Edited by: Navya Gupta
November 6th, 2024. The clock on my lock screen ticks to 12:15 P.M IST. I’m still in class—a political science class of all things, ironically—but all I can watch is the ratio of red to blue on my computer screen. I watch one stick of colour shift a little to the right, and I hold my breath. Only, I have to let it go the next second dejectedly when it’s evened out from the other side. My phone says 13:54. I’m chewing on rice but I can’t taste anything; I keep watching the red and blue fight each other, hovering over the interactive infographic of all the states to see which colour is leading where. I don’t even know what most of these places are called. November 6th, 2024. It’s 7:34 P.M IST. “I can’t believe this,” my mother is saying over the phone. “What have we come to?”
November 7th, 2024 (IST). It’s been an eventful night, dozens of celebrities and their posts have gone viral, their passionate sentiments about the end of women, the end of humanity, even. And it only gets worse. From the other side emerges the victor—a viscous, inhuman satisfaction with an ugly smile that reads Your Body, My Choice. It all explodes.
“Why do you care what happens halfway around the world in a country that’s not yours?” they ask me. “It’s beneficial that these new economic policies align with ours.”
“And what about the women? The raped and assaulted? The poor? The ones who just don’t want it?”
Silence.
Or worse, “But the child deserves a life.”
And the mother doesn’t?
In today’s world, there’s a lot to be angry about: genocide, capitalism, climate change a felon becoming President (the true “perseverance can overcome all” story). We started the decade with a global pandemic, and not even halfway in it feels like everything is hanging onto the last thread. It’s easy to be loud about the things we believe in on a campus, in university, in the midst of like-minded individuals who also want to fight for the things we care about. But there’s a bigger world out there that has a lot of different things to say and more power to make those words mean something.
And, as much as we truly have much to be rightfully angry about, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of them don’t matter for our lives; for the assignment that’s due tomorrow and the exam next week. For the college degree we just want to finish and the day job we’ll eventually end up at. It’s easier to give up when you realise how easy it is to forget. Your parents told you not to get into the protesting and what not if you wanted a future, and they’re not entirely wrong in their fears, unfortunately.
So how do we, as the generation inheriting the future of this world, navigate a political climate that: one, we are too radical for; and two, seems to be regressing rather than progressing as we grow? How do we take our first steps into adulthood with this newfound feeling of autonomy and freedom, and not immediately lose all hope when we are dealt with the harsh cards of reality, a helpless cycle in which we don’t have as much power as we like to think?
The truth I’ve found hope in is that even survival isn’t passive. Every day that we live—that we choose to work and study and dream—is a day we actively resist a system that seems hellbent on crushing our spirit. Being loud on a college campus counts. Writing that scathing tweet and deleting it out of fear counts. Supporting that classmate’s mental health, sharing resources, voting in local elections. Change has always been a slower process than we like to admit. The skyrocketing acceptance towards LGBTQ+ was not a product of only social media or Gen Z, but of centuries of fighting, of resistance small and big. Especially in the age of social media, where news travels at lightning speed and backlash is immediate, it’s easy to feel hopeless because we don’t see the change following at their heels.
We’re having to re-learn that power isn’t just in the grand gestures. Every choice you make is an act that’s part of a larger, slow erosion, and this is important to remember when sometimes everything seems to be sweeping us along in winds we can’t control. We may not transform the world overnight, but we can—and are—creating pockets of possibility. The system feels unmovable and the news channels just never shut up, all we have to do is keep showing up. Seemingly insignificant choices that mean nothing, that change nothing. But that doesn’t mean they don’t count.