Our Joy Makes Us Unmanageable
Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of our 50501 CO newsletter!
In this newsletter we discuss the power of joy in our struggle against authoritarianism. In addition, you’ll find information on upcoming activities from the 50501 calendar, actions you can take outside of protesting, and also find out about additional ways to connect with us.
See you on the streets! ✊✊✊
Actions and Activities
(The below list contains details on all actions this week and next week which have been submitted to our 50501 CO calendar; click the link above for more details and the full calendar)
All Cities
10/29: 6:00pm - 7:00pm - Team ENOUGH Welcome Session (For Young People Under 26) (Virtual - Hosted in Denver CO)
Denver
10/25: 1:00pm - 2:00pm - CO Fox Takedown (Fox 31 Studio, 100 Speer Blvd, Denver, CO 80203)
Littleton
11/1: 11:00am - 1:00pm - Protest Against Tyranny (5700 South Broadway)
11/8: 11:00am - 1:00pm - Protest Against Tyranny (5700 South Broadway)
Loveland
11/1: 12:00pm - 2:00pm - Hands Off (US 287 from US34/Sprouts to Tesla)
11/1: 12:00pm - 2:00pm - Hands Off (US 287 from US34/Sprouts to Tesla)
Northglenn
10/31: 11:00am - 1:00pm - Protest at Gabe Evans’ Northglenn Office (Northglenn District Office, 10701 Melody Dr, Northglenn, CO 80234)
Steamboat Springs
11/6: 5:30pm - 6:30pm - Worth Fighting For - Routt County In-Person Meeting (RSVP for exact location)
Our Joy Makes Us Unmanageable
Authoritarianism runs on fear, exhaustion, and boredom. It needs people too scared to speak, too tired to organize, and too cynical to dream. That’s why joy isn’t frivolous right now — it’s sabotage. Every laugh, dance, mural, or shared meal interrupts the logic of control. Our joy makes us unmanageable.
That’s not a slogan. It’s strategy. Because cruelty isn’t just a policy; it’s a tempo. It keeps the country marching in lockstep to the beat of outrage. The only way to break that rhythm is to make our own music.
You can feel it at protests when someone brings a drum, or when a crowd chants a joke so clever it cracks the tension wide open. You can see it in drag shows still happening under the threat of “decency” laws, in teachers decorating banned-book displays with glitter and defiance, in people chalking bright messages of hope on public sidewalks. Those moments don’t distract from the fight; they remind us what the fight is for.
Oppressors always fear laughter. Dictatorships thrive on grim spectacle — parades, decrees, choreographed applause. Joy is the one performance they can’t choreograph. It spreads without permission. You can outlaw dissent, but you can’t outlaw delight.
About a month ago, I was standing in line at a King Soopers DMV kiosk, trying to reprint my registration tags that never arrived in the mail. There were about fifteen of us all waiting as the machine was glitchy and not instructions not very clear. It could have turned tense, but it didn’t. People started chatting, comparing notes, laughing. When someone finally printed their tags, the whole line clapped, called out “Congratulations!” and wished them a good day. By the time it was my turn, everyone was smiling. I walked out in a good mood, not realizing until later how quietly remarkable it was — a mundane errand that became a small moment of joy and cooperation.
That’s what I mean by unmanageable. Joy breaks hierarchy. No one in that line was in charge; everyone was part of something easy and decent. And it wasn’t selective — it was multilingual, multiracial, multi-everything. Exactly the kind of moment cruelty can’t compute.
History backs this up. Spirituals in the fields were coded messages of escape. Music in the civil-rights marches kept people upright under batons. Humor in Soviet samizdat culture made truth survivable when speech was criminal. The queer dance floors of the AIDS era, built in grief, became sanctuaries of self-definition. The smile of someone refusing to disappear has always been subversive.
Joy doesn’t mean pretending things are fine. It means refusing to surrender imagination. When the state wants your despair, staying tender is a kind of rebellion. When propaganda demands conformity, creativity is proof of life. To laugh, to paint, to love publicly — these are ways of saying, You don’t own my spirit.
And yes, joy is harder to muster now. Prices rise, friends withdraw, news cycles spin like turbines. But community joy isn’t about constant cheerfulness. It’s about connection. A potluck for furloughed workers. A neighborhood sing-along on a dark evening. Sharing memes that turn outrage into oxygen. Every act of shared levity breaks isolation, and isolation is the soil authoritarianism grows in.
This kind of joy is contagious because it’s participatory. It doesn’t need tickets or permission slips — just people willing to show up with openness and a sense of mischief. That’s how movements stay human. That’s how they survive long enough to win.
Joy doesn’t cancel anger; it calibrates it. It turns rage from corrosive to creative, from reaction to intention. The point isn’t to feel better. The point is to stay free.
Because authoritarianism can manage fear. It can manage compliance. It can even manage protest if it knows the chants by heart. What it can’t manage is a population that still finds ways to laugh, dance, and help each other in line at a DMV kiosk.
That’s our leak in their machine.
Our joy makes us unmanageable — and that’s the whole point.
Non-Protest Actions Bingo
The below bingo card contains a list of actions you can take (other than protesting) to help further the cause. If you get a bingo, tag us on social media to let us know!
1. As you have likely heard, the United States budget for fiscal year 2026 must be passed before the end of September to avoid a government shutdown. Both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have indicated that they are willing to compromise on passing the budget so long as Affordable Care Act subsidies are added back in. This cannot be the only item they fight for. Democrats have the ability to filibuster the budget in the Senate, and should use it to rein in ICE budgets/behavior, the rampant corruption of the Trump administration, and the use of the Department of Justice as a political hit tool. Call our CO senators and demand that they pressure Schumer and their peers to take a stand for what really matters to you!
2. Very few (if any) cities and counties in Colorado have laws against sidewalk art. In the right conditions, you can leave messages which will last several days or potentially more than a week. Writing messages in sidewalk chalk outside of news stations, political offices, or public places can help maintain pressure when you’re not able to protest.
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