No Kings 👑
As a product leader, I often wrestle with the tension between the urgent and the important. This week, that gap felt wider than ever. I’ve been more distracted than usual. I’m caught in conversations about call-to-action buttons, their text, their conversion rates. It all feels so small. So hollow.
While I am debating the placement of pixels, a more important call to action is being sounded. How can I think about buttons and pixels when there is so much else happening? People are disappearing. Families are being torn apart. Some by deportation, others by political ideologies that make them unrecognizable to one another. By the stories we choose to believe about who deserves to belong.
It’s not just the chaos in Los Angeles that weighs on me. It’s not just one political ideology or pundit. I’m angry. Angry at the calculated precision with which power is being seized. Angry that it’s working. Angry that people I love—my own family—have aligned themselves with a narrative that feels increasingly alien and frightening to me.
And that’s the thing. We have, and always will be, creatures that make sense of our world through story. In the folktales of old, we warned our children of the mighty beasts and witches to frighten them into safety. We know how to coax detail through embellishments to frighten the little ones. But as we grow, we recognize the dangers of the beast ourselves, and can shed the hyperbole for reality.
That’s why I keep returning to the narrative. The camera is vulnerable right now; it is being pulled to the spectacle of burning Waymos like moths to a flame. The car aflame makes headlines. The grandmother holding quiet vigil for her disappeared grandchildren does not.
The systems we built exist to protect the vulnerable. I know that the color of my skin and the direction of my affections shield me from some of the worst. But justice, if it is justice at all, must extend beyond me.
This is the story I’m watching. This is the story I refuse to look away from.
No kings. No idols. Just people. With the dignity we all deserve.
So here is my call-to-action, small as it may be. Ask yourself what part of this is mine to influence, even if it is a ripple in the storm?
Sometimes that means voicing your angst. Sometimes it means helping someone else. Even tending to your mental state is an act of resistance.