The micro and macro of life are a throbbing lens of focus for me, like putting in my contact lenses and then having to put on my readers off and on, off and on, all day. There is constant over correction for taking too much time on my little singular existence’s needs and joys, which I love, and then zooming out to the happenings and needs of the world and feeling all at once futile and angry at the forces behind the horrors and mad at myself for not doing enough. I often perseverate on not being active in my community enough, even after going to a protest and showing up late to dinner, there’s a feeling of it never being enough to the point of feeling pathetic, like there I go again trying to save the world in two hours time before I get back to my sweet, safe life. I find I’ll cluster protest, two weekends in a row, make some deep art, think a lot, cry a lot, send emails, create “learning opportunities” in my classes, connect with activists by joining groups I fully intend on being an active member of, sign up for important newsletters I fully intend to read every day… Then, the grammar of my job and the care of my kids and some new, fun music or project pull me back to that type of pleasant busy again and I live with my horsey blinders on to focus on MY life… the cycle repeats itself.

Dolores Park, No Kings Day 2025. photo by Raina Mast

I’m pretty sure others feel like this. Last week there were I.C.E. raids in the town next to where I grew up, some workers who were working on fire restoration of building and were kidnapped by masked agents in a unmarked van. I texted my brother who lives nearby, “Are you going to the protest today?” and after I pressed send, I realized how full of big sister expectation that may have sounded for him, working so hard with his hands very full as a new parent working his butt off. I don’t expect him to drop everything, I just wanted to go stand up for those people and he was my closest chance, my sibling appendage, an extension of me.

I feel quite split down the middle when the spectrum widens between world grief and imminent joyfulness. How can I be texting all gitty one moment about the Los Angeles WNBA team playing the same night the new women’s SF sports bar opens, and in the very next moment watch Los Angeles fight ICE kidnappings? How in one day am I shopping for a gas mask and a new masc bathing suit? Same phone, same heart in my chest, just all in a blender, these mixed up pieces of me.

As Israel and Iran bomb each other tonight, and LA continues under curfew under the national guard and Marines, and the strength and hope I felt yesterday at No Kings Day dissipates into “What next? Now what?”, I look for some guidance from the past when revolution was in the air. How did our parents keep it together? They didn’t have phones to stare at for constant info and supposed connection with all the strangers in the world who also have phones. How did the Black Panthers get those amazing pamphlets printed and on planes to distribute across the country? How did people know to go to Woodstock or the Summer of Love? After the assassination of MLK, did people spread the word that it was time to stand up or were the riots that erupted all across the country just the natural phenomenon that occurs when the human spirit when it is attacked so gravely? How will I know it’s time when it’s time?

I grew up thinking the world was still a mess and the Baby Boomers hadn’t finished the job of curing racism, sexism, classicism, pollution, etc. At a lunchtime meeting at school last year following the death of Oklahoma teenager Nex Benedict, I struggled to express how sad I was that my generation did not fix the world as I so wholeheartedly had believed we would. Instead we were handing it over as a literal hot mess that my students would have to try to fix as they grew up into it. I saw my parent’s generation as having not done enough, and now I was now in the seat of apology, wondering what had happened.

Kid’s NO KINGS DAY protest sign 2025. photo by Raina Mast

Yes, legal strides were made in the 90s and early 2000s. Gay marriage was legalized, we codified the welcoming of immigrants, and improved workplace and healthcare law for all genders. We demonstrated like crazy for the environment, gay rights, and civil rights. As a country, we started to listen and raise up non-white voices and perspectives in our classrooms, radio stations, and museums. We tried to turn up the heat on preserving democracy and elected our first Black president. Enough of my peers studied computer science and most of us got really amazing computers and cellphones. In my little interpretation of reality, it seemed like things were looking up!

But despite our efforts, we had also let businesses use up resources, pollute, and develop chemicals that would forever alter our earth. Instead of questioning our own exploitation intrinsic to capitalism’s corporate greed that we were working under or for, many of my white friends and fam shifted the camera away from the wealthy standing over us and focused blame on those less powerful, buying into race/blindness and the class warfare of “welfare queens”. We had grown police stations into high tech military to be used on our own people and grown our prisons to be money making machines instead of centers of rehabilitation and penitence. We had exported jobs to other countries where humans are exploited just like the enslaved of the 1600s-1900s of the United States. We had defunded education, made college a financial pipe dream/nightmare, and somehow stood by as the American Dream applied only to the 1% that would use the rest of us as labor and consumers addicted to technology, fast fashion and fast delivery.

