“You’re young, you’ll grow out of it.” It’s a phrase I hear often, and perhaps it’s true. I am outspoken, unrelenting, and I am hopeful. It is a mark of my youth, but to treat that as something I should leave behind as I mature seems backwards to me. I hope I don’t grow fatigued and stop believing that a united people can make a difference. I hope I don’t grow content with the way things are or become so bitter that it incapacitates me. I hope to maintain this mark of youth.

I recognize my life experience is limited, I recognize that in some ways I am naive. I recognize that I am in my prime, and I have more energy now than I will in ten years. I know if I’m lucky, I will live long enough that one day my knees will start to give and one day my back will start to ache, but I hope that even then I will not have grown out of my fervor. I hope I will know that while I can stand, I should. I hope that I know that while I can speak, I should. I hope that I know that even if all I can do is survive, I should. I hope that whatever form my resistance can take is the form that it will take. Oppression is an enemy to us all, that is why I resist it. I hope to never stop until there is no longer a need to resist.

I speak so often of hope for a reason. Hope is at the foundation of my fighting. If I do not hope we can live better, then I am stupid to fight. I fight because I believe we can do better. I believe we can be better. There are so many terrible things occurring, all of them happening back to back; it’s so easy to grow out of hope. It’s so easy to give up. But we cannot afford to give up.

My hope for you, for all of us, is that we never grow out of hope. The death of our hope is the flag of our defeat. Hope is the lifeblood of progress. And right now we can use all the progress we can get.

Godspeed,
MJ Mac (he/him, 22)