Carpe Momentum: From Sparks to Strikes

Grassroots disruption, rolling strikes, and the hard work of defining demands

The streets of Chicago looked more like Fallujah than South Shore this week. At one in the morning, helicopters dropped federal agents onto rooftops, flash-bangs shook sleeping children from their beds, and doors were smashed open as families were zip-tied and marched half-clothed into the night. DHS called it “Operation Midway Blitz.” Governor J.B. Pritzker called it authoritarianism. And the neighbors who watched their community treated like an occupied zone simply called it terrifying. Four of the children dragged into custody that night were U.S. citizens. Their crime? Parents without papers.

The footage wasn’t even hidden. Secretary Kristi Noem blasted it on social media like a campaign ad, dramatic music laid over scenes of militarized agents storming hallways, as if families were props in a reality show. ICE and DHS insist they were targeting traffickers and gang associates, but their numbers tell another story: whole communities treated as collateral. This is pure spectacle. It is intimidation. It is a test balloon for what it looks like when domestic policing is fused with military tactics and wrapped in a flag.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Trump told the military brass just days earlier that U.S. cities should become “training grounds.” Chicago became the test case. The escalation isn’t incidental, it’s policy, doctrine, and theater all at once. And like Jane Fonda warned when she relaunched her father’s Committee for the First Amendment, authoritarian projects consolidate fast. They seize culture, then speech, then streets, then neighborhoods. If we don’t resist at each step, the next becomes normal.

That’s why free speech and the right not to have soldiers rappelling onto your roof are not separate battles. They are fronts in the same war. Fonda said it best: this is our “documentary moment.” We don’t get to watch grainy black-and-white footage of civil rights sit-ins and wonder if we would have been brave enough. The question is here, now, and it’s no longer hypothetical.

But here’s the trap: it is apparent from many of the comments I see that too many people are waiting for a single national organization to form, some umbrella resistance movement that will tell us when and how to move. That’s not how history works. The civil-rights sit-ins didn’t start with a national board meeting. They started on February 1, 1960, when four Black freshmen from North Carolina A&T, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, walked into a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, sat at the “whites only” lunch counter, politely asked for service and refused to leave; that single act of sit-in defiance lit a wave of similar protests across the South and helped give rise to student organizing that changed law and custom.

Labor strikes that rattled governments didn’t always begin with central committees either. In late November 2020, ten major trade unions called a nationwide, one-day general strike in India that organizers say drew well over 200 million workers, a mass, decentralized stoppage that shut down banks, transport, ports and factories in many states and showed how workplace actions can paralyze entire systems without waiting for a single national headquarters to hand down orders. These local shop-floor walkouts and logistics disruptions are exactly the kind of muscle local organizers can build now; national structures tend to emerge after the local disruptions have already proven they can move markets, media, and power.

Build disruption where you are. Tailor it to your city, your workplace, your community. If your town’s fight is over a library board, show up and make it impossible for censorship to stand. If your neighborhood is vulnerable to raids, build rapid-response phone trees, fund local legal defense, and let agents know they’ll be met by witnesses. If your school is threatened with gag orders, organize a culture night where banned books are read aloud and amplified. If your local media platform caves to pressure, mobilize advertisers and subscribers to hit them where it hurts. None of these require permission slips from Washington; all of them build the muscle memory for mass noncompliance.

If the people most at risk in your town are trans kids, queer elders, and neighbors sleeping in parks, then disruption must be built around protecting flesh-and-blood people before it’s about headlines. Turn everyday civic work into a shield: organize rapid-response teams that can reach school board meetings, clinic entrances, and encampment sites within an hour, not to escalate, but to document, bear witness, and provide legal observers and journalists with a live record so every abusive move is seen and stamped into the public record. Put together a rotating roster of volunteer drivers, medics, and plainclothes observers so when a clinic faces harassment or an encampment is threatened there’s an immediate human wall of help: transport to a safe house, a warm blanket, a lawyer on the phone. Make your neighborhood a sanctuary by mapping who can host an overnight for a trans teen or a houseless neighbor and by setting up a simple, encrypted phone tree and a public-but-not-easily-exploitable hotline so families can call and know a real plan is coming, not just promises.

Cultivate partnerships with local faith groups, unions, and service organizations so that when a sweep is announced there’s an organized offer of shelter, legal funds ready to deploy, and media-ready spokespeople who frame the story around dignity, not criminality. When city councils or library boards try to pass censorship or anti-trans policies, flood their meetings and inboxes with bodies and testimony; show up in numbers to read the books they want banned and sit in the rooms they want closed until inaction becomes politically costly. Use targeted economic pressure where it matters: ask local advertisers to pause sponsorships of outlets that amplify hate, call out contractors who profit from encampment sweeps, and organize small, sustained consumer actions that are proportionate, public, and nonviolent. Teach people to document abuse safely, video, witness statements, time-stamped notes, and funnel that documentation to a trusted team that packages it for lawyers and the press so isolated incidents become undeniable patterns. None of this needs a national permission slip; it needs neighbors who know their rights, who have a plan, and who refuse to let officials treat human beings as collateral.

Local disruption is the seed of any larger movement, and history shows that it never begins with a central committee handing down orders. The Greensboro sit-ins that ignited the civil-rights movement began not with a national directive, but with four students who simply refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960. That one act of defiance rippled outward into hundreds of cities and helped force desegregation. In India, some of the largest general strikes in modern history did not emerge from a polished national plan; they began with workers shutting down their own shops, transport hubs, and offices. Those strikes grew into waves of disruption involving hundreds of millions, powerful enough to stall industries and push governments onto the defensive.

The lesson is that national structures come later. They coalesce once local actions prove they can’t be ignored, once neighbors begin building the habits of refusal and the networks of support that make wider coordination possible. That’s how today’s scattered protests and rapid-response efforts can become the scaffolding for rolling general strikes that stretch across regions and, eventually, across the country. The hammer of the strike is only as effective as the chisel of demands it is wielding with, which means the hard work now is twofold: building that culture of noncompliance locally, and identifying the clear, unified demands that will make each disruption matter. Only then will the sparks of local defiance grow into a national fire that cannot be put out.

The cavalry isn’t coming. We are the cavalry. The only way a national movement will exist is if we create disruption locally, now, in ways that are safe, visible, and relentlessly nonviolent. Each neighborhood act of defiance is a spark, and together those sparks build the fire that forces institutions to choose sides. That’s how pillars of power shift. That’s how regimes fall.

The world is watching. Every day I hear from readers in Canada, in Europe and the UK, in Australia, in Latin America, even Africa, in places where authoritarianism has already taken root or is knocking at the door. They write to say they’re rooting for us, praying for us, and urging us to show what sort of mettle Americans are made of. They know that if we bend or break, it will embolden the forces pressing down on them too. This moment isn’t just about whether our children wake up free, it’s about whether people everywhere who still believe in freedom can take heart from what happens here. We have to seize it, not just for ourselves, but for every nation being dragged toward the same abyss.

The story of this era won’t be written by those who waited patiently for an official invitation to resist. It will be written by those who understood that democracy is defended block by block, campus by campus, union hall by union hall. The raid in Chicago is a warning of what’s coming. The relaunch of the Committee for the First Amendment is a reminder that freedom is in our bones. The only question left is whether we’ll use it.