I had thought my Generation X would do better than our Baby Boomer parents, many who worked 35 years at a personal American Dream through wars and recessions to give their Gen X babies stability and opportunities. I thought we GenXers and millennials would take that “I can be whatever I want when I grow up” prosperity of opportunity, if not prosperity of cash/available credit, and fix the problems of the world by the time we were grownups. Like if we all went to college and participated in a fun combination of Amnesty International, ACLU, Greenpeace, GSA, bible studies, and Planned Parenthood and we all got a liberal arts education with a mix of world history with an anti-colonizer lens, earth science, art/art history and yoga, etc, we’d all see the problems clearly and be educated enough to vote in line with that info and navigate the bureaucracy to change law to make us all more free. At least, that was the recipe I was sold, that I invested whole heartedly in.

But 24 years later, after paying down $28,000 of college loans and trying hard to teach this stuff I learned to my students, it turns out over half of my country learned other things and dismisses most of what I believe in as “woke” and/or “elitist”, my kids are growing up with freedoms disappearing left and right, and capitalism is grinding us all down working hella jobs and side hustles to pay the bills and have a morsel of hope we will have a chance to retire after we try to get our kids raised and make sure our parents are stable in their retirement.

This afternoon there was a large box in plain sight outside my neighbor’s house that hadn’t been there before I had left for a 20 minute walk. I didn’t want it to get stolen and so I rang both doorbells of the building. An elderly woman opened and said she had just got the email from the company that her new walker had been delivered. After getting it inside, we exchanged names and she asked if I had gone to the protests yesterday and I replied that I had and it was really great, reporting to her the details because I assumed she asked because she didn’t make it in her old age. But to my surprise, she said she had gone, too. Her son had been fired from USAID by DOGE and she was so upset. While I was all worried that the protest hadn’t done enough, asking “what now? what’s next?”, here was somebody who was needing a new walker, but who had made it all the way to Dolores Park (on a hill, lots of traffic to get there, thousands of people= not easy) to march.

I often question the effectiveness/impact of protests in today’s world, especially if they are small in a big city. But maybe my expectations of impact are screwy; maybe protests serve more of a purpose than just convincing representatives that they’ll lose votes if they don’t listen. Maybe there’s more to it if my neighbor and I feel some hope and learned each other’s names and listened to each other’s struggles a little bit and found out we aren’t alone at all in our lives separated by a few buildings, but instead connected in chants across the park yesterday, tens of thousands of people in between, not even aware that we were both there rooting each other on, standing up for each other’s families, believing our country can do better. Two white ladies knowing what uniting feels like because so many took their Saturday to get out on the street to say “we care, this aint right.”

My students have talked to me about performative activism, critiquing people who get dressed up and make videos of themselves fighting for what’s right, which I’m not sure I completely understand as being a problem???, but I’m personally more preoccupied with my opposite doom spotlight: “Look at me NOT doing enough activism 24/7! I’m a terrible person!” But isn’t that just some weird martyr narcissist ego stuff as much as the look at me I’m a the best, prettiest activist ever? Is that all a distraction from just doing what’s right? As I figure out how to parent my kids through this, I’m learning humility is not just about not hogging the spotlight, it’s about questioning if the personal guilt spotlight should even exist. It’s teaching my kids simply to show up for their country and use their voice to try to solve problems.

It’s funny when you teach kids stuff you have to reassess if what you apply to yourself is what you want them to apply to themselves. Like sometimes parenting requires learning some unlearning. For me, it’s meditating on the fact that activism isn’t a competition of checkboxes and we can’t all be community leaders, but we all can show up and be led by those leaders. And it doesn’t have to be perfect! If I can’t make it to a protest or a meeting, I find so much comfort and hope that my neighbor may be there standing up for what she believes, representing our block, our kids, and our future. We have to believe in each other, that each of us will rise up in whatever little or big ways we can because we know ICE/war/exploitation/hate ain’t right and we do care and we wanna look at our kids later and say we did try our best. I’m gonna try to keep on doing my best in my grind, turning away from my guilt spotlight, instead feeling the sunshine on my face, feeling connected, knowing that the sun shines the same for us all as we try to get through this ongoing, intergenerational mess, together.

UNSCHEDULED: protest

UNSCHEDULED: selling online