What Am I Even Resisting?

KayLeigh Fitzgerald
Aug 20
3 min read

It is in times like this, times where we feel so hopeless that we must remember...that is exactly what they want! I've been talking a lot on my socials and especially within the comment section on Facebook (side note: oh my gosh y'all have to look at them, it's insane) about fascism and authoritarian governments. But not enough. I talk so much about tools of reisistance that I haven't explained what I am resisting. I'm not just resisting a policy or a politician. I am resisting a calculated, multi-front assault on the very idea of a shared, compassionate reality. I am resisting:

The Cult of the Unfeeling. This is the mindset that celebrates the cruelty of a child in a cage as "toughness." It’s the rhetoric that calls compassion "weakness" and brutality "strength." It is a system that demands we turn off the most essential part of ourselves—our empathy—in order to survive it. This is the core engine of authoritarianism: the numbness that allows a person to follow orders without question, to see a human being as a problem to be processed.

The Fog of Lies. It’s not just the big lies; it’s the constant, low-grade hum of nonsense designed to exhaust you. It’s the flooding of the zone with so much contradictory information that people throw up their hands and trust only their tribe, or worse, trust nothing at all. A population that can’t agree on basic facts cannot organize effectively. It is a deliberate strategy to paralyze us with confusion.

The Theft of Our Imagination. This might be the most insidious one. They want you to believe that this is the only way things can be. That cages, endless wars, and spiraling inequality are just the "adult," "realistic" state of the world. They peddle a future that is either a nostalgic fantasy or a dystopian nightmare because it keeps us from imagining—and therefore fighting for—anything else. A hopeless people are a compliant people.

And it is against this bleakness that we must shine a light so bright it hurts. We must fight numbness with feeling, lies with truth, and despair with vision. This is why our most essential work is to create.

And this is precisely why art is not a soft response, but rather, it is the sharp, precise tool to dismantle each pillar of this oppression.

Against the Unfeeling, Art Empathizes. A play about a family fleeing violence doesn’t argue with statistics; it bypasses the cynical brain and aims straight for the heart. It forces feeling. It makes you care about a character who represents thousands. It is an antidote to numbness.

Against the Fog of Lies, Art Clarifies. A political cartoon can cut through a thousand pages of obfuscating testimony with one powerful image. A protest song condenses a complex injustice into a lyric that can be chanted by thousands, creating a unified, undeniable truth in real time. It is a lighthouse in the storm of disinformation.

Against the Theft of Imagination, Art Dreams. Afrofuturist novels imagine liberated Black futures. Climate artists visualize sustainable cities. Musicians compose harmonies of a world without war. They are not being naive. They are doing the vital work of building a blueprint for a better world in our minds, making it a place we can recognize and run toward when the opportunity arises.

So when you feel that despair creeping in, that sense of "what can I even do?"—do not succumb. That is the point of the entire operation. Instead, pick up your tool. Your tool might be a phone camera to document. A marker to make a sign. Your voice to sing. Your body to dance in a public square. Your platform to amplify a marginalized artist. Your money to fund radical artists.