The Frightening State of Disobedience

As 2025 rapidly approaches summer, the majority of young Americans are struggling to make sense of the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

The new republican leadership has taken glee in eroding both the rights and livelihoods of those targeted by an ongoing culture war, while putting to rest all hopes for economic prosperity once promised to the “practical” conservative voting base. Executive orders made to remove “gender ideology” from federal institutions have once again put trans and queer people at risk of erasure, destabilizing schools, prisons, and military personnel to conform to the enforced gender binary. International students now face the threat of visa revocation, deportation, or disappearance if their outwardly expressed opinions conflict with those of the conservative administration, which has shown increasing sympathy to white nationalist ideologies. January’s temporary Israel-Hamas ceasefire quickly fell apart after an Israeli airstrike, demonstrating that neither occupation nor genocide can be easily bandaged through temporary fixes. Brief flashes of healthcare-based class consciousness after the assassination of Brian Thompson have since devolved into fetishizing conversations regarding Luigi Mangione, presenting a failed opportunity for private health discussion that transcends partisan lines. Now, after a year of campaign losses and a refusal to listen to demands of young voters, the only refractory responses of the corporate left are the mere symbolic gestures of the Democratic Party’s pink clothing or Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech in Congress.

A similar sense of desperation for action has befallen Amherst’s campus. The brutal response of Massachusetts State Police to last May’s pro-Palestinian encampments on the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, coupled with the new administration’s crackdown of visa revocations and detainings, have quelled the outward action of student activists on Amherst’s campus, forcing them to choose between their personal safety and criticisms of the institution’s investments. Mobilizations for divestment that defined last spring semester’s protests at the college have now fallen by the wayside in the face of an unwavering Board of Trustees decision rejecting divestment, placing “practicality” over the question of “principles.” The most recent widespread form of political campus engagement has been small groups of “Stand up for democracy” signs in Amherst Common, seeing students, faculty, and town residents counting the number of car horn honks as their source of political accomplishment. The most major of the Amherst College administration’s involvement with recent on-campus politics has been in response to harsh critique and death threats resulting from a Student article problematizing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, ensuring in a campus-wide email that all students have ability to share ideas that are “unpopular, controversial … and even offensive,” all of which only resulted in the attention of far right reactionary outlets, which painted the incident as yet another example of white, male, conservative victimhood in face of a vitriolic left.

As the year rages on, with its list of new horrors increasing daily, Amherst College students and the younger generation in general have found themselves in a disenfranchised state of silence, where the unraveling of progressivism’s previous failures and the curation of our desired future seem increasingly impossible feats. Meanwhile, those who maintain a semblance of hope find themselves wondering: “Where do we go from here?”

It is firstly important to recognize that the dynamic shift of activism and political mobilization has been, in part, a result of a widespread systemic, economic, and cultural movement towards a deregulated and increasingly commodified society throughout the last half century. Previous student initiatives at Amherst that resulted in institutional change, similar to most political movements of the past, had been less within a spatial context of online discussion and event planning and more in in-person, community-based solidarity. Movements similar to Amherst Uprising — which saw members of the Amherst community participate in a four-day sit-in with specific demands, including changing the Lord Jeff mascot and addressing violence and institutional ignorance towards Black students — now seem largely unlikely or bothersome. Last February, for example, when unidentified students interrupted a presentation by a member of the Board of Trustees in Frost Library, the immediate student response was unfavorable on Amherst’s anonymous social media platform, Fizz, with many lamenting the inconvenience of a disruptive protest during valuable midterm study sessions. This incident, along with the rest of last year’s growing number of political demonstrations on campus, saw a trend of reactionary conversations regarding student protest become less about the goals and demands of the movements, and more about chiding the personal inconveniences the specific forms of activism brought to busy students.

