Must-Reads and Some Thoughts on Learning in This Moment

“Your clarity is needed. Your hearts and hands are needed.”

Kelly Hayes

Kelly Hayes

— 8 min read
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Must Reads and Some Thoughts on Learning in This Moment
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Greetings friends,

If you're just here for the must-reads, feel free to scroll on down. If you want to check out my final thoughts for the week, you can start here at the top.

Final Thoughts

Today, I want to share some words I wrote for a group of university students. I won’t share what school I was visiting, or any details about who was in attendance, because my visit was not publicized. Months ago, when I was invited to visit the school, a larger event had been envisioned. In the current climate, safety concerns led the organizers to make the conversation an invite-only affair. I understood their concerns and welcomed the opportunity to meet with a smaller group in an environment where attendees would feel safer and speak more freely. Given what these young people are up against, I wanted to devote the majority of our time together to a shared dialogue, so we could talk through their concerns, fears, and ideas. With that in mind, I wrote some short opening remarks to ground us in the moment. 

I wanted to share those words here, with all of you, in case they are useful to anyone else.

***

I want to start with a few questions.

Who here is feeling scared?

Who is feeling tired?

Who is worried about someone they care deeply about and what might happen to that person under this administration?

Who isn’t quite sure how we’re gonna get out of this?

Thank you for sharing that. 

Sometimes, things are terrible, and it’s important to name this. I wanted to begin with the hurt, confusion, and exhaustion that folks are feeling because I want to acknowledge those feelings, and to remind all of us that we’re not alone. The compassion we feel for one another, and the compassion we feel for people whose hardships and precarity far exceed our own, is essential in these times. It’s what will keep us human as fascist politicians attempt to grind down our empathy. This time of chaos is meant to break us. Shock and awe, as a military tactic, is a frenzied bombardment meant to distort a target’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight. Our attackers want people of conscience to feel hopeless. They want us to hunker down and only worry about ourselves. They need us to splinter, and to be ruled by our fears and resentments. Elon Musk refers to empathy as “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” because our collective empathy has the potential to undermine his political agenda. Remember that.

We’ve already seen what capitulation looks like and what it costs. Democratic officials who are willing to disregard the fates of kidnapped students, immigrants and trans people are following a very old template of appeasement. Some of their historical counterparts said nothing when the Nazis came for socialists, trade unionists, and Jewish people. Those choices were grounded in expediency, too. But when we accept the dehumanization and disposal of other people, we are dehumanized as well. Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us that “where life is precious, life is precious.” It’s conversely true that where life is cheapened, all life gets cheaper.   

What you are experiencing right now, as students in a country where universities are under attack, may feel unprecedented, but it is not unheard of. Fascist and authoritarian governments routinely target academia and academics. As you are likely aware, this is being done for the same reason government research institutions are being gutted. Curtis Yarvin, a blogger whose work has strongly influenced people like Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance, recently said, “Every existing institution of science … must be fully cremated in a nuclear autoclave.” He said that “To capture an elite, you have to demolish its institutions.”

That is where we’re at. This is about destroying institutions in order to destroy ways of living, thinking, and ordering society. 

I once told a young friend who was thinking about whether or not to attend college that I thought she should consider doing so, because there would be no other time in her life when learning would be recognized as her primary task. As messed up as colleges and universities are, in so many ways, there’s something really special about that. I am sorry that this war on thought, on institutions, on ways of being, and living is happening at a time when learning is supposed to be your primary task. That is deeply unfair.

Something rather extreme happened when I was a college student as well. I was a sophomore in college on 9/11 when the towers fell. I went to class, like most people on campus, because we didn’t know what else to do. In my first class of the day, Mass Media and Popular Culture, my professor approached the moment with a level of clarity and compassion that I will never forget. When he walked in, people started scurrying to put their phones away, and he said, “No, don’t put your phones away. Check on your people. Do whatever you have to do. And please, take a moment to collect yourselves.” He then sat quietly for a few minutes before he began to speak.

Now, I am not going to get his words exactly right, after all of these years, but he said something like:

You are all in a crucial and unfair position today. The world around you is about to go mad. You will see what fear, panic, hatred, and nationalism can do. You will see this immense tragedy leveraged to do so much harm. Nothing will be the same. But you are studying and discussing how propaganda works. You have the capacity to see and understand the truth, and the world needs you to be people who see and tell the truth. That clarity is needed. Because a lot of people will be warped by these events. They will surrender their discernment out of anger and fear. You can choose not to do that. And it’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make, not just for yourselves, but for all our sakes.

What my professor was telling us that day was that we carried a responsibility as thoughtful, engaged, and curious human beings to engage with the moment truthfully, and to reject the lies, xenophobia, and violence that would soon overtake our society. He was calling on us, not simply to have a well-grounded analysis, but to be a force for what we knew was true and right in this world. He described what was about to happen: the Islamophobia, the march to war, how people we knew would approve of things we never would have imagined. He was right about all of it. 

Unfortunately, the dissenting voices of people of conscience could not stop what came next—an era of warfare that felt endless, when war itself became background noise here in the United States. I believe that violence and its normalization helped pave the path to this moment. I also believe that everything people of conscience said and did to oppose it mattered. Keeping decency and the truth alive mattered. Defending the lives and liberty of people who others demonized or wrote off as “collateral damage” mattered. 

In the moment, we never know what our place in a larger lineage of struggle is going to look like. Sometimes, we win. Sometimes, we keep hope and decency alive. Sometimes, we build countercultures that give the next round of resistors a sense of who they are and what they’re made of. All of that matters. My friend Sarah Kendzior, who has spent many years studying authoritarian governments, recently told me that compassion, imagination and tenacity can’t be taken away from a person. They can only be surrendered. Our task, in this moment, above all else, is to refuse to surrender. 

So, I am here to tell you that you are in a crucial and unfair position today. You are inheriting a world on fire, and whatever flawed and fragile stability this society might have offered in such times is unraveling. You are seeing what fear, panic, hatred, and nationalism can do. You are seeing these things leveraged to do immense harm. But you are thoughtful, empathetic people. You are thinking about justice, and how we can make it, in spite of the death-making forces we are faced with. You have compassion, imagination, and tenacity that no one can take from you. Your clarity is needed. Your hearts and hands are needed. Your refusal to abandon others is needed. Because a lot of people will be warped by these events. They will abandon each other, and in so doing, cheapen life itself. They will either support the fascistic politics of the day or give up, hunker down, and simply look out for themselves. They will surrender their decency out of expediency. You can choose not to do that. And it’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make, not just for yourselves, but for all our sakes. 

ICYMI

This week, I spoke with Sarah Kendzior, bestselling author and expert on authoritarian regimes, about the crisis we're facing—and how we can hold onto our humanity and begin to turn things around.

Must-Reads

Do not miss the Maria Ressa portion of this Democracy Now! interview about attacks on the press. It’s absolutely essential. I especially appreciated this point from Ressa:

The biggest lesson we learned [in the Philippines under Duterte] is that you are at your most powerful at the beginning of the attacks. Every day you do not fight back, you lose just a little bit more of your rights. We normalize just a little bit more of this kind of pseudo-democracy.

It’s been a rough week, and I am going to try to recharge this weekend. I hope you’re all able to do the same.

Much love,

Kelly

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