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- The power of showing up.
This weekend, thousands of people have come together in rallies across the country to protest the way men’s violence is handled in Australia (and making five specific demands to change this).
This week, tens of thousands of students and staff are protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza on university campuses in the U.S., Australia, France and Italy. At the time of writing, at least 500 people have been arrested in the States. The 24/7 picket outside Anthony Albanese’s Marrickville office, run by Families for Palestine, is entering it’s 12th week (with no engagement or response from the formerly pro-Palestine Prime Minister).
This week, Woodside shareholders rejected its climate and emissions reduction plan in the strongest protest vote to date.
Gendered violence, genocide, police brutality against peaceful protests, private profit sending us into climate catastrophe… these are horrifyingly bleak topics. Let’s reframe how we view these news moments: These are bold displays of solidarity. This is people coming together to find power in numbers and fight for human justice.
To me, that is categorically good news.
Protest movements and solidarity efforts have been instrumental in every major shift in social progress. Women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement and labour rights movements, ending South African apartheid, Gay Liberation and same-sex marriage, just to name a few. Participating in protest is effortful – it is not passive support.
So even though a lot of the coverage and discussion of uprisings and protests will skew negative – in a “oh, isn’t it terrible these things are happening?” kind of way – it’s also very hopeful, empowering and energising to witness people making the effort to say and show, loudly, what they believe in. It’s hopeful, empowering and energising to participate in. Seeing signs that people care enough and are demanding change for the better is very good news.
I think it’s worth resurfacing something I wrote in March 2023, when an anti-trans agitator & grifter was driven out of the country by solidarity protestors in Australia and NZ: “All the time we spend behind little screens on our own can make it easy to forget how much power we have in numbers; physically coming together in the offline world to flex those numbers takes effort. It's the effort that really underscores the message about what we will not stand for… It sounds like such a cliche but coming together, being organised and doing so out of love for others is a radical act. Like we've talked about before, simply being informed doesn't change much. But showing up can change a lot.”
All this to say, if you’re receiving any of these news developments with a note of understandable despair – a simple reframe can do wonders. This is how the change happens, this is what we should expect to be in the news as momentum builds. I hope to see more! The truly bad news would be to see nothing – no agitation, no organisation, no combat. There will be no win if there is no fight.
An update!
The wrecking ball about to hit Australian media hasn’t hit quite yet, but the industry quivers are already affecting Zee Feed 🙃 I’m trialling some strategic changes: reducing the content on the site to one in-depth piece per week and sending it direct to your inbox with a mid-week newsletter blast. You can expect the first drop this week, love to hear your thoughts on the format when it comes.
The Sunday newsletter will continue bringing you analysis of one news story and our content recommendations (below). Those aren’t going anywhere! But you might notice this middle section of the Sunday newsletter chopping and changing a bit for the next few weeks or months. Bare with me! And as always, open to feedback.
Thank you for your continued support, together we’re actively making Aussie media more progressive & feminist, less reactive & less white*!
*Someone had to say it…
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
Verso currently has 7 books available for free (e-book format); some on Palestine and some on mass protests. Get them here.
Enough is enough. Australia is in a crisis of violence against women on IndigenousX
A very important reminder – focusing only on the safety of white women will ensure the movement fails. Sissy Austin was attacked in a similar location and manner to Samantha Murphy: “As I led the march of thousands down the streets of Ballarat, I couldn’t escape the thought… would they be marching if it were Aboriginal women murdered? If that man killed me when I was attacked running?”
'Everyone has missed the point of Baby Reindeer, BTW' on Cosmopolitan
“While no-one could have predicted Baby Reindeer’s huge success, the benefit of hindsight suggests an innocent naivety and almost a fundamental misunderstanding in how audiences interact with shows nowadays – particularly those based on true stories.”
“It's a heartless show, and that is maybe what I hate the most about it.” on Deez Links substack
This is an entry from ‘Hate Read’, a brilliant and hilarious miniseries within the Deez Links newsletter (a fave) with writers publishing an essay about something they hate. As a hater to my core, I recommend the whole series but especially one about Succession: “t’s a piñata spree all the way down; once you scrape all the jokes off, it’s clear that Succession never feels the need to question what it might mean to need something beyond hollow validation and meaningless wealth.”
Pro-Palestine Protesters Are on the Right Side of History on Jacobin
“Future generations will be disgusted by the posture of those who saw millions of Palestinians displaced from their homes and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians murdered with US weapons — and decided not to join the cease-fire protesters gathering on and off campuses but to smear them as ‘mobs.’”