My generation came of age amid COVID and George Floyd. Can we muster the energy to protest Trump 2.0?

My classmates and I came face-to-face with the challenges of adulthood as college students in 2020 — all of us submerged in the turmoil of COVID-19 and George Floyd.

Forced in these first impressions to confront the systems that enabled both police brutality and pandemic healthcare disparities, we responded with simultaneous rage, resolution, and optimism.

There was a viral joke that in a few decades, our kids would be writing essays on their AP exams about our 2020 TikToks. That was the spirit in the air: that this was history, that the pressure of our indignance had finally burst the institutional pipes such that we could build better, fairer systems in their place.

In the five years since, I have graduated from college and begun medical school. The headlines, once again, reflect massive upheaval, and the academic medical world I find myself in has been a prime target: banned research topics, restricted funding, cut programs, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in hospitals. Students and healthcare professionals penalized for speaking up.

Shiny new pipes no longer feel possible; rather, we just hope that the rusty old ones won’t poison us too much. It’s whiplash.

As someone who majored in the history of medicine in college, I spent a lot of time feeling grateful that I wasn’t born centuries or even decades ago.

Slavery and segregation enabled centuries of medical neglect and abuse against Black Americans; xenophobic stereotypes portrayed immigrant communities as vectors of disease; patriarchal systems reduced women to vessels of reproduction and prevented them from receiving reproductive healthcare. The list goes on.

We owe a lot to people before us who demanded more: abolitionists, civil rights activists, feminists, HIV activists. I decided to pursue medicine after feeling moved by these stories while taking my first history classes in the semesters preceding the pandemic.

I entered medical school holding their legacies in one hand and 2020 in the other, my peers and I sharing rose-tinted imaginings of our abilities to demand more, too.

Even before 2025, the march of history had shown its propensity for U-turns, and institutional voids have absorbed many of our protests. I feel this most existentially when we confront the fires and floods, decades of climate activism proving fruitless.

When I started to consider pursuing emergency medicine because it seemed most useful in an apocalypse, I blamed my own paranoia, until I had numerous conversations with classmates expressing similar thoughts. Instead of anticipating change, we brace ourselves for the end.

This mindset has only worsened in the cruel monotony that has taken shape this year. In the middle of class, someone spots a headline portending a negative development that may profoundly affect our future.

We read the articles. We crack nihilistic jokes — “This might be the last one,” we said to each other at a cultural affinity group event after executive orders against diversity, equity, and inclusion were announced. We rant. We plan our extracurriculars with asterisks, unclear if our health equity research will exist in the next month.

We go back to work; our lectures — on the composition of synovial fluid in cases of osteoarthritis, on the specific signs of viral vs. bacterial encephalitis — can’t wait.

We walk home, we read more headlines, we numb ourselves on TikTok, we wake up and start again.

We used up our energy stores building a movement for change a few years ago. Now, we’re rationing what’s left with silly routines and coping strategies. Beneath it all, a deep fear — of the future, of our own powerlessness.

Sometimes, on my walks to school, back and forth and back and forth again, I spiral over whether this current moment is stochastic noise on an upward trend, or if we have instead reached an inflection point.

Did young people of earlier generations also feel such existential dread when they weathered wars and movements and economic depressions? I want someone to contextualize all these cultural and societal shifts within the constellation of history, for someone to tell me that it will all be OK, that all the progress I have taken for granted will not be erased.

I’ve found solace in history, but not the kind about presidents and wars. In one class in college, we learned about the Black Panthers’ free medical clinics and free breakfast for schoolchildren program, where party chapters mobilized volunteers to provide free health services or food for their communities.

The headlines, once again, reflect massive upheaval, and the academic medical world I find myself in has been a prime target.

They fought a big, racist sociopolitical system by turning toward their own neighborhoods. If I open my eyes, I see echoes of these histories all around me.

Brightly painted fridges have popped up in my Philadelphia neighborhood, stocked and maintained by volunteers in the South Philadelphia Community Fridge program to provide food for anyone in need.

Other organizations — mutual aid, abortion funds, street outreach, harm reduction — are all driven by similar philosophies, the idea that communities should look out for each other.

Earlier this year, two days after Inauguration Day, a group of classmates and I volunteered with Philadelphiaʼs Point in Time count, an effort to document all those experiencing homelessness in the city in one night to best guide resource allocation. I was assigned to a group with Sharon Sanders, who spends her professional life doing street outreach.

That night, the temperature outside was under 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Few dared to venture outside. Our voices echoed in the emptiness.

We talked to a group of laughing men inside a 7-Eleven. Sharon directed two people walking in the cold to a warming hub nearby and gave her number to a woman inside a subway stop. We walked down a dark alley, and Sharon noticed someone huddled under a black blanket, blending in with the shadows around him. He did not want help.

To kick off the Point-in-Time Count, hundreds of volunteers had gathered in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. An organizer gave a speech describing how, for years, she had checked in on someone who sat on her neighborhood street corner. Later, she met him when he was off the street. He greeted her, expressing his appreciation for all the times she acknowledged him.

Larger political forces continue to push us around. The Black Panthers, famously, were surveilled by the FBI, and today, local organizations across the country depend on city, state, and federal funding and policies.

But I’d like to believe in the power of small, microlevel interactions, the same ones that have sustained the health of people and communities despite every macrolevel upheaval in history.

“You just need to keep showing up,” Sharon told me in the alley. I hope we can all do that, too.

Isabella Li is a medical student in Philadelphia with an interest in bioethics and the history of medicine.