On the morning of the Unite the Right rally, I lumbered down the staircase of a Catskills Airbnb rented for a bachelor party to learn that only hours before, a gang of white nationalists stormed the University of Virginia campus wielding Tiki torches and chanting, 'Jews will not replace us.'
Faiz Shakir, executive director of More Perfect Union, stated, 'We're hoping that an economic populist movement for the next generation will start through More Perfect Union on campuses.' This reflects the organization's goal to mobilize students around economic issues.
For decades, work was designed around a fiction, that of the 'neutral' worker, an abstract individual assumed to be fully available, consistent, rational, and unaffected by bodily constraints. But this neutrality was never real.
The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.
Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.
In the environmental nonprofit sector, "centering frontline voices" has become a familiar slogan, often detached from how decisions are made or resources allocated. It appears in grant proposals, conference agendas, and organizational values statements. And yet, too often, those voices are still positioned as illustrative rather than authoritative-invited to animate strategies already decided, asked to translate lived experience into language legible to funders, or flattened into narratives that travel more easily than the truths they carry.
"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.
There's a myth in our society that real change requires force, strength, and domination. We celebrate athletes, CEOs, and politicians who crush their opponents. But history tells a different story. Lasting social change has often been triggered by humble people whose weapons were passion, principle, and an unwavering commitment to justice and the truth - not the truth we see on TV or read in print media, but rather the truth that we feel deep inside ourselves.
