Elon Musk is buying another election—and once again, we seem to be watching.
When I saw the headlines about his $1 million “voter giveaway” in Wisconsin, I didn’t feel shock. That feeling burned out long ago. What I felt instead was something colder, more familiar: a kind of seething weariness. He slips through legal gray zones like water through fingers. By the time we call it a fire, he’s already lit the next spark.
I remember Pennsylvania. The same playbook. The same audacity. And the same eerie silence when nothing stuck. Musk doesn’t just test boundaries—he shows us what the powerful can do when the rules become suggestions, and enforcement becomes performance. Each time, he wears the same groove deeper—impunity etched into the system.
It wasn’t new. We saw it with Trump. I was at the original Women’s March—feet aching, heart buoyed, chanting alongside strangers who still believed presence could shift power. But year after year, he sauntered past accountability like it was an empty chair—always there, never meant for him. Each time, I thought: Surely this will be the one that holds. But nothing held. Hope doesn’t always shatter—it thins. Quietly. Until one day, it’s threadbare.
Earlier still, in my student years, I marched in London. Sometimes out of fury, sometimes for the coach ride and a few hours in the city. But I believed then that showing up mattered. That signs, chants, and bodies in motion could interrupt the script. I wasn’t naïve, but I still thought we were bending something slowly toward justice.
Then I stopped marching. I started watching. And the watching became habit. Dithering isn’t always indecision—it can feel like surrender. It’s the muscle memory of inaction. The quiet dulling of conviction. And I didn’t notice, not right away, how easy it became to settle into that hollow we’ve worn into the ground—trampled by delay, shaped by silence.
And now, Musk again. Another stunt. Another shrug from the system. He’s not just a tech mogul behaving badly. He’s a mirror—reflecting what happens when those with power rewrite the rules mid-game, and we let them.
But not everyone is dithering. The Tesla protests are different. Focused. Persistent. And they’re hitting where it counts: the wallet. They remind us that resistance doesn’t need to be loud to matter—it just has to cost something. It has to register.
And now, there’s April 5th.
A national protest is taking shape—Hands Off!—a coalition-led call to defend what remains of the public good: our healthcare, our schools, our votes, our futures. It’s not just Musk or Trump. It’s the slow bleed of accountability. The creep of normalized impunity. The widening gap between outrage and response.
So I’ve decided: I will show up.
Not because I’m brimming with hope. Not because I believe one day of protest will reverse years of erosion. But because I’m tired of watching. I printed the flyer. Wrote down the address. It’s not optimism—it’s direction. A small gesture to remind my body what resistance feels like.
It’s easy to fear the short-term consequences of standing up—discomfort, exposure, disruption. But we rarely sit with the longer-term cost of doing nothing. That’s what accumulates. That’s what hollows us out.
Maybe showing up isn’t about belief. Maybe it’s about refusal. About drawing a line—not around our ideals, but around the ground we won’t keep giving up.
He moves with relaxed speed because he’s used to no resistance. But I’ll move too—slower, maybe, but with weight. Deliberately. Not dithering.
We’ve watched long enough.