From Despair to Action: Building a Future That’s Ours
Turns out, we’re the leaders we need.
My 15-year-old son and I watched Braveheart last week.* If you were a 90s kid like me, you remember the battles, the blue face paint, and the iconic speech: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our FREEDOM!” My mother’s maiden name is MacKenzie so I felt those bagpipes in my soul. And every time I got to the end of the movie when Wallace refused to beg for mercy, it wrecked me. Ugly crying, every time.
But rewatching it as an adult last week was a different story. Yes, I was still sad when Murron died. But the part that broke me? Falkirk. When the Scottish lords who had promised Wallace support, turned and left him stranded. When he chased after the King in a rage, was unhorsed by a masked knight, and then he realized it was Robert the Bruce. The one man he thought was on his side. Wallace was betrayed and abandoned so the Scottish lords could have more land, money, and titles. You see it hit him all at once - the dream of a free Scotland slipping through his fingers, not because of the enemy, but because the men with power refused to fight for anything but themselves.
This was the part that wrecked me this time, because I KNOW that feeling now, in a way I never could have known as a teenage girl with privilege.
That gut-punch realization that no matter how much we invest, donate, organize, vote, or call our representatives, again and again the people we’re told to trust turn around and sell us out. The Scottish lords had their land deals; our leaders have corporate donors. The game was never designed for us to win. And yet, foolishly, I keep believing. I keep hoping. I keep feeling that crushing despair when they prove, over and over, that they were never here for us.
Despair is a natural reaction. But it’s also a tool of oppression. They want us to feel powerless because deep down they realize the power of us gathering in community.
No One is Coming to Save Us
I keep seeing it everywhere lately: No one is coming to save us. And it’s true. Endless election cycles keep us in a loop, giving us just enough hope to keep us engaged and just enough disappointment to keep us exhausted.
I don’t know about you, but I’m so tired of being urged to call my representatives. I live in a district where my congresswoman is a full-blown Trump supporter who was posting from the White House the week he signed the bill banning transgender athletes. Do I think my phone call is changing her mind? Absolutely not. If calling your reps energizes you, by all means keep doing it. But me? I’d rather not spend my time and energy propping up a system that is crumbling.
I’d rather spend my energy building the future instead of trying to fix a broken past. And the future is in community and partnership, not top-down hierarchies of power.
Turning Despair into Fuel
Every major rights movement (civil rights, labor, suffrage) succeeded because of community and grassroots pressure, not because a politician benevolently decided to do the right thing. That is the shift we need now: moving away from our reliance on elected leaders to community-driven action.
I don’t have all the answers, and I won’t pretend to be an expert on community organizing when Black activists, disability activists, and people on the margins have been doing this work for centuries. The rest of us, those of us with privilege, are just now waking up to the truth.
But I DO know that I want to start conversations and spark action for people like me - people who have always played by the rules but are ready to do things differently. I have more questions than answers at this point, and this is where I’d love to hear from YOU - what are some of your ideas about community action?
Some of the questions I’ve been wrestling with:
What’s broken in my community? Housing? Food access? Education? What are the pain points where I can make a difference?
Who is already working on this problem? How do I join (or build) networks of like-minded individuals?
Where can I learn from past movements for effective grassroots actions? Instead of waiting for better welfare policies, how do we start community food pantries? Instead of asking for housing reform, how do we support tenant unions? Instead of hoping for better labor laws, how do we organize worker collectives?
What do I have to offer? Time, money, skills, connections - what resources do I actually have, and where can I put them to use?
Redefining Who Has Power
Many of us have accepted the traditional idea that leadership means people who were elected or promoted, like politicians and CEOS. But leadership is already happening in our community, quietly:
The mom who organizes childcare swaps so working parents don’t burn out.
The high schooler who rallies their friends to protest book bans.
The neighbor who sets up a community fridge so no one goes hungry.
When we stop waiting for leaders to fix things, we realize that we might just have the means to do it ourselves. In Braveheart, Wallace didn’t wait for the Scottish lords to organize against the tyranny of the English, he stepped up as a leader and fought back as long as he could.
The work won’t be perfect, or easy, but it’s clear to me that waiting on someone “in charge” is no longer an option. We don’t need permission. We don’t need approval. We can build something better, together.
*Yes, I know the movie was criticized for all sorts of historical fallacies. And I know Mel Gibson himself is problematic and has made horrifying comments in the past. But I trust that we’re all grownups who can take the lessons we need to take from works of art while also acknowledging their faults.