September 30, 2025

Now, to feel

In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, as the rightwing tried to grab onto a feeling besides hate, it occurred to me how many of our feelings we’ve been ignoring. Between brand promotions, rightwingers tried to mimic the vulnerability of grief. They couldn’t quite nail it and the self-promotion didn’t help.

There is a reason the rightwing has shouted “facts don’t care about your feelings” for a decade. They have tried to cast empathy as a sin. They demand “debate” over things no one can logic their way around—issues as profound and ineffable as life and love.

But now, more than ever, it seems important to discuss our feelings. Fascism puts all reality to the side, trying to remake the world by sheer force of will. They want the world to compensate for their interpersonal grievances. They want a pound of flesh for their petty humiliations. I, a proud hater of fascists, would seek nuance. They have forced us into this binary, so we might as well discuss it.

To discuss it properly, we must start with the foundation of our shared humanity: our feelings. Morality is a feeling. It is an ache in your chest, a stone in your stomach; it is the pride and satisfaction you feel when you follow its exhortations.

The only way to draw you away from your inherent morality is to pluck it out by the root. Fascists must separate you from yourself until you no longer see the evil in separating families.

Albert Camus, who lived through fascism himself, spoke of the ills of nihilism. And we see those ills again as disaffected men engage in incoherent crime. Their murders are intended to highlight nothing except their shared idea that nothing matters.

Of course, fascists agree with the premise. Nothing matters, they try to convince you. Ignore the part of you who sobs seeing communities torn apart. Keep that posture right up to the moment when it is your community torn to shreds. Then you’ll grieve twice, but it will be too late for action.

But, if we acknowledge the reality of our feelings, we must acknowledge how disastrous it has all been. People dying in the streets is not kind. People tortured in jails, foreign and domestic, is not kind. Empty stomachs ache.

All the solutions are within our grasp. If we can angle the world towards profit—a nebulous non-feeling thing—why could we not tilt it another way? We could tilt the globe towards kindness.

Religion is a good cover for the fascist. Spiritual rituals are, of course, intended as an expression of feeling. They are a way for groups to share in emotion, to communally express ideas. Of course, organized religion often uses said rituals to drag you away from your inherent moral understanding. They guide you towards a more complicated morality, one that is baroque, impenetrable, and easily manipulated.

We must bring a religious zeal to our passion for kindness, to our dedication to following our feelings. In her biography of Emma Goldman, Vivian Gornick writes, “This passion for individuation, as old as the Greek discovery of consciousness, burned in her not only as an angry hunger to feel free within her own self but as an undying insistence that freedom was a human birthright.” Later, Gornick writes of Emma’s passion for political expression as similar to one’s commitment to art or science: “…that experience is incomparable: to feel not simply alive, but expressive.”

In 1919, Emma Goldman was deported from the United States for her self-expression and conviction.

I have been thinking of her frequently this year. We must, like Emma, grab onto our feelings, to never let them be diminished. We must continue to feel our sadness, express our anger, and insist—without caveat or embarrassment—the world realign towards kindness. It is a demand both simple and profound.

Fascists want us to live in their binary world. Fine. Let them choke on the reality of their cruelty and let our kindness kill them.

Books referenced:

Resistance, Rebellion & Death by Albert Camus

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a way of life by Vivian Gornick