Breathing Together, Building Power
Protest gives us breath today. Organizing makes sure we can breathe tomorrow.
Protest is powerful because it cracks something open.
Organizing is powerful because it builds on what’s been cracked.
This is part two of the conversation I started on Sunday.
Protest is how we breathe today, and organizing is how we make sure we can still breathe tomorrow.
There’s a kind of silence that builds up over the week. You bite your tongue at work. You scroll through headlines until you feel sick. And then you walk into a protest, and suddenly the silence cracks open. You hear your own voice mix with hundreds of others, and you remember you’re not alone.
That’s what protest gives us. Room to breath. Relief. A moment of survival.
I’ve been in those crowds. I know what it feels like to shout until your throat is raw, to hold a sign high enough for your arms to ache, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers who refuse to disappear. Protest reminds us we still exist. It insists, loudly and without apology: we will not be erased.
Protests have also never been the thing that wins change on its own. Sparks can light the sky for a moment, but they only matter if they catch. What lasts (what shifts power long-term) is the organizing that follows.
Look at history and the patterns are there. Rosa Parks’s defiance lit a fire, but the Montgomery Bus Boycott didn’t survive 381 days because of headlines. It survived because there were carpools, churches passing the plate, leaflets printed in basements, whole networks of people holding each other up when daily sacrifice should have broken them. The marches filled the streets, but it was Ella Baker training organizers, Fannie Lou Hamer risking everything for voting rights, Bayard Rustin designing the March on Washington that turned sparks into structure.
Labor’s story is the same. Strikes made the papers. Picket lines turned heads. But it was union locals, dues-paying members, and contracts enforced for decades that forced corporations to the table. A headline could shame a boss for a day. An organized workforce could bend them for generations.
Even the suffragists followed the same model. Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels held banners outside the White House until they were dragged to jail and force-fed. Their bravery inspired thousands. But the Nineteenth Amendment passed only after decades of petitions, state-level campaigns, lobbying, and strategy.
The spark needed structure.
You can even say the same of the anti-war movement. The marches of the ’60s and ’70s were massive, enough to shift opinion. But it was draft resistance networks, veteran groups, and congressional fights over funding that finally forced an end.
Over and over, protest forces the world to look. Organizing makes sure it can’t look away.
And yet, we keep forgetting.
Inside party politics, the fantasy is that elections alone will save us.
If only we can recruit the right candidates and flip the right districts then everything will fall into place. Outside the party, the conviction is that street pressure alone is the real pressure. That if we march hard enough, disrupt long enough, we’ll force change.
It’s easy (natural) for each side to write off the other. Activists call party workers sellouts. Party people call activists unserious. Both imagine their lane is the lane.
But no movement that ever won lasting change has done it that way.
The Civil Rights Act wasn’t marches alone or politicians alone. It was both, together. Labor rights weren’t strikes alone or ballots alone. They were both.
Suffrage wasn’t pickets or lobbying. It was both.
That’s the tension we live in now. And the danger of this moment is that we sink deeper into silos, convinced only our lane matters.
I understand why protest feels like the most urgent lane today.
This administration has weaponized power in ways we haven’t seen in generations. Agencies turned into political tools. Courts stacked to rubber-stamp abuse. Laws written to punish opponents and reward loyalists. Whole communities singled out and targeted.
In times like this, protest is oxygen. It’s how we breathe together when the air gets heavy.
But authoritarians know how to wait protest out. They can change permit rules or flood the streets with counter-protesters. They grind people down with arrests, and drown out coverage with chaos. If we leave resistance in the streets alone, they’re betting the fire will burn out.
That’s why protest has to be the spark. And not the whole fire.
Here’s how it was explained to me several years ago: all organizers are activists. Not all activists are organizers. Movements need both, but they need them working together.
An activist shows up. Holds a sign. Speaks truth. Takes a risk. That matters.
An organizer makes sure that risk turns into something that lasts. An organizer builds the phone tree. Schedules the next meeting. Trains new leaders. Knocks the doors. Creates the structure power can’t ignore.
Activism without organizing burns hot and fades. Organizing without activism grinds away unseen. We need both… but linked. Protest on Sunday, meeting on Tuesday. Rally in the street, work in the room. Sparks and structure, together.
If you’ve been in the streets: thank you. It matters. Keep showing up.
But don’t stop there. Join the group doing the work in your community.
Sit through the meeting, even when it feels boring. Volunteer for the campaign that aligns with your values. Bring a friend.
Protest is how we breathe today. Organizing is how we make sure we can still breathe tomorrow.