pulled away from society. We like to think that we’re connected, but there’s a huge difference between socializing online and in person. We’ve all created bubbles for ourselves online, so we only see and care about what’s going on in our tiny bubble.
In doing so, we’ve become detached from everyone that we can’t see.
I will say, however, that online spaces are a great way to build community, but I want to also emphasize that it has to go beyond that.
I myself am heavily online, and most of my socializing is done there. But that made joining back into the real world even harder.
I struggle to socialize at school because I forgot what it was like to talk face-to-face with someone I don’t know. I was very isolated growing up and didn’t make much effort to change that until adulthood.
When we are alone, isolated and facing horror in the world, we will become fearful. We’ll feel powerless, we’ll spiral because we don’t know what we can do to possibly help make this world better. When the rich elite hold so much power over us, how are we supposed to even begin to fight back? You start with the community.
Start small with local groups. Find a cause that you want to fight for and start looking for people who also fight for that cause. For me personally, as someone who is queer, trans and disabled, I started going to local events that feature those things. Go to these events just to go, observe conversations if you’re not ready to talk yet.
The healing will come with that sense of solidarity you feel just by being among people who feel the same way you do.
The only way to combat that feeling of helplessness is by contributing in any small way, and that contribution can mean anything. As long as you are making an effort to support communities and causes you care about, it will help you feel better in the long run. We do have power when we join together. Staying withdrawn and avoiding our own neighbors is not how we’re going to fight fascism. We have to become less selfish, now more than ever.
This isn’t about politics or petty discourse, this is about human lives. Whether you support ICE or not, there is a death toll attributed to them. The only way we can survive is by helping each other. We can’t abandon each other, and we can’t abandon ourselves either just because we’re scared. Standing on our principles and protecting our neighbors and communities is what we need right now.
We have to continue to speak out against injustice no matter how dangerous it might be, for everyone’s sake.
I know it seems like we can’t do anything, but we can do something. Expand your network. Start talking to activist groups and community leaders. Find out how to get involved, because even I, as a disabled person, found a way to do it. If nothing else, just make your voice loud and make your feelings known.
It’s okay to be scared and confused, but don’t panic.
Organize!
I really want to end this with some lyrics from my favorite Dead Kennedys song, called “Stars and Stripes of Corruption,” because no other song in the world has been able to capture how I feel right now:
“But what can just one of us do?
Against all that money and power
Trying to crush us into roaches?
We won’t destroy society in a day
Until we change ourselves first from the inside out.”
Remember this, and whatever you do: don’t give up. Fight, and do it together.
