<aside>
<aside>
History haunts progress
Revolution seeds transformation
Freedom requires struggle
-安天美
</aside>
History moves through our bloodstream like inherited memory, carrying stories we pretend not to know. When we speak of progress without acknowledging the foundations built on stolen labour and systematic exclusion, we participate in a collective amnesia that serves power rather than justice. The haunting isn’t metaphorical; it lives in policies that mirror plantation logic, in democratic institutions that protect wealth over welfare, in the persistent belief that reform can heal wounds that require revolutionary medicine.
Our young minds today inherit a world where democracy wears the mask of inclusion while maintaining the machinery of extraction. We are told to celebrate incremental change whilst the same systems that enslaved our ancestors now imprison our contemporaries through different names but identical methods. The ghost of slavery walks freely through modern capitalism, wearing suits instead of chains, speaking the language of opportunity whilst delivering the reality of exploitation.
Yet acknowledging this haunting becomes the first act of liberation. When we name the ways history shapes our present moment, we stop participating in the lie that our struggles are coincidental or individual. We begin to see patterns, to understand that our grandmother’s fights and our own resistance spring from the same source: the refusal to accept that some humans matter more than others.
Revolution has never been a single moment of dramatic overthrow; it has always been the patient work of planting seeds in ground that others have declared barren. Each generation of activists discovers that their urgent call for change becomes the foundation for the next wave of transformation. The civil rights movement seeded the women’s liberation movement, which seeded LGBTQ+ rights, which seeds today’s understanding of intersectional justice. Revolution reproduces itself through evolution.
The genius of sustained resistance lies in its refusal to accept partial victories as final destinations. When Angela Davis spoke of the master’s tools being inadequate for dismantling the master’s house, she pointed toward a fundamental truth: real change requires new methods, new thinking, new ways of organising human relationships. Today’s young revolutionaries understand this instinctively [or so we hope], creating aid networks, practising restorative justice, and building alternative economies that prefigure the world they want to inhabit.
What previous generations might have seen as failure, we can now recognise as germination. The seeds planted by revolutionaries of the 1960s and 70s are flowering in movements like Black Lives Matter, climate justice activism, and prison abolition work. Each cycle of resistance learns from its predecessors whilst adapting to new conditions, new technologies, new forms of oppression that require fresh strategies of liberation.
Democracy as originally conceived was never intended to include the majority of people who now claim its protections. Built by and for white property-owning men, it has been expanded through centuries of struggle by those it was designed to exclude. The contradiction runs deeper than representation; it lives in the very structure of systems that claim to serve collective leadership whilst protecting concentrated wealth and power.
Modern democracy operates like a beautifully decorated theatre where the real decisions happen backstage. We are invited to vote between options chosen by others, to participate in debates framed by corporate interests, to believe that our voice matters whilst money speaks louder than millions. The militarisation of police forces serves as democracy’s enforcement arm, protecting property over people, order over justice, stability over transformation.
Revolutionary repair requires us to imagine democracy beyond its current limitations. What would collective leadership look like if it truly served collective needs? How might we organise society if we prioritised care over profit, cooperation over competition, interdependence over individual accumulation? These questions aren’t abstract; they live in the mutual aid networks that fed communities during the pandemic, in the restorative justice circles that heal harm without perpetuating it, in the community gardens that transform vacant lots into sources of nourishment.
Revolution begins in the intimate spaces where we first learn to accept or reject the world as it is. Family dinner tables where certain truths cannot be spoken, classrooms where history is sanitised, workplaces where exploitation is normalised as necessity. Personal transformation and political revolution are not separate processes; they are the same movement happening at different scales, each reinforcing and requiring the other.
The courage to question authority in our personal relationships prepares us for the courage to challenge authority in our institutions. Learning to set boundaries with toxic family members teaches us how to resist toxic systems. Healing our own trauma helps us understand how collective trauma shapes society. When we stop accepting abuse in our intimate lives, we become less willing to accept abuse from our government, our employers, our economic system.
Yet personal transformation without political engagement remains incomplete, just as political action without personal growth burns out or reproduces the very patterns it seeks to change. The most sustainable revolutionaries are those who understand that changing the world requires changing ourselves, not as separate projects but as two sides of the same sacred work. They bring their whole selves to the movement, hearts healed enough to hold both rage and love, minds clear enough to envision alternatives to what currently exists.
Freedom isn’t a destination we reach but a muscle we strengthen through daily use. Each time we choose cooperation over competition, each time we share resources instead of hoarding them, each time we centre the most marginalised voices in our decision-making, we practise the freedom we seek to create on a larger scale. The struggle isn’t a burden we must bear until someone else grants us liberation; it is the very process through which we liberate ourselves and each other.
The young generation inheriting this moment understands something their predecessors sometimes forgot: revolution is not just about tearing down what oppresses us but building up what will sustain us. We create mutual aid networks whilst challenging police budgets, practise consent culture whilst fighting rape culture, develop sustainable technologies whilst resisting extractive industries. Our revolution integrates destruction and creation, resistance and construction.
This understanding transforms struggle from something we endure into something we choose because it aligns with our values. When we root our resistance in love rather than hate, in vision rather than reaction, we create movements that can sustain themselves across generations. We learn to find joy in the fight itself, not just in imagined victory. We discover that the struggle to create a more just world is itself a form of freedom, a way of living our values even when the world around us has not yet caught up to our dreams.
Happy Democracy day.
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/backward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/backward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> River Keepers
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/forward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/forward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> River Season
</aside>