The Beautiful Heart of Resistance
From 1940s France to 2025: how resistance finds its way through love
“Why grant one’s heart to anything other than the good?”
These words were written by the French philosopher, mystic, and political activist Simone Weil in her essay L’Enracinement (Need for Roots) published posthumously in 1949.
Simone lived through the rise of Nazi Germany, was active in the French resistance, and died very young at age 34 from tuberculosis. She was obsessed with advocating for those who were suffering. Her writings have lived on and are particularly poignant today.
Simone embodied and upheld the importance of protecting what is good, in the heart and in politics alike.
In the last few weeks, President Trump and his unelected oligarch Elon Musk have done the opposite of what is good. They have tried to “flood the zone” with executive orders and illegal actions: like freezing foreign aid, accessing Federal payment systems, firing Environmental Protection Agency employees, proposing that the US take over Gaza, increasing raids and deportations of immigrants, removing thousands of government webpages with important public data and information, and so much more. This tactic is effective psychological warfare. The overwhelm and despair that follow, with our 24/7 access to this information, is incapacitating.
Yet as political analyst Anand Giridharadas writes, “you do not have to consent to being flooded.”
How do we resist the tide?
An essential and irrevocable common thread to not becoming so flooded that we lose our capacity to focus, organize and act strategically, is community. Is finding our people and nurturing a network of support. Of acting instead of consenting to the flood.
Authoritarianism advances aggressively by overreaches of power. It succeeds if no one resists.
We will not let that happen.
A week ago, when Trump ordered that foreign assistance abruptly halt, I joined an anonymous grassroots coalition of 2,000 USAID employees, contractors, and implementing partners in a Signal group. USAID is the United States Agency for International Development, founded in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, and is responsible for our global assistance like food and medicine as well as domestic support to farmers. USAID makes up less than 1% of the federal budget and has always had bipartisan support.
When Trump ordered that all 8,000 global programs grind to a sudden halt, millions were left without their life-saving H.I.V/AIDS medicine, malaria treatments, food aid and essential programs (read more here). The global impact of the sudden freeze on human life is staggering and enraging.
I felt like I could either succumb to the despair, or try and do something about it. Given my experience working on USAID-funded projects in central Africa over the last twenty years, I wanted to help. However small.
In this Signal group, we formed task forces on communications, media outreach, congressional strategies for the hill, legal review and so much more. I even spoke on the news!
The dead overwhelm quickly morphed energy, vitality and love. Fear and panic thrive in isolation. Witnessing these people’s good hearts do what they could was not just important to try and protect the millions of people who receive these programs, but I also saw it was very good for us too.
And by the end of last week, we had helped place dozens of stories in the media, helped to motivate calls to Congress and the Senate at unprecedented volumes, gotten nearly 60,000 to sign our petition, and filed a lawsuit suing President Trump for illegally firing 14,000 Americans who work for USAID.
Late Friday night, the judge, a Trump appointee, ruled in our favor.
Even if temporary, this is a signal: illegal actions will only win if no one is there to resist them.
So we shall be there. We will show up.
There are so many good people everywhere. I have no doubt of this.
I hope we can find each other and then contribute in whatever way we can to be useful, with our specific skill set, sphere of influence and particular hearts. Yes, this is the right thing to do, but also, and I really believe this, it feels really good.
Pleasure is an antidote to despair, but political pleasure, I think, can only be born in community.
This could look like checking on your neighbor, writing an op-ed in your local paper, advocating to your kids school to refuse entry to immigration officials, or making your calls to your representatives and telling them why you want them to protect human life. There are countless, numblerless ways we can each participate. We do not have to doom scroll our way into consenting to this nightmare.
I know there is a place for everyone in the world we are struggling to protect.
To stay with the trouble of her time, Simone Weil’s political activism and resistance was rooted, in part, in her mysticism. She had a radical direct encounter with divine in a little church outside of Assisi, the same land that the mystic and revolutionary St. Francis of Assisi loved and lived amongst.
The twin threads of mysticism and action are entangled. A DNA helix encoded with a beautiful heart for a beautiful world.
There is a thread through history of people who have faced incredibly devastating times, led by leaders with no care for human life, and who found the ability, resource and capacity to foster and protect the good, the true, and the beautiful, despite all that.
Part of this enduring goodness are practices and rituals that elevate the good. As an example of this, later in Simone’s essay, she writes about how the Druids, an animist people from the British aisles, would spend twenty years learning poems about divinity and the universe by heart. This was their form of education. This was their practice of the good.
I wonder what would happen to our hearts if we committed ourselves to nurturing what is good and beautiful, while at the same time alchemizing that into actions aligned with solidarity and love for those who are being targeted by injustice.
What do you love that is good?
How can you make it a practice to elevate that good?
I know how scary, dark and overwhelming the last few weeks have been.
I also know that goodness, found in the hidden, quiet places as well as the big beauty of moral courage, will keep us supple, soft and resilient.
This is the elixir for our bodies to not give in to despair. To not give up before its even begun.
I believe in our good hearts. I believe in our love for the good.
I am grateful we are in this together. And we won’t. Give. Up.
-Lindsay
USAID Stop Work Website with more information on USAID’s impact domestically and abroad.
Make 5 Calls a Day the easiest app for contacting your reps!
An Encounter with Simeone Veil - trailer for a documentary about her life.
Sign the petition in support of foreign assistance.