Kendrick Lamar and Local Resistance
By Mary Lupien
This halftime show was electrifying, not just as a performance but as a moment of political and cultural resistance. Kendrick Lamar took a stage that is usually corporate, sanitized, and focused on mass appeal—and instead turned it into something raw, urgent, and unapologetically radical. It wasn’t just a performance; it was a warning, a challenge, and a call to action.
The dancer waving the Gaza and Sudan flag, tackled and dragged away in real time, felt like a terrifying metaphor for where we are now. The choreography of the system is so ingrained that even a moment of defiance—one that should be protected under the same so-called freedoms this country claims to uphold—is immediately suppressed. And yet, it happened. It was seen. And that alone is powerful.
My daughter, looking to make sense of it, said “Well, they weren’t supposed to do that so it makes sense they got carried away.” My daughter’s reaction is exactly what this moment forces us to wrestle with. “Supposed to” means something different now. It means compliance in the face of genocide. It means pretending not to see the rising tide of fascism because acknowledging it means we have to do something about it. The status quo has always relied on teaching people to accept it as normal, even when normal is injustice.
And that’s why resistance has to be local. National movements matter, but the battle for justice is happening on the ground, in cities like ours. Neoliberal policies are bleeding our communities dry, funneling wealth away from the people who actually live here while corporate-backed politicians use power to protect power. The same politicians who tell us we just need to “trust the process” while refusing to change the process itself.
We have the numbers, but we also need to believe in our own power. Not just in elections, but in how we organize, how we build alternatives, how we take care of each other when the system won’t. It’s a class war, and they have made it clear which side they are on.
Kendrick ended with TV Off, and that message resonates. Turn off the spectacle they want us to focus on and look at what’s happening right in front of us. We’re still in the game, and we still have a chance to change the outcome.
Go Eagles. Go us.
