Joy Is a Political Act

A few days ago I asked my social media connections to send me the songs they reach for when they need them most.

I expected maybe a handful of responses. Instead, I got a hundred songs. A hundred answers to the question of what joy sounds like.

That flood of music has been sitting with me ever since.

There is something I keep thinking about, something that feels urgent right now.

We are living through a moment when the world seems organized, in certain quarters, around a single goal: to keep us from stopping. From thinking. From feeling something in our chests that we did not plan to feel. From looking at a painting or a stranger’s face or a piece of sky and being surprised by it.

Autocracy, at its core, is a management model. And the hardest people to manage are the ones who feel differently, think differently, choose differently. The ones who are curious rather than obedient. The explorers rather than the conquerors.

The people who are fed by art, who use creativity the way others use a compass, who carry inside them something that cannot be replicated because it grew from a specific life, a specific set of losses and loves and moments of grace.

These people are a problem for any system that needs everyone on the same page.

This is why I think about the current assault on DEI initiatives not just as a political maneuver but as something more fundamental. Difference is hard to manage. Sameness is easy. If you can get people consuming the same ideas, fearing the same things, dismissing the same people, then you have something close to control.

Crush the initiatives that celebrate difference and you send a message: get in line.

Here is what tyranny cannot reach.

A hundred people sent me a hundred songs. Classical, R&B, country, jazz, gospel, rock, pop, songs in languages I don’t speak, songs from before I was born, songs released last year. Few sent the same song. And yet every single one of them was talking about the same thing.

Joy.

Not happiness, which is a condition. Joy, which is an experience. Something that catches you and lifts you before you realize what smacked you upside your soul.

Joy that comes in through the body, that moves you, literally, that makes you want to sing along or close your eyes or dance in your kitchen when you thought you were too tired to stand.

The musicians who made those songs were trying to communicate something. And across every genre, across decades and continents and traditions, they succeeded. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, an extraordinary thing.

A person with a voice or an instrument and a feeling can reach through time, find you in your car or in your cups or in your Thursday afternoon, and take hold of you long enough to lift you up.

I want to say something plainly: your joy is not a luxury. It is not frivolous. It is not something to be embarrassed about or to save for safer times.

Your joy is a form of resistance.

When you put on a song that opens something in you, when you let it do what it is trying to do, when you rise up and move to it or weep to it or laugh out loud at how perfectly it says the thing you could not say, you are doing something that does not fit neatly inside a system built on fear and sameness.

You are being specific. You cannot be pigeonholed. You are being a person that no algorithm fully predicted, and no authority fully owns.

And here is the part that energizes me most: you are not alone in it.

Right now, someone across the country is playing a completely different song and feeling exactly what you are feeling. Someone on the other side of the world is being found by music the same way you are being found.

The songs may be different but the joy is the same.

We do not all have to love the same thing to share something real. That is a miracle of the arts.

So, sing your song. Play it loud. Let it move you.

Not because it is easy. Not because everything is fine. But because cultural bliss, insistently felt and freely shared, is one of the things that keeps us from becoming what fear wants us to be.

Different songs. Different answers. The same fierce, inconvenient, and beautiful joy.

A version of this post was originally published on Substack, Mar. 5, 2026

Banner image: John Decker, Mural Study #2 (c. 1941), National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, CC0