When the World Feels Untenable, Care Is a Radical Act
What a single act of courage—and a week of family illness—taught me about refusing the logic of violence.
This week made one thing painfully clear: violence is the logic of a world that has forgotten how to care. Brown University. Bondi Beach. Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner. It all feels so shocking and yet—tragically—not surprising.
Violence is the logic of a world that has forgotten how to care
We live in a time when large-scale systems of power are inflicting widespread harm; when a manufactured Hunger Games of obscene wealth beside crushing deprivation has become the global backdrop; when those desperate to preserve a patriarchal culture built on dominance and control are doubling down on violence to maintain it. “Othering” people as scapegoats for the anguish baked into the system has become the norm. So it’s no wonder interpersonal violence is intensifying too. It can all feel like a foregone conclusion.
And yet. Ahmed al-Ahmed.
A father who treated the world as if it were his family. A Muslim man who put himself in the crosshairs of a violent attack, wrestling the gun away from a man allegedly inspired by ISIS, saving Jews while sustaining gunshot wounds himself. The attack happened at a Chanukah celebration—the festival of lights. And in the darkest moment, Ahmed became one. As Kate Manne points out, his courage offers “a shred of hope that this horrific anti-Semitic massacre will not be used as yet another excuse for Australia’s virulent Islamophobia.”
The simple fact that a man saw other people dying and couldn’t bear it offers something stronger than hope: proof that our capacity for care hasn’t been extinguished. There is something fierce and undeniable in the countless people who refuse to be bystanders—people fundraising because they can’t bear the starvation in Gaza, confronting ICE because they can’t bear the dehumanization of immigrants, boycotting Amazon because they can’t bear the greed.
These acts of care matter because they defy the logic we’re told to accept. The violence erupting around us isn’t random. It grows out of the same patriarchal logic that has always undergirded fascism.
As scholars like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Jason Stanley have shown, you can’t separate fascist politics from patriarchal gender ideology—they are mutually reinforcing systems. Fascism gains strength when traditional masculine authority feels threatened by economic change, women’s rights, or social progress—it promises men they can reclaim dominance and restore their “rightful” place above women, minorities, and others deemed inferior. Both celebrate violence as a masculine virtue. Both seek to control women’s sexuality and reproduction to consolidate power.
A patriarchal household becomes the blueprint for the authoritarian state: obedience learned at home becomes political obedience. The “strongman” who demands dominance, loyalty, and the right to rule through force is simply the father-as-sovereign writ large.
Patriarchy harms everyone. It forces men to act as if they don’t need others, and forces women to choose between having a voice or having a relationship. As Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider argue in Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, patriarchy requires “a sacrifice of love for the sake of hierarchy”—it “steels us against the vulnerability of loving and by doing so, becomes a defense against loss.” In other words, patriarchy creates loss and then hardens us against feeling it.
This logic—the devaluation of love, dependence, vulnerability, and care—doesn’t just shape nations and movements. It shapes families who are trying to survive systems that refuse to help them.
Take the Reiners. Their deaths are a private tragedy, but they are also a devastating example of what happens when a society refuses to build real structures of care. Parents caring for a child with addiction or severe mental illness often live in fear and isolation because they are asked to shoulder what should be a collective responsibility.
In the United States, healthcare is not a fundamental right. Losing a job can mean losing health insurance, which can mean losing essential medication or therapy, which can mean losing the fragile stability a family has fought to maintain. Mental health care is inconsistent, expensive, stigmatized, and often impossible to access. Families are blamed while the system looks away.
The Reiners were not alone. There are countless parents, most with far fewer resources, who live with this terrified vigilance, trying to care for a child in crisis with almost no help at all, and lots of judgment.
This is what a culture looks like when care is treated as weakness, feminized, stigmatized, or dismissed. When vulnerability is mocked. When interdependence is pathologized. When the patriarchal script says: handle it yourself, be strong, don’t ask for help—and if you can’t manage it, the failure is yours.
A small, intimate moment keeps coming to mind. While all this violence was unfolding, norovirus swept through my family. My parents happened to be visiting, and watching two people in their eighties become so sick was frightening. My husband drove my father to the ER, where we then spent eleven hours. I drove to three pharmacies hunting for anti-nausea medication for my mother—as she surely did for me countless times. We cleaned up after each other and tried to keep one another hydrated. It was miserable. But it was also tender—this tiny, makeshift infrastructure of care we built because that’s what you do when someone you love is unwell.
Domination is never what holds a society together. Care is.
Being ill made the violence in the headlines feel even heavier, but it also clarified something essential: domination is never what holds a society together. Care is. Care is what saves us in the smallest moments and the biggest ones. Care is what teaches us how to belong to one another. Care is what interrupts the logic of fascism.
Because a world where wealth is hoarded by a few, where masculinity is defined as domination, where privilege means “better than,” is always a world drifting toward authoritarianism. The only way out is choosing connection over the false safety of indifference—choosing to see one another not as competitors in some manufactured contest, but as humans whose fates are intertwined.
The only antidote to a world engineered for cruelty is a radical insistence on care. But I won’t pretend that choice is simple. Care can cost you. Sometimes it means literally stepping into the line of fire like Ahmed al-Ahmed. More often it means risking your job, your reputation, your peace of mind. How much to give, when to protect yourself, whether to lead with heart or head—these aren’t questions with easy answers. They’re questions we weigh differently in every moment.
We can’t legislate tenderness, but we can build policy around its truth: that people flourish when they are cared for, and societies collapse when they are not. The work, then, is both intimate and collective. It happens in ER waiting rooms and family kitchens, but also in voting booths, school boards, and protest lines.
Care is not soft. Care is infrastructure. Care is resistance.
And in a world bent toward cruelty, insisting on care is how we bend it back.
If the ideas in this piece resonate—care as resistance, connection as antidote—my book Sexism & Sensibility explores how patriarchy shapes everything from our intimate relationships to the stories we tell about girls and women, and what it takes to raise empowered, resilient girls in spite of it. It also makes a thoughtful holiday read or gift for anyone invested in building a different future.
*Take 50% off a one-year subscription to this newsletter by purchasing a copy of Sexism and Sensibility. That’s a book AND a subscription for less than a subscription alone. Just email me your receipt and I’ll send you a link.
