Imagination as Resistance
Lesson 4: Take Responsibility for the Face of the World
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder writes:
“Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow.”
It’s a lesson that feels both deceptively simple and quietly radical. He urges us to notice the signs of hate, the swastikas scrawled on a subway seat, the slurs etched into cityscape walls, and to act. Remove them. Cover them. Challenge them. Not because it’s convenient, but because the world we tolerate is the world we build.
An Early Lesson in Hate’s Reach
I learned this lesson early.
I grew up attending a Hebrew Day School in Atlanta, Georgia. One morning, we arrived to find our school had been vandalized with swastikas and antisemitic graffiti. Even the playground wasn’t spared. The cement climbing tubes we once imagined as forts of safety and escape were suddenly desecrated, marked with hate.
I remember feeling that sharp, jarring rupture. Even our make-believe sanctuaries weren’t immune. Hate had entered the space where we played, laughed, and learned. That early memory shaped my understanding of the world. Symbols aren’t just symbols. They have the power to terrorize, to make children feel unsafe in their own imagination.
That experience propelled me to speak out as I grew older. To remove, replace, repaint, and refuse to let hate linger unchallenged. Because silence doesn’t neutralize hate. It nourishes it.
The Power of Symbols And the Stories They Tell
My sister is an artist, and she has taught me how much power symbols hold. They can communicate volumes without a single word. Watching her create with such reverence sparked something in me.
It’s not enough to simply challenge the symbols of hate. We must also transform them. And more than that, we must dare to create symbols that tell the stories the world needs, stories of unity, resilience, and interconnectedness. Symbols that express not only the human spirit, but the global one.
As a storyteller, I’ve come to see symbols as a form of visual narrative. They frame how we understand the world and each other. That’s why we must take a stand.
We must be mindful of the stories we’re telling through what we display, promote, tolerate, or remove. And we must confront and rewrite the stories of fear and hate that are trying to embed themselves into the landscape of our lives.
This Is Not Theoretical
We are living in a time when hate symbols are reemerging in public spaces, on college campuses, in politics, online, and at rallies where torches glow and slogans are chanted with historical malice.
Antisemitic, anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ, and xenophobic imagery is being dusted off and paraded again. Not only as intimidation, but as a dark kind of recruitment. We cannot afford to look away.
This current administration understands the power of symbols. We’ve seen it in the quiet removal of signage and exhibits. Those images, stories and symbols that once invited people to reflect on inclusion, learn from history, and imagine a more just future have disappeared without explanation or meaningful conversation. These efforts are not accidental. They are strategic acts of erasure, and they reveal just how much the face of the world still matters.
If these symbols seek to shrink the world into fear, it is our imagination that must stretch it back open.
Imagination as Resistance
Democracy needs a future. A future needs imagination. And imagination needs art.
So if Snyder gave us the imperative to notice and to resist becoming numb, then let us answer it. Not only by confronting what distorts the face of the world, but by helping to shape one that reflects our highest hopes.