Make Trouble

It's time to make some trouble. The good kind. And to make some enemies. The bad kind. You don’t need those people as your friends. You’ll make new ones. Better ones.

When iconic civil rights activist Congressman John Lewis died in the summer of 2020, all kinds of good Lefties started posting Good Trouble memes in his memory, all over social media. Ones like these:

In sharing these in memoriam sentiments, many claimed the mantle as their own.

And I thought to myself (and said to my husband): “He was indeed. But what kind of trouble have these people ever made?”

If you have never stood in a room where you disagreed with everyone in it and you said what you thought anyway, you aren’t Good Trouble. If you’ve never risked anything — really risked it — to say what you believe, you aren’t Good Trouble. If everyone you know agrees with you on everything, you aren’t Good Trouble. And if your views fit very neatly into a prescribed political or religious or some other cultural box, you aren’t Good Trouble. And if you make this claim that you are anyway — publicly or in your own mind, with these exact words or different ones — I’d argue it’s merely a salve for a guilty conscience.

I should know. That used to be me.