Use your imagination

It's the most powerful tool you've got

Mar 07, 2025

We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction.— adrienne marie brown, Emergent Strategies.

I know it may seem naive to suggest in a world where men like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are removing safeguards from the military, a military they would very much like to turn against citizens when they deem necessary, all while trumpeting the return to a “warrior ethos”, but imagination, not physical aggression, is the most potent tool in our toolkit right now.

Why? Because having a vision, not of how things are or how they have been at some time in the past, but of a future that embodies our ideals inspires us to keep reaching beyond what is to what could be. That vision is born in our imagination, in our ability to construct the idea of a world that has never existed but can be built, brick-by-previously-unknown-brick.

The folks currently in authority in this country want to define reality now and well into the future such that it conforms to their vision of the world. In the face of that, how could the ability to envision alternatives not be the most powerful weapon in our arsenal?

So, let’s talk about how imagination functions. First, imagination speaks in the language of symbols, so operationalizing our vision involves thinking about the symbolic meaning of our actions. Symbols are slippery, it’s true. They’re open to interpretation. We can never guarantee they’ll speak to everyone in the exact way we intend. But who told us that dreams are guaranteed? They aren’t. Never have been. The magic, though, is they can be shared.

Shared dreams are powerful.

In order to engage in the kind of symbolic action that spreads dreams you have to understand your audience, though. You’ll waste your life hammering at the door of folks who are benefiting from the way things are trying to get them to understand you. They’re not your audience. You’ll scream yourself hoarse trying to convince folks committed to literal interpretations of anything, really, to think metaphorically, which is to say, symbolically, which is to say, imaginatively. They’re not your audience, either.

But if you turn instead and look for those around you with some spark of what if in their eyes, then engage in symbolic action that feeds that spark? That’s when you bring the impossible into the realm of the possible, using your imagination to expand your dream beyond the confines of your singular self to your neighbor, your friend, your children, your spouse, until it washes over the whole world.

When Martin Luther King proclaimed that he had “been to the mountain top”, was he talking about that one time he geared up and hiked to a high altitude? No, he was not. But did tens of thousands of people still want to follow him wherever he was going? Yes, they did. His use of metaphor, which is to say an image that symbolizes something else, ignited people’s imaginations, and a wider movement for civil rights in the United States.

Symbolic action and speech are always at the heart of nonviolent protest. They have to be. If you’re not relying on beating other people into submission then your success comes through your ability to capture the imagination of enough people that your opposition is forced to succumb to the strength and pervasiveness of your collective vision. It rolls over them like a tsunami.

Symbolic action/speech—>ignited imaginations—>power

Thinking that some transcendent, inspirational leader is going to swoop in and ignite the imaginations of a populace who haven’t been feeding their own what if spark, however, is misunderstanding how change happens, and abdicating our responsibility in that change.

We don’t need to all be leaders. But we do have to feed our imaginations through story, poetry, song— any engagement with art, really— so that when things happen we can imagine how to respond in a way that is symbolically potent. We can plan actions together that ignite and inspire.

Do we also need some evidence sometimes that nonviolence works in real time in order to hold faith with each other? We probably do. So, let me tell you a story.

Sharing is both potent and non-violent.

One day a stranger came to the Quaker Meeting I grew up in. We didn’t tend to get strangers very often. Visitors, sure. But unlike, say, Friends Meeting of Washington, the bigger Meeting in downtown D.C., our Meeting was in the suburbs. It wasn’t on a bus line or a major road. The neighborhood had no sidewalks. So, random walk-ins weren’t really a thing. But on this particular day a guy showed up who nobody knew.

He settled into silence with everyone. (For those of you who don’t know, unprogrammed Quaker worship is entirely silent unless someone stands up because they’re moved to speak.) Perhaps the appeal of a silent, seated audience was eventually too great for him. Or maybe he was just on fire inside. I don’t know. But he stood up and started to speak. And he spoke, and spoke, and spoke.

You might say he ranted, even, and with increasing violence. About social and governmental corruption, and all sorts of things. He was, if memory serves, a Vietnam Vet. Was he offended by our pacifism as a result? Maybe. Maybe he was also damaged by what he had done, as well as the treatment he received when he returned from that terrible war. But as the minutes drummed on, he was clearly getting more and more whipped up.

What were we to do? Shout him down? Order him to leave? Escort him from the room? He was clearly in pain. How could we, in good conscience, ignore his suffering? He was also clearly volatile. How could we, in good conscience, ignore his potential to escalate?

The tension in the room became so thick you could have stuck your finger in it and made a dent.

Then, across the room from where he was standing, one of the members of the Meeting silently stood up. He didn’t seem to notice and kept going. Then another member stood up. Slowly but surely, one by one, everyone in the room just stood up and kept silently standing.

Did it change the power dynamic when he wasn’t standing over everyone? Did everyone standing silently with him help him feel he wasn’t alone? I have no idea. I just know that he looked around with something like surprise once everyone was standing, silently holding vigil with him, and sat down quietly.

At President Trump’s speech to Congress this week, Representative Al Green was ejected from the chamber for standing up and yelling at the president about how he was leaving out of his speech his intentions to cut Medicaid. House Speaker Johnson banged his gavel repeatedly, insisting Green was violating the dictates of decorum. Gah! Nothing like weaponizing civility to squash dissent.

I agree with Green’s critique, and am disgusted with the ten Democrats that voted with Republicans in the House to censor him. But, more importantly, I can’t help but imagine what would have happened if, instead of Democrats waving paddles in the air like a bunch of upset church ladies on a hot day or standing up, like Green, and yelling at Trump, they had all simply stood up once he got going and turned their backs, silently refusing to watch him and listen to his lies.

What kind of visual would that have created? How might that have shifted the power dynamic or symbolically inspired the public?

Or what if, when Congressman Green was removed from the chamber, they had all, every single one of them, walked out in solidarity? How might that have shifted the power dynamic or symbolically inspired the public?

I’m not suggesting any of those actions would have changed Trump’s mind, or even the mind of a single Republican. But they’re not the audience. They’re not the ones whose minds needs changing. It’s the minds of all of us who are being worn out, overwhelmed, cowed, and demoralized by the actions of this administration. Maybe it is we who need to see what it looks like to resist nonviolently yet forcefully. Maybe it is we who need our imaginations awakened.

adrienne marie brown writes further about imagination as a tool for social change in her book Pleasure Activism. She states that “we are in an imagination battle” and urges us to reclaim “our right to shape our lived reality” by rejecting leaders’ “fearful imagination”, replacing it with our own vivid, resistant ones. Amen, amen, amen!

Do I wish we had dynamic leaders in this moment who understood that and could forcefully, nonviolently counter that fearful imagination? God, yes, I do. But we can’t wait for them. We have to start thinking and acting imaginatively, in creative, unprecedented, symbolically powerful ways. Our elected, Democratic leaders will catch up. Or they won’t. But they’ll be too many of us by then for them to resist.

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