Race

State-level voting rights acts were put forth in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. That is not unintentional, said Anneshia Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values, before the decision.

“If section 2 gets weakened, you’re going to see a shift towards a lot of state-level strategies,” Hardy said. “You’re going to see more localized litigation, deepened investment in on-the-ground organizing. We’re realising that when federal protections are narrowed or become less reliable, which they have, unfortunately, the fight doesn’t stop. It ultimately relocates.

But the community rose to meet the challenge. Initially they had nearly a dozen people who volunteered as delivery drivers; now they have about 130. One volunteer built an app to help make the process smoother for people working on the logistics side. “The pantry is really the truest example of a community effort,” Hampton said. “People from all across the community, different walks of life, different religions, different ethnicities – everyone came together to make this happen.”

So, perhaps the spread of pessimism has been a deliberated project, but if it has been, you can’t weather it on your own. “One of the beautiful, profound things I’ve seen over and over,” Solnit says, “is those moments of uprisings, anti-war protests, No Kings demonstrations, Occupy Wall Street bring a sense of power and belonging that is transformative. The solidarity, the sense of purpose and interconnectedness, is so meaningful.” In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Solnit describes the intensity of communities forged by natural disasters – the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a savage explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina. She sees the same unbreakable bonds being forged in activism: the friendships, the energy, the self-awareness and the ambition created by political action stay with you for the rest of your life; they often define your life.