Where Your Fists Reach

A Springsteenian battle cry for the Bullshit Hunters

On November 16th, I took a mushroom gummy and wept at a Bruce Springsteen concert.

“Oh, no cannonballs did fly, no rifles cut us down
No bombs fell from the sky, no blood soaked the ground
No powder flash blinded the eye, no deathly thunder sound
But just as sure as the hand of God, they brought death to my hometown”

Last week, I sat on my therapist’s couch and took the lid off a container I leave in a dusty corner that never sees the light. A container that holds all the helpless, desperate feelings of choosing a career that works against large, complex systems—reconciling the certain truth that if the ultimate goal (complete anarchy, dismantling all that exists) is Mount Kilimanjaro, the height of my professional life will likely be a man-made bunny hill in a province that is otherwise flat.

This morning, the first real interaction I had was loudly exclaiming to my partner—innocently trying to make coffee in the haze of a quiet morning—“Another plane crash! In Toronto!” Because I chose to start my day with my favourite meditation—scrolling Bluesky.

I was in the midst of wondering if you, the reader, would be interested in a compilation of facts about these recent plane crashes, if maybe I could drudge up something of value to bring clarity to online confusion, when Justin blasted me his latest mix—Dance Rock—with a message, “Give me the vibe check for the opening section boss!”

Seeing if I can decipher which song will bleed into the next is one of my favourite pastimes. Caamp, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Boss, Springsteen.

The mix ended, and I continued to scroll through news stories of recent crashes. “Four major deadly U.S. aviation disasters this year” became “Hundreds of FAA probationary workers fired by Trump administration” became “President Donald J. Trump ends DEI madness and restores excellence and safety within the Federal Aviation Administration” and so on and so forth until I was unsure where the layers of horror would end.

“No shells ripped the evening sky, no cities burning down
No armies stormed the shores for which we'd die
No dictators were crowned
I awoke from a quite night, I never heard a sound
Marauders raided in the dark and brought death to my hometown, boys”

Cycles don’t necessarily have an absolute end. They evolve, they collapse, or transform rather than simply stop. What was once occasional doses, through print and radio, of international goings-on became the 24-hour TV news cycle, evolving into the hyper-fragmented social media algorithm. Now, it’s less of a cycle—sort of tidy and circular—and more of a universe, something we can only perceive finitely in its amorphous perpetuity.

It leaves us breathless. The limitless nature of it all. We are inundated with catastrophe after catastrophe, each one demanding immediate attention, immediate outrage, immediate grief. There’s likely a term for this—the cognitive load of relentless despair. In advertising, we called it things like 'content fatigue,' ‘message dilution,' or simply 'burnout'—saturating a space until no message stands out, until the audience can't realistically consume anymore, and everything blurs into white noise.

I wept at Bruce Springsteen because I was experiencing community—a collective moment of unity between strangers. Three middle-aged men who started the night completely unfamiliar with each other had their arms wrapped around one another by the end of Darkness on the Edge of Town. I raged on my therapist’s couch because I was experiencing severe isolation in the experience of my life.

And this morning, I blinked uselessly at articles that manufactured a feeling with no place to go.

What happens outside of us matters. What happens in nations outside of ours matters. What you decide to care about and give your energy to is yours—no one gets to take those things away from you. No one is the true arbiter of what’s good and what’s righteous.

What happens in the places we can’t reach does matter. But we do not matter so much to it.

We matter here, where our fists can reach.

“They destroyed our families' factories and they took our homes
They left our bodies on the plains, the vultures picked our bones
So listen up, my sonny boy, be ready for when they come
For they'll be returning sure as the rising sun”

So when the weight of it all presses down, when the world expands beyond what you can hold, when every headline blurs into another brick in the wall, blinking uselessly—stop.

Where your fists can reach: your city council meetings, demands for budget transparency, support for alternatives to policing, your neighbourhood’s library funding battle, advocating for your local Indigenous rights movement, the grassroots groups organizing mutual aid. Support financial institutions that reinvest in community rather than profit-driven banks. Push for safe injection sites and access to Narcan—educate yourself on how to use it. Protect local ecosystems, and fight corporate land grabs. These struggles are winnable. They are tangible.

Weep with your community, and not just because psychedelics are a hell of a drug.

I’ll never get to the top of Kilimanjaro. And even if I did, I wouldn’t win by standing there alone. We win by standing together on the bunny hill that is ours.

Learn how to file FOIA requests. Learn the patterns of archival research, how to track the flow of money in your local government. Power hides in the paperwork, but the right hands can turn those papers into a usable weapons in this fight.

Write. Share information. Even if the distracted masses don’t see it today, even if your work never makes it to the front page of CNN, even if it feels like screaming into the void.

This is how we fight. Not by waiting for the world to look our way, but by looking at what’s in front of us and refusing to let it slip away.

“Now get yourself a song to sing, and sing it 'til you’re done.”