Focus. Believe. Fight Despair.

To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair.

—Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s” in” The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

Editor’s Note: I don’t want to say anything that will stand in the way of you reading the above passage a second time and then clicking on “Learning from the 60s” to receive the whole thing in a larger context. But I will take a moment to thank Janet Wolf, a beloved mentor of mine, for placing it before me today. My fellow Americans and I share custody over two of the men in ties pictured above. Their decision to be photographed smiling alongside a third is theirs and theirs alone. But…they’re doing it on my dime and my time. Something is being signaled. Data points. Decisions create cultures and countercultures. Christina Edmondson taught me that. May we each mind what it is we’re cultivating as we choose our words and deeds and signals and forge coalitions. There is good work to do. Focus. Believe. Fight Despair.