We Are The Ones We've Been Waiting For

Closing Speech - 22nd Century Conference

From June 19 -22, 2025, the 22nd Century Initiative, the national anti-authoritarian organization I am privileged to lead, convened 1000 people to address the crisis of authoritarianism we are facing in the U.S. What follows is the closing speech:

We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For: A Call to Action

We are living in a dark and difficult times full of fear and sadness. In such times, it is easy to fall to despair. But today we gather not in despair, but in recognition of our power. We gather not as victims of authoritarianism, but as its active opponents. And we gather with the wisdom of those who came before us, who faced down fascism and apartheid and emerged victorious through their courage and solidarity.

Forty-seven years ago, the poet June Jordan stood before the United Nations and read a poem to honor 40,000 South African women who had risked everything to resist apartheid. She spoke for those who understood that freedom is not given; it is taken by those brave enough to claim it.

Today, as we face our own crisis of democracy, as we watch authoritarianism consolidate power before our eyes, June Jordan's words call to us across the decades with the same fierce urgency - I share them with you now:

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that rising like a marvelous pollen will be fertile
even as the first woman whispering imagination to the trees around her made for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit now aroused they carousing in ferocious affirmation of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat from a baptismal smoke where yes there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe a moving force
irreversible as light years traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary even under the sea:

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

These words became a song through Sweet Honey in the Rock. They became a rallying cry through Barack Obama. They became a movement slogan because they speak a fundamental truth: that ordinary people, when they organize and act collectively, become the agents of the transformation they seek.

We are not waiting for perfect leaders. We are not waiting for perfect conditions. We are not waiting for someone else to save democracy.

The women who marched in Pretoria in 1956 understood this. They faced down the apparatus of apartheid - the dogs, the guns, the tear gas, the prisons - because they knew that if they didn't act, no one would. They were the ones they had been waiting for.

The antifascists who fought in Spain understood this. The resistance fighters in occupied Europe understood this. The freedom riders in the American South understood this. They didn't wait for permission to defend democracy. They became democracy's defenders.

Today, as authoritarianism threatens everything we hold dear, we must embody that same recognition. We are the ones who will build the movement that authoritarianism cannot survive. We are the ones who will create the sustained, disciplined, joyful resistance that transforms crisis into opportunity.

We are the ones who will turn our protests into sustained movements through recruitment, engagement, and absorption—drawing millions into the work of defending and expanding democracy. We are the ones who will reach that critical 3.5% and that is necessary to take power, creating the unstoppable force that no authoritarian system can withstand.

We are the ones who will pivot from defense to offense, from naming our opponents to building our alternatives, from episodic outrage to sustained organizing that wins concrete victories and builds lasting power.

The infrastructure exists. The networks are activated. The people are ready. What happened on No Kings Day proved we can mobilize millions. Now we must prove we can sustain them, organize them, and deploy them in the strategic, creative, disciplined resistance that authoritarianism cannot survive.

From this moment forward, let June Jordan's words be our rallying cry. Let them remind us that we need not wait for saviors or perfect moments. The South African women who inspired these words didn't wait. The freedom fighters who came before us didn't wait.

And neither will we.

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

The time is now. The people are us. The future is what we make it.

Now, let's get to work.