Every day — sometimes just before I sleep or right after I’ve woken up, sometimes over breakfast or while brushing my teeth — I watch people die. 

I see videos of buildings crumbling to the ground, children so malnourished that every tiny bone is visible through their skin, rains of fire over cities like my own with apartment buildings and soccer fields, and the harrowed faces of parents whose children were taken away from them by an AR-15-style rifle wielded by another child. These pop up as I scroll through focaccia-making videos and Tiny Desk clips. 

These videos, posted by news outlets or political accounts circulating media to support their own motives, garner millions of views, thousands of likes, shares, reposts, and yet virtually no change. We’ve become an online generation, forced to watch children we once looked like live through hell as we heat up our dinner.

It took radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow reporting from the rooftops of London as bombs fell from the sky to convince Americans to get involved in World War II. It took photos of pre-independence Indians beaten and starved to death by British officers in global newspapers, among other influences, for an entire nation to be freed from British rule after almost 200 years. 

But today, we are numb. 

Since the coronavirus pandemic, political unrest has only heightened. So has the number of horrific headlines many of us encounter daily scrolling on our phones. In an interview with Harvard Health Publishing, Dr. Aditi Nerurkar said that individuals who scroll endlessly through news can get “popcorn brain… [a] real, biological phenomenon of feeling your brain is popping because you’re being overstimulated online.”

This overexposure leads us to desensitization. A Politico analysis of Google search data and newspaper front pages found that the news cycles for incidents of political violence are sometimes measured in days. We cannot mourn tragedy, because before we can process it, another tragedy strikes. We suffer from the illusory truth effect, a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to tragic current events causes people to not believe that so many horrors can exist in their city, country or world. 

Scrolling through Instagram stories for just a minute, I’ll see news of lynchings on one friend’s story, a Cabo San Lucas vacation on another’s and the Gaza death toll on a third. 

This whiplash prevents social media users from taking the jarring current events seriously. Instagram activism contradicts the nature of protest. 

Protest, from sit-ins to marches, is uncomfortable. Genuine activism is supposed to be inconveniencing, to the system and even more to the activist. But reposting a photo, statistic or headline onto your story, with the most severe implication being disagreement from your followers, is not revolutionary. 

Raising awareness is meaningful, but it doesn’t incentivize change the way that mass movements do. In our digital age, an online herd mentality supersedes the much more groundbreaking physical solidarity.  

But even when we give our feelings space, when we create communities that hurt together, organizing mass demonstrations, we’re shut down by figures of authority rather than being afforded our right to peacefully protest. Our own University, which is supposed to protect the space for everyone to express their beliefs freely, called the Los Angeles Police Department on protesting students in Spring 2024 for “trespassing.” 

Across the country, our government has weaponized wealth and sued university after university into submission, bringing the freedom of politics and values within institutional education to its feet. At least $11 billion of federal funding for university research has been threatened to be cut from top research universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern and more, due to claims of antisemitism. 

Just this Wednesday, the White House sent nine universities a compact, which offered them increased assurance of access to federal research funding, only if they state they’ll commit to regressive definitions of gender, limiting the number of international students they accept and protecting conservative ideas on campus. 

President Donald Trump’s administration has flooded the zone, and we are treading, flailing and drowning. We live in a country where legal immigrants and citizens alike must carry their identification everywhere to avoid violent, dehumanizing and racially motivated United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement interrogations. 

We live in a country where an entertainer such as Jimmy Kimmel isn’t allowed to criticize his government without his platform being seized from him. We are a nation governed by the inhumane. 

As Gil Scott-Heron said, the revolution will not be televised, but “The revolution will be no re-run, brothers / The revolution will be live.” In times of dire political disappointment, change will not arise from an Instagram repost or another doomscroll. It’ll not come from allowing fearful institutions to govern us. 

It’s time for us to go live, to internalize the news and to bar our dissipating freedom from convincing us that we are helpless, but let it mobilize us. Let’s choose inconvenience. Let’s speak out, criticize our government with no fear, organize and march and sit and pray together. 

Let’s raise us, the people, up.