The Grief That Must Catch Fire

A meditation on defiance

By Dino Alonso

I’ve been thinking about anger.

Not the performative kind, of course. Not the viral clip or the righteous tweet(can we agree to just use tweet…what the hell do you call X 🤦🏻‍♂️?). I’m talking about the kind of anger that lives in your bones. The kind that remembers.

We’re in the teeth of something now. It isn’t just politics. It’s a rewiring of the moral universe. A breaking of the compass. A theft of the language that used to tell us what was right.

MAGA knows exactly what it’s doing. This isn’t some mass hallucination—it’s a siege. It’s war-by-memory-holing. They’re trying to bury us under so many outrages, so much noise, so many broken norms, that we stop noticing the smell of the fire.

And here’s the dangerous truth: It’s working.

You can feel it. The numbness creeping in. The exhaustion. The temptation to treat this chaos as the new baseline. To normalize it just enough to survive it. To build a little room inside hell and call it shelter.

But we cannot.

We must not.

Because this isn’t normal. It’s not fine. It’s not politics-as-usual. It’s the slow coup of a nation’s conscience. And the longer we pretend otherwise, the deeper the infection sets.

So here we are—raw, betrayed, furious. Grieving not just the policies or the votes or the headlines, but the loss of shared reality. The erosion of decency. The funeral march of pluralism. And we don’t know where to put it all.

But let me offer this:

We must metabolize our grief.

We must take the ashes of outrage and forge something out of them—something that does not fade when the news cycle shifts, something that outlives the man and the movement and the cowardice in Congress. Because this grief? It’s not weakness. It’s not paralysis. It’s the spark.

The job now is not to cool off.

The job is to carry the fire.

To let our indignation ferment into resolve. Let our heartbreak become ritual. Let our rage inform—not consume—but inform every word we speak and every action we take.

And we have to build systems for it.

• Spaces where our memory is kept alive—where the daily crimes are chronicled, not dismissed.

• Routines that remind us what we believe and why—rituals of resistance, daily doses of truth.

• Art that cracks through the numbness and makes people feel again.

• Local coalitions that become spiritual sanctuaries and logistical launchpads.

We turn grief into infrastructure.

We make defiance into a culture.

We build endurance like monks under siege—because we are. And every act of remembering, every refusal to go numb, is an act of resurrection.

You want to fight fascism?

Then feel everything. Let it cut. Let it open you. Then plant your feet and say: I see what you’re doing—and I will not let you win.

They want us silent.

We speak.

They want us afraid.

We gather.

They want us tired.

We become relentless.

This grief is sacred. Let it become your gospel. Let it become your fuel.

We don’t need a return to normal. We need a rebirth of the human spirit—fierce, clear-eyed, unafraid to call tyranny by its name, and ready to outlast it.

That is the fire we carry.

That is the oath we swear.

And that is how we win.