As someone who has been connected to “the resistance” since my early twenties, I can assure you: it is far from dead.
The resistance has always been mycelial—decentralized, connective, and highly adaptive. This sprawling organic structure is both its strength and the key to its resilience and success. Our methods stand in stark contrast to authoritarianism, which consolidates power around cults of personality within rigid hierarchies upheld by blind loyalty, violence, and corruption.
Movements like the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter were akin to a flush of mushrooms’ fruiting bodies: visible and dramatic, appearing suddenly when conditions were right. Yes, they were performative, but theater and spectacle have always been part of the broader work toward justice. Though these marches didn’t always yield the changes demanded by signs and slogans, they allowed us to see one another in great numbers and spread ideas like spores. After that energizing moment, many of us returned to our quieter, sustained work.
The disciplined and sober among us are still here, engaged in the unglamorous but essential labor of resistance. We volunteer, build networks of mutual aid, run book clubs, teach, mend, and tend. We are the artists, writers, and thinkers who imagine and co-create possibilities for a better world. We form underground networks to help women access healthcare in states hostile to bodily autonomy. We organize self-defense classes to protect ourselves and our communities. We endure the tedium of town-council meetings and carefully scrutinize dense ordinances and bills. More often than not, we’re buried in spreadsheets, Slack conversations, and email threads. And after so many years, we may appear as part of the furniture to the casual observer.
The resistance is, in many ways, “women’s work”—the often unrecognized yet vital efforts that have held us together as we stumble and lurch toward a kinder and better future.
– Zelda Lin
Artist, lead developer at Cause+Effect