That quote from Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda has been looping in my mind:

“One often meets their destiny on the road they take to avoid it.”

While I’m extremely upset with the current U.S. administration, their chokehold on legacy media, their manipulation of public systems to serve private interests, I’m starting to notice something that feels like a spark of hope. And maybe I’m late to this realization, but if others have already been thinking this way, please reach out. I’d love to learn from and collaborate with you.

Here’s what I’m starting to see:
Yes, the administration is consolidating power and bypassing democratic process. They’re fast-tracking agendas that benefit a small elite and, in doing so, disregarding the will of the people. That should lead to mass outrage. And maybe it still will.

But zooming out, I see something else happening, something bigger than the U.S. alone.

This isn’t just a national crisis. It’s part of a global shift, and ironically, the very mechanisms of control being used here might be accelerating their own undoing.

Take the attack on higher education. By discouraging international students from attending U.S. institutions, especially elite ones, the government is unintentionally shrinking the country’s soft power. It’s severing cultural and intellectual exchanges that once propped up America’s global image. The more they isolate, the smaller their influence becomes.

Or look at the instability in economic policy, these erratic trade wars aren’t strengthening our position. They’re weakening our credibility on the global stage.

Here’s where it gets interesting: scholars like Aníbal Quijano, who work in post-colonial and decolonial theory, have been offering frameworks for this moment for decades. They’ve shown how global capitalism and dominant social theory are rooted in colonial hierarchies, hierarchies that have shaped not just economies, but minds.

This isn’t new. Indigenous movements, the Global South, Palestine, and countless resistance efforts have long been calling attention to these power structures. What’s different now is that the mask is slipping even within the imperial core, within the U.S. itself.

And maybe that’s the key:
It’s not just about what the U.S. is doing to the world. It’s also about what this system has done to us, to everyday Americans. We’ve been sold a story of freedom while being conditioned to uphold the very systems that exploit us.
We’ve been colonized too, in a psychological and spiritual sense.

That doesn’t mean our struggle is the same as those in historically colonized regions. It’s not. But maybe it does mean we have a role to play in unlearning, in breaking the illusion, and in showing up for a different future

I’m not saying any of this is guaranteed. Collapse isn’t a promise of liberation, it’s a volatile and dangerous opening. And history has shown us, over and over, that power doesn’t disappear quietly. When empires fall, what often rises next isn’t justice, it’s more violence, more control, more desperation dressed up as order.

But that’s why it’s so important to pay attention now.

We can’t afford to be romantic about this moment. Yes, it’s destabilizing. Yes, it’s painful. But if we mistake chaos for progress, or worse, if we sit back and assume collapse will magically fix what’s broken, we risk repeating the same patterns under a new name.

So what gives me hope isn’t just that things are falling apart. It’s that more people are waking up. More of us are questioning the narratives we were handed. We’re learning from post-colonial thinkers, from grassroots movements, from people and communities who have never had the luxury of believing this system worked in the first place.

The resistance didn’t start now. We’re not the first to see the cracks. But maybe we’re part of a generation that has the capacity, and the responsibility, to help shift the story. Not by centering ourselves, but by listening, unlearning, and choosing to build with humility and solidarity.

That’s not easy. And it’s not guaranteed to work.
But it’s better than waiting for the collapse to decide for us.