Such an increasing sense of moral apathy has been ascribed by some to a temporal stagnation of culture as a result of the rise of neoliberalism, along with the commodification of activism in an increasingly capital-driven society. It’s difficult to speak on what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called the “slow cancellation of the future” without sounding like a direct quotation from his books “Capitalist Realism” or “Ghosts of My Life,” but his theory speaks to how such an erasure of a generation’s hopes and dreams, which began with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, has reached its peak in the current moment. According to Fisher, with the flattening of all facets of culture by neoliberal policy and technological advancement, it became more difficult for Gen-Xers and beyond to imagine a fulfilling and idyllic future for themselves. Areas of society that once gave rise to political and social movement, the under-bridges or the co-ops or the basement raves through which most ideas and cultural generation came to fruition, are now all likely steamrolled into brutalist rows of gentrified apartment housing. With the rapid progression of industry, culture had fewer spaces to exist and thrive freely, the young generation had less space to exist in community; in this robbery, we lost the ability to completely understand our present. In a vapidly individualized and labor-valorizing existence, the current moment has created an inescapably clear contradiction to the utopic future of decency and progression promised to us by the gains of free market capital. To have any tangible effect in securing the idyllic and empathetic future many of us wish for now seems a deeply naive and lonely measure.

Similarly, in the face of technological growth and the rise of the internet, the majority of political movements, subcultures, and interest groups moved into a progressively individualized online space. Once the accountability of existing politically within an in-person group or community disappeared, activism took place on low-commitment pages or forums that transformed sociocultural awareness into yet another commodity. This generated the growth of slacktivism, professional liberalism, and what Catherine Liu describes as “virtue hoarding.” It manifested itself in the vague moral gestures of the Black Lives Matter instagram blackboxes or the AI-generated “All Eyes on Rafah” image — the barriers to entry of activism lower than ever before, but with zero requirement for commitment.

In spite of this, however, an issue that quickly arises in distancing oneself from neoliberal institutions — that is, to say, to become a ‘‘radical” — is to put one’s own safety at risk. Black radicality, historically at the forefront of leftist movements, serves as a direct threat to western neoliberal institutions, which still operate under a framework of their plantation past. To be political and angry as a person of color, in the broader context of American history, is to put one’s self actualization and security directly at odds with an entire system. A similar danger has impacted youth-led protests, commonly fronted by those whose identities are subjugated by their institutions, in which outward expressions of ideologies contradictory to western institutions have resulted in visa revocation, threats of deportation, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests. What was once a precocious group championed by the American left for their outspokenness against climate policy, corporate greed, and mass shootings, has now found itself abandoned by major media outlets the moment its focus redirected to genocide in Palestine. It makes sense why so many of us have opted towards silence in the past year, as expressing one’s own anger could likely jeopardize our safety, career, or survival.

But it is incumbent upon us, in our increasingly dire reality, to be able to express our anger, and, more importantly, to not expect others to express it for us. The effectiveness of anger in political mobilization has been reiterated time and time again by Assistant Professor of English Dr. Frank Leon Roberts, who frequently cites poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger.” In this essay, Lorde describes anger as a motivating force for action, arguing to her generation of women in 1981 that their fear of anger would “teach them nothing,” further defining the expression of anger “in … service of our vision and our future [as] a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” Through this lens, anger can be viewed as the closest answer our generation will get towards action, a sentiment not meant as a catalyst for hatred but rather for community organization. Make no mistake, the goal from here on out should not be to make oneself comfortable with those who harness destructive ideology; as Lorde said, these moments in time are meant to reveal the true enemy. But if our largest displays of solidarity and action rarely and only present themselves in reactionary responses to conservative campus expressions, then our energy is in dire need of refocus.

It is not customary to assume that, because you are angry and that others likely are too, they will therefore do the activist work for you. In a moment where international students, Black Americans, queer Americans, and countless dispossessed others are being singled out by their institutions, the base-building of political organizations, campus activist groups, and larger community solidarity around a central objective is absolutely necessary. If students do wish to match the success of the legendary Amherst Uprising, then a good majority of us must relinquish ourselves from the assumption that others will do our organizing work for us. Perhaps it is your turn to take a seat in the library.

But, as in all movements and aspirations of the past, white liberals, institutions, and professional elites have nevertheless continued to delegate their political responsibilities to the masses of the marginal, based on the simple assurance that they, as ones who harness capital and privilege, will be okay.

Now, in a realization made far too late, it is strikingly evident to even them: It will not be okay. You are not safe. It is time to join the rest, to find your community in the impossible, before the silence of a very few comes to damn us all.