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Right now, your newsfeed might feel like a hurricane, and for good reason.
Across Iran, millions of people are standing in the streets, in bazaars, in universities, and in their neighborhoods demanding dignity, freedom, and a future that honors their humanity. Beginning in late December 2025, nationwide protests erupted as the economy collapsed, prices soared, and the state is responding with unrelenting force, internet blackouts, mass arrests of over 16,700 people, and heavy use of live ammunition against demonstrators. Thousands have been killed, and many more are wounded in what has become one of the most savage, painful, and courageous uprisings in Iran’s modern history.
For people of Iranian heritage around the world, and for everyone who holds justice as a sacred practice, these moments cut deep. This is not distant news; it is ancestral fire rising in the streets of your homeland. It is the echo of generations who have carried hope through siege, sanction, and silence. It is grief, it is rage, it is prayer lifted in unison by millions risking everything for a chance at a life where voices are heard, not murdered for wanting freedom. This is a shared volition.
And then, here at home in the United States, we witnessed the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, poet, and beloved presence in her community, at the hands of a mercenary-like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. Her death has sparked national sorrow, protest, and demands for accountability for a federal agency that is clearly being directed to provoke fear and intimidation.
Different places. Same disease.
Power without conscience. Authority without accountability. Violence used to maintain control.
These moments, in Iran and in Minnesota, are not separate. They are connected by a fundamental truth: FALSE POWER USES FORCE. Because they have to, they have nothing else.
When systems choose violence over listening, grief and rage must become fuel. When governments erase voices, citizens become the beacons of their own liberation. The Iranian uprising is a testament to collective bravery, students, bazaaris, workers, and families standing shoulder to shoulder. Their courage calls to those of us who believe in a world that cherishes life over control, freedom over subjugation.
Likewise, the grief we feel for Renee’s life, her children now motherless, her community grieving her absence, calls us not to despair but to practice justice with fierce intention.
This is what practice looks like now:
Hold truth in your body. You know what is right and what is wrong. You have the compass embedded in your bones.
Make grief active. Turn sorrow into steady action, writing letters to elected officials, supporting community bail funds, donating to Iranian human rights groups, showing up at vigils, training yourself in nonviolent support.
Practice togetherness across borders. Solidarity is not a hashtag, it’s consistent attention, shared resources, and collective presence that says: They will not divide us.
Cultivate a fierce compassion. Refuse numbness. Let outrage be the fire that strengthens your resolve, not the flame that burns you out.
Remember that hope is a verb. Hope is not something anemic and passive, it is disciplined, active, and collective. It is the work of leaning into our love for our world even as it burns. Especially when it burns.
There is a long lineage of people who have turned grief and injustice into steady, immovable strength. Iran’s uprising is continuing that lineage today with unflinching courage. And for Renee Good, a life cut short by the state, we can deepen our loyalty to a world where such losses are no longer tolerated.
This is the path of spirit and action intertwined.
A burning heart, a disciplined will, and an unleashed love of life.
May we walk it together, naming what is true, resisting what is unjust, and choosing life with unwavering intention.
Here. Now. For the lost and the living.
- Lydia
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