An Invitation to Resistance and Resilience

May 15, 2025

Over the next several months, or perhaps years, I’ll be concentrating on the themes of resistance as an act of courage and resilience as an act of resistance through the use of the arts. I recently hiked the Rocky Mountains and was captured by both actions expressed in nature all around me, including this photograph of an evergreen, staking its claim “to be” on a barren cliff. We all have that right “to be,” especially in the face of governments that deny our basic human dignity, especially now.

I’m encouraged and challenged by the words of poet Toni Morrison concerning the power of the arts in turbulent, frightening, and unstable times such as these:

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no place for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge, even wisdom, like art.”

I envision this blog-space becoming a gathering site where anyone can share their art of resistance and resilience, whether it be photography, prose, poetry, fiction, music, whatever. We learn from each other, and we need the community of each other. So, if you are reading this, please accept this invitation to reply with your own reflections in your own medium.

To begin, I share this poem recently composed by a millennial:

I pledged allegiance every day
believing that we should
be proud of how our leaders pray
“one nation, under God,” we’d say
as if we understood

what “justice” or what “liberty”
meant to the poor and needy
those sidelined in our history
who we were taught to never see
as anything but greedy.

I was sixteen at Columbine,
eighteen when I saw planes
against the NYC skyline
a scream came from a friend of mine
as people jumped from flames.

I couldn’t find a job the year
the banks sat on their thrones,
and made Congress a financier
while letting housing disappear
and claimed we should have known.

I married when an oil spill
left Southern coasts demolished.
Two years later children killed
at Sandy Hook, gun rights were still
not something we’d abolish.

And through the next six years I’d be
a witness to the hate
of #MeToo, Black Lives, and refugees
and all who were “the least of these,”
who made our country great.

Almost a decade since our land
has seen the facts become
subjective whims of one small man
who doesn’t seem to understand
the damage he has done.

A million deaths would not persuade
the minds of his supporters
nor would the promises he made,
broken or used as a charade
to terrorize our borders.

I could write several pages more,
of why I am so tired.
Of all else that now lays in store
for those who choose not to abhor
what we’re told to admire.

I know now that we’ll never be
a country that is equal
where everyone is truly free
and leaders hold to the decree,
that power’s in the people.

The hardest lessons that we learn
are those about our nation.
Oh, how I wish I could return
to blissful freedom from concern
before my education.

(c) Kathleen McMahan

Does this poem evoke any response in you? How might it act as a prompt for your creative or spiritual work?

Resisting together,

Rosemary

Kathleen McMahan is an Executive Assistant at Brandeis University. She writes poetry, composes music, plays the guitar, and is passionate about justice and equality.

Photo credit: Rosemary McMahan