Every generation rails against the systems that carry oppression, harm, and injustice. My forebears fought against oppressive religions, the divine right of kings, the doctrine of discovery, feudalism, racism, apartheid. Our generation picks up the unfinished business and the new expressions of old power, fighting them on a different playing field.

This work is never going to be done, and I find something steadying in that rather than defeating. The arc of history shows we are always trending, however unevenly, toward more fairness and more wisdom about how to live collectively. Right now we are head first into a blip in that trend, and the systems of oppression can feel far too mighty for any one of us to tackle.

But these Systems we speak of are made of people. Individuals. Which means systemic harm lives in people too, in the thinking they carry, the stories they repeat, the frames they hand down without questioning. Systemic transformation also lives in people. In the ones working at the edges, shifting cultural stories one cup of tea at a time. Their care and aroha (love) ripples outward in ways that are mostly invisible. 

This week I want to share a few things that have genuinely lit me up.

The first is this beautiful site: Lots of Little Fires, dedicated to the stories of changemakers making a difference in real people's everyday lives. The story I've been sitting with is about a group dignifying people without homes, without judgement. Their love and care helps make visible what the "work hard and get ahead" narrative conveniently obscures: that homelessness is the system's harm, carried in individual bodies. In a world of shrinking job markets and fraying social fabric, that reframe matters enormously.

Then there's this interview: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian of fascism and author of Strongmen, speaking with the wonderful Sarah Wilson on her Wild podcast. She is clear-eyed on how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence, and machismo, and clear-eyed too on how they can be defeated. Her hopeful read: it burns itself out. Peaceful protest is having an unprecedented renaissance, and people are organising in increasingly strategic, novel, and impactful ways. (Sarah also has a gorgeous new book out, I Eat the Stars, on living fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. Very much my kind of reading.)

Yes, we are in a time of concentrated, compounding threat, autocrats and tech giants waging wars for oil and influence, regulations stripped from polluting industries, control clamped onto women's and recognition stripped from trans bodies, humans othered by humans based on skin colour, ecosystems unravelling. I don't look away from any of that.

What I'm also seeing, and what I think is worth shouting from the rooftops, is our global moral immune response activating. People strapping into truth, holding their hopeful vision steady, calling for justice, using their creativity, building and relying on community, showing up as everyday humans in their own unique, small-yet-significant-to-the-whole way.

We just have to see it clearly, and pour something flammable on it. Like high-octane hope and a genuine belief in what humanity is capable of after this chapter.

Lots of love to you, wherever this missive finds you in this wonderful world at this wild time.

X Megan