Another scan of her notebook, searching for her train of thought.
“I can’t remember being afraid of anything in my life, and maybe it’s a product of getting older, but suddenly I am afraid. To be honest, I’m afraid all the time.”
A burst of oscine birds took to the sky. This impromptu storm of wings breached the day like a crash of thunder, alerting the assembled to how quiet they’d grown. Only the patter of rain filled the silence that followed.
“We are met with this unthinkable nightmare befalling our planet, and the hour has grown so late. We are only in the early stages of the devastation to come. I could name all the events that have destroyed families and lives and homes over the past ten or twenty years, but what’s the point? All of this is only the beginning. That’s what breaks my heart so much. We’re not here to prevent that future anymore—because we can’t. All we have left to fight is our own oblivion. Our civilization devouring itself as we run from storms and fires, as we die starving and thirsty and fearful and alone.
“We can tell ourselves that it’s all of our faults, that we all share blame, but that’s bullshit. Let’s call it like it is: There are a handful of corporations and governments happily burning as much carbon as they can so that a handful of people can get obscenely rich. And mostly, the problem lies right here.”
And she pointed behind her to the bulging Capitol Dome.
“That building is ours. The whole idea is that whatever happens in there is our will. Our decision. But instead, it’s a defensive fortress for a tiny elite, who are profiting from the genocide of our planet. It’s not even a secret. They’re not hiding their plan. They are openly telling us they are going to exploit and plunder our country, our earth, our home, and then profit from its unraveling.” Kate Morris slapped the notebook against her thigh. “They expect us to stand by and do nothing. The only question is, will we do nothing? The solutions to this crisis, it turns out, will also require an even greater ambition, a more just global order. We need to build a new energy infrastructure. We need to reinvent agriculture. We need to put everyone in this country to work in high-paying, meaningful jobs. We need to make housing, health care, and education universal rights, so we’re not all hungry, addicted, angry, and alone. We need to destroy the power of the surveillance capitalist economy, the people who profit from fomenting hate. We need an immediate release of the political prisoners, people like Dr. Anthony Pietrus, who have done nothing wrong except try to warn us of what’s coming. We need an end to the harassment, imprisonment, and torture of activists, protestors, religious and racial minorities, whether that’s at the local mosque or the local chapter of A Fierce Blue Fire. We need justice for the mothers who’ve lost children to heroin addiction in Kentucky, just like we need justice for the fathers who’ve lost their sons to bullets in Dallas. We need our freedom and our hope returned to us. We need to find our way back to each other.”
Kelly Pasquina had loved Kate Morris since she first learned of her as a middle schooler, and the moment her idol stepped onstage, she’d begun to tingle. She did not care a whit about any of the scandals, the gossip, or the attacks from the left, right, or center. There were some people you would ride for come what may. Now, listening to her, she clutched her hands in front of her mouth as if in prayer and let the tears pour shamelessly from her eyes.
“The problem is, in order to fulfill this vision, we need to take their money, and we need to take their power.” She jabbed her finger behind her again at the Capitol Dome. “It’s as simple as that. Because that money is blood money, and the power fucking belongs to us anyway.”
“Fuck yes!” Kelly screamed, and her voice rippled back through the crowd, past Seventh and then Fourteenth Street, nearly all the way to the Washington Monument.
“So what are we going to do?” Morris demanded. She held three fingers on her right hand high. “We are going to save our biosphere, we are going to remake our unjust and unequal economic system, and we are going to re-democratize our country and our world. History shows us that people can be monsters. That they can kill and maim and enslave and exploit, and they can do it while telling themselves how enlightened they are. But history also tells us that when people band together, they can do mighty things. Whole systems can fall overnight. We don’t need armies, guns, or bombs. Great change is made by a tired, pissed-off woman who doesn’t want to give up her seat on a bus, or by a scrawny Indian lawyer who decides to stop eating. What is extraordinary about the people we revere in history is just how unbearably ordinary they were. All that separates us from them—literally the only difference—is that they had the courage to act. When the wealthy and powerful told them what they were doing was meaningless, they didn’t listen.”
Quinton Marcus-McCall watched the crowd feast on this woman’s voice. He’d first heard her at a speech at Wayne State in 2025 when he was failing at his nursing degree, and though he hadn’t known it then, it set his life on a new course. This speech didn’t sound all that different to him from the rest of her catalogue, but it was good to know she still had some juice left. He set his backpack on the ground and went rooting through it for the strip of blue cloth and began tying it around his left bicep. Kate Morris continued:
“Remember, you have courage in you. All these disasters the past thirty years, from 9/11 and Covid-19 to the Great Eastern Flood, and what do people always do? In the LA fire, you know what they did? Fishermen sailed their boats up the coast from Mexico to rescue Americans they’d never met. Because when disaster comes, we don’t run, we don’t eat each other, we don’t say ‘That’s the other gal’s problem, why bother?’ Even if the powerful want us to forget it, we are innately brave and always carry within ourselves hope in the face of the impossible. We don’t run from the fire, we run into the fire.”
She leaned hard into the mic, the flesh stretched tight across her collarbones as she surged into her own skin, her fist beating the air for emphasis.
“So here’s what we do: As I speak, we have organizers, here, today, setting up encampments and building barricades in the streets, and we’re asking you to stay, right here, for as long as you can. We will lay siege to this city. We’re not leaving until our leaders hear us, meet our demands, and address, immediately, these emergencies of democracy, inequality, and climate.”
At this point, what Kate Morris was actually saying didn’t quite connect with the crowd, which let out a half-confused round of applause. She pushed on, trying to make them understand.
“Find the people wearing the blue armbands, and they will set you up with the supplies you need: tents, sleeping bags, water, food. For those watching, anywhere in the world: Get here. As quickly as you can. We are not here to spark violence or damage even a single brick. This is not a MAGA rally. The buildings that surround us, this is our heritage. It’s our home, and we will treat it as such. We must be uncompromising in our nonviolence, but the business of the heartless and violent corporate plutocracy that now passes for governance in this city? That’s finished. Not one deal will happen, not one law will pass, not one piece of corporate welfare will be enacted until we, the citizens of this country, are heard.”