I joined one of the 50501 protests this weekend — but now I’m asking: What’s next? How do I channel the momentum from 50501 into a campaign that taps into real power?

I’m looking for a clear next step — not just to repeat what we did, but to evolve it.

There is a hinge clicking inside the day and you can hear it if you’re quiet long enough. Bones remembering things. Old structures fissure, and something else—not quite formed—curls up from beneath. The crowd swinging No Kings banners, the sky briefly lit with that impossible blue found only on momentous days. Electric, epochal imagination: we are moths, briefly ablaze. But always, the next question squats at the edge: Now what? How to step off the high wire and onto real, muddy ground—boots thick with the actual? What to do when the singing stops.

Protest is blast, someone says. The energy you need for the breach, for the break, the tremble in the chest that insists maybe, maybe. But after that? You look around and there is scaffolding to erect if you want this charge to hold, to shape, to last. Otherwise, it evaporates—old air, twitching with static, but nothing new grown.

Campaign-building is catch and contain—the delicate work of making a vessel for the hot edge of the day after. “No sleepwalking,” says the hard voice inward, the refusal to flatten into ritual, to drift on adrenaline's ebb tide. The 50501 moment: a bonfire. But do not let it just burn.

Micah White haunts the back of your mind—memes, molecules, the long postmortem of Occupy: an energy storm, but where did it all go? Meme warfare is not theory, not even close to social change. Social change is fuss, repetition, unglamorous assembling of places people can fit themselves into, when the sun’s dimmed and the heart’s tired.

Bigger thinking, says Buckminster Fuller, might be the only thinking that’s effective. “How big can we think?” He asks, accusingly, as if he doubts we really mean to change anything. Protest as point, mistake unlearned. Even the best speeches turn into ritual sleep if nobody holds the thread. The aim is to nudge someone’s coordinates of possibility a hair off axis—and after that, to institutionalize it, press it into wet cement while it’s still yielding.

You begin with a whittled sort of wisdom: energy scatters unless the vessel is ready. The poem of action is usually lost in air, unless there’s a theory, a skeleton. The pretty surges make for lovely headlines, but headlines don’t keep you warm. They don’t feed Kilmar after deportation.

First, anchor the epiphany. Gather the ones who aren’t merely passing through. They can meet in living rooms, church basements, blind corners of the internet. It isn’t bureaucracy you want, but relationship, kin clusters. Neighborhood councils with dirty hands. Digital cooperatives that survive because the work is granular: a meal, a study circle, child care. Tiny clinics sweating out the basics. Legal defense funds for the next inevitable “mistake.” Not just slogans about justice, but an actual link in the cold supply of justice.

A flash forms bonds—ephemeral, sinewy, but brittle. The work is to bind it into something less glamorous and more reliable. “A mode of production subsists only insofar as the reproduction of the relations of production is ensured.” Althusser via a cup of coffee in someone’s kitchen. The real win: not just new demands, but new habits of seeing, habits of helping. Do your groceries differently. Stand up in a meeting and stay standing.

Then, pick a lever. Do not try to fix all the world’s splinters. The best hammers get dull that way. Deportations, public service cuts, some local villain who needs relentless naming. A campaign that has teeth, but doesn’t bite off more than can be chewed by ordinary people with tired bones. Plan escalation that is not just fever, but fever that makes new immunity: direct action, a thousand red ribbons looped around bureaucratic buildings, letters pressed into legislators’ hands, legal “jamming.” Victory is a larva—ugly, hungry, always threatening to turn. Which metamorphosis are you here for?

Paradigm shift is as much mischief as critique. Not only “no,” but the more difficult “yes” invented under duress. Cultural campaigns with their own weather: teach-ins, rebel clinics, relentless song. Make cracks in the world where weeds of hope push through. Something even the poets and the old radicals don’t expect.

New organizers are needed. Not larger crowds waving the old slogans, but people drawn through initiation—drawn by curiosity. Teach them how to hold a room, make a plan, wrangle the logistics of protest and keep a secret. The megaphone-wielder is not the leader, but the one handing out jobs, beginning every meeting with a patient what do you need today? Multiply, split, become less predictable.

Contradiction is a sibling to progress. Do not flatten debate for the sake of unity that smells like plastic. “Fear of your power to retaliate,” Baldwin whispers, “moves the world more than hope.” The friction, the heated room, thick with argument—this is the forge for sharper edges.

You sit with the practical—pick three names from the last march, from the edge of the dance, the ones who always stayed to clean up and asked questions after. Debrief quickly: seventy-two hours, or the magic leaks away. A first neighborhood assembly: in the gritty corner shop, online, in someone’s moss-stained backyard.

Set the schedule. One concrete anchor act in the next two weeks—a meal delivered, a meeting with an official, flyers thick on the bus stop, a call made to the most vulnerable, a map of threats and needs drawn on butcher paper. Routines, not just rituals. Record every fleeting win, mark the setbacks, celebrate the micro: a new face who comes back, a legislator who replies, a disagreement that does not collapse into silence.

Innovation not only in tactics but in infrastructure. Try encrypted chats, mutual aid funds running on odd technology, not reliant on the fickle attention of donors who only open their wallets if tears are visible. Assign rotating anchors, with the expectation that each organizer will draw two more into the circle—a math of multiplication, not dwindling.

Embed new rituals. Chalk poetry, reading nights with rumpled pamphlets, collective child care for those missing out. Not the old “consensus assembly” simply recast, but a ritual or a joke or a gesture that dignifies the difficulty of every day after.

The new world is the ordinary rendered strange. “Victory depends on persistent, inventive structures disrupting daily business as usual.” Do not wait for another spectacle to surge up, drenched in light and vanishing as dew. Every escalation is a test: does the structure hold?

You succeed only when the difference is inhabited, visible, repeated with the muscle memory of a thousand minor mornings. Aftercircles that outlive adrenaline, aftercare that transposes protest refusal into a habit of presence. Inside the debris of the old paradigm, start now, even if you do not know how, building a vessel awkward, unfinished, but big enough to hold what never stood still.

What you want is not nostalgia for the flash, but the daily work of turning “no” into a recurring yes. Meetings that multiply; feasts and arguments and setbacks. The slow, steady birth of a sun in a sky nobody yet recognizes.

A hinge clicks within the movement; the door is still open. Step through before the ache of ordinary unlearns what you glimpsed.