There Are a Thousand Ways to Kneel and Kiss the Ground

Movements fall apart not only because they are attacked and suppressed from the outside. They are also fractured, gradually or explosively, from within. Too often, when internal difference is turned into suspicion, judgement and competition, we end up spending more energy scrutinizing one another than actually confronting the forces that are destroying people’s lives.

This is not accidental. It’s foundational to empire.

The war machine does not need to crush the movement in dramatic ways. It only needs us to turn on each other often enough, long enough, and viciously enough that we lose focus and momentum. It benefits when our every disagreement over strategy becomes a moral accusation; when people become more committed to proving their own virtue and correctness than to building collective power. It benefits when movements become scenes of internal performance instead of vehicles for struggle.

We should know this by now. Fragmentation has always been useful to the oppressor.

This does not mean that all tactics deserve equal merit, or that every political instinct should go unchallenged. Serious movements need criticism, clarity and debate. They need discipline and accountability. Movements move—this means we consciously and deliberately operate in the space of questioning and responsiveness: What is effective? What is principled? What actually builds power? But there is a difference between political disagreement and self-sabotage. There is a difference between challenging one another, sharpening one another’s skills, awareness, and sensitivity, and feeding a culture of erosion.

Our success doesn’t live and die on our absolute agreement. As Rumi wrote:

 “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.” 

This is something we often forget: that there is no single, pure form of solidarity, no one correct posture of resistance, no universal script for how we should show up.

People enter the work differently. Each of us brings our own histories, capacities, risks, limits, and instincts. Some are community organizers. Some build quietly, and alone. Some write, document, heal, or teach, while others cook, fundraise, speak, or hold things together behind the scenes. Some confront power in the streets. Others sustain those who can. None of this is outside the struggle. None of it is dismissed simply because it does not resemble someone else’s preferred method.

What matters is whether we let our differences strengthen the movement, or splinter it.

What unites us is so much greater than the tactical disagreements that so often consume us. We understand that the war, extraction, oppression, displacement, economic violence, and engineered scarcity making life more brutal and precarious by the day are not separate crises, but interconnected struggles that bind us. We know our liberation is intertwined, that the forces making our worlds unliveable are part of the same imperial machinery. And this machinery prevails not only through force, but through division, confusion, and exhaustion.

We cannot afford to make enemies of each other over every divergence in style, language, or approach. Not because disagreement isn’t valuable, but because the stakes are too high to let opposition become the center of gravity.

We do not need uniformity. We need coherence.

We do not need identical methods. We need shared direction.

We do not need to move the same way. We need to remember where we are trying to go.

The enemy has always counted on our fear and well-earned skepticism to manifest in mistrust, sectarianism, and purity politics. It banks on our inability to stay rooted in common purpose, on our inevitable splintering and isolation. We should stop making its work easier.

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

There are a thousand ways to defend it, too.

The question is not whether everyone struggles in the same way. We never will. The question is whether we can hold space for one another without losing the plot. Whether we can debate without dominating and devouring each other. Whether we can remain unshakable enough to keep our attention where it belongs: on the systems that are dispossessing, bombing, exploiting, and suffocating people every day.

If we can do that, difference becomes strength.

If we cannot, it becomes a weapon in the enemy’s hands.

Together, we are harder to break.

Together, we stand a chance of winning.