Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 4
A birthday month practice
For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what over here.
A friend today told me she listened to a New York Times interview with one of the architects of the current fascist takeover of the US government. She was grateful for the chance to go deep, as she said it, into the belly of the beast. I told her I hadn’t been thrilled about the NYTimes granting him such a wide and uncritical platform. She just started reading this little essay series of mine, so she asked me to write today’s micro essay about this question: Who should be speaking on our shared platforms as we confront our present collapse?
This isn’t easy to write about in a micro essay, as you can imagine. But here is my attempt: I understand that people may want to listen to authoritarians to learn more and understand the context in which we do our work from the primary sources themselves. But I have a problem with mainstream media platforming these people when they have captured so much of our media infrastructure already. Our global media is oriented toward them, for clicks and likes, and so the permission structures for authoritarianism keep growing.
Today, people protested outside the USAID building to protect due process and aid funding, the Treasury to protect our national financial infrastructure, NYU Langone hospital to protect trans kids right to healthcare, the highways of Los Angeles to protect migrants from summary deportation, and so much more. Mainstream media in the US barely covered this. Instead, it was the authoritarian vision that keeps being propped up, sometimes with a mild critique, but sometimes just to pull people in and fix their attention. The protestors are engaging in defense and protection of people — a precursor of building vision for shared futures. And that isn’t getting the platform it deserves.
In the aftermath of elections around the world in 2024, I hear a constant drumbeat of blame toward progressives for not forwarding a vision of how we build just and shared futures. I keep seeing posts, primarily from a small group of men from the chattering class, that say, “we need vision. This is why we lost. We need ‘vision’!” I keep wanting to ask them: Who is “we”?
If you think there is a lack of vision being crafted and stated for how the future should unfold, you might be listening to the wrong people. Or not listening at all. It’s so much easier to chase the extreme right’s narratives, and often more profitable to claim there is a vacuum of imagination and strategic creativity.
Communities of progressive Black, Native, Asian, Latine, LGBTQ, feminists, humanists, climate change and refugee activists, advocates for education and health access, creative artivists, digital and information activists, have forwarded visions of how to build society that uplifts all people toward shared equity and prosperity. People who weave all of these visions together into a shared narrative do exist. We are largely unheard and underresourced. If there is a pathway forward out of <all of this>, this needs to change. Now.
While I was musing on this piece, I was listening to Joy Oladokun’s song, “Keeping the Light On.”
Keeping the light on, light on ain’t easy
Keeping the fight on, so long, is hard to do
For all the times you feel the weight, there might just be a better way
Won’t deny that it feels so hard
When the night gets so dark
Keep keeping the light on
It helped.
Essay 5 is here.
