By Dr. Panicha McGuire, LMFT, RPT™
There’s a reason the Star Wars universe resonates so deeply with so many of us especially now.
We are living in a moment where systems of oppression are not just visible; they are emboldened. We are watching as bodily autonomy is stripped away, voting rights are eroded, trans existence is criminalized, and book bans echo the darkness of fascist histories we swore never to repeat. We witness genocide, forced displacement, settler colonialism, and the slow violence of climate catastrophe that is deliberately ignored by those with the power to intervene.
It’s overwhelming and enraging, but it’s not new. This is empire.
Not just one government, one party, one villain…but a system that is built to dominate, extract, erase, and profit. A system that insists its way is the only way, no matter the human cost. The Galactic Empire of Star Wars may be fictional, but it is deeply familiar. It is the military-industrial complex. It is global capitalism. It is the history of colonization that lives on in borders, languages, and passports. It is supremacy, nationalism, and corporate media empires that decide which lives matter based on market value.
There is no place on Earth untouched by empire.
We see its impact in the occupation and erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lands, in the manufacturing of poverty and debt, and in the hoarding of aid and control of dominant narratives by the powerful few. We see it every time people are forced to choose between surviving and staying true to themselves. The empire doesn’t just control laws and land. It also controls imagination. That’s what makes hope so dangerous.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the line “Rebellions are built on hope”. It’s a reminder of the theme throughout the Star Wars universe. It reminds us that rebellion is not a single act of defiance or a spectacular moment of victory. It is the daily, often thankless work of choosing humanity. Over and over again.
Many of us have been in this fight since we were children. We were taught to comply, to mask, to code-switch, to acculturate for our own safety. And now, we find ourselves holding the contradictions: the longing for peace and the need to resist, the exhaustion of surviving empire and the impossibility of looking away.
I’ve told some clients of mine that the rebellion is a long game. And like Luthen in Andor, we may never see the fall of the empire in our lifetime. But that’s not the point.
The point is that we keep fighting. Not because we’re certain we’ll win, but because we refuse to surrender our humanity.
The System Is Designed to Make You Numb
Empire teaches us that nothing we do matters. That we are powerless. That we should trust institutions over instincts, policies over people. That if we’re burned out, that’s our own fault for not being productive enough. Your burnout is not a failure. We are not meant to carry this much alone. And we are not meant to fix the empire as individuals. We’re meant to fight it together.
What Does Fighting Look Like?
It looks like mutual aid: neighbors organizing diaper drives, delivering groceries, creating emergency funds. Not as charity, but as solidarity. Not with strings attached, but with the belief that everyone deserves to eat, to rest, to live with dignity. Mutual aid says: your survival matters even if the system says otherwise.
It looks like community-centered care: therapists offering PWYC/sliding scale options, herbalists teaching free workshops, doulas supporting birthing people who are ignored by medical institutions. It’s supporting harm reduction, not punishment. It’s choosing to center care around relationships, trust, and consent.
It looks like refusing to professionalize compassion.
Fighting looks like decentering whiteness, wealth, and Western logic in how we understand healing and justice. It means honoring the wisdom in cultural traditions, in ancestral practices, in disabled and neurodivergent ways of being. It means we stop asking people to prove their pain in order to be believed.
It looks like saying “no” to systems that are killing us, and saying “yes” to each other.
It looks like care collectives that show up for people after crisis. It looks like practicing consent in all parts of our lives. It looks like holding space for grief without rushing toward productivity. It looks like teaching kids they don’t need to earn love.
Fighting looks like staying connected even when we disagree, because disconnection is how empire wins. It looks like resisting purity politics and making room for imperfection, repair, and growth.
It looks like artists making protest signs, musicians singing at vigils, organizers sending out spreadsheets and texts at midnight, someone showing up with meals after a funeral. These things matter.
It looks like knowing that survival is not the same as liberation, but it’s the ground we stand on to imagine what comes next.
This kind of fighting isn’t glamorous. It won’t get you medals or airtime. But it will build something the empire cannot destroy: belonging. A way of living rooted in care, reciprocity, and shared power.
The rebellion is not just against the empire out there. It’s against the internalized beliefs the empire has taught us: that we are too much, too sensitive, too angry, too idealistic. Fighting means remembering we were never meant to carry this alone.
About Hope
Hope is not a naive belief that things will magically improve. It is the disciplined, deliberate, stubborn commitment to imagining a world where everyone gets to belong. Where being human comes first, and harm is repaired, not denied, not ignored, not explained away.
Hope is also not passive.
It is not just a feeling. It is a practice, a muscle, a choice we make again and again, even when we’re tired, even when it feels like nothing changes. Especially then.
Hope is making room for joy without pretending everything’s okay. It is creating pockets of resistance through pleasure, softness, music, and connection. It is laughing in the middle of a disaster. Not because we’re in denial, but because we’re alive. Because we remember what we’re fighting for, not just what we’re fighting against.
In Star Wars, the Empire had more weapons, more soldiers, more propaganda. But it couldn’t erase memory. It couldn’t kill language. It couldn’t crush the spark of connection between people who believed in another way of being. Hope lived in quiet conversations, in smuggled messages, in holding the line just long enough for someone else to make it through.
Hope lives in the small, unglamorous acts: showing up, checking in, telling the truth when it’s risky, apologizing, and trying again. It lives in refusing to disappear, even when the world tells you to shrink.
You don’t have to be a senator or a general. You don’t have to have a title, a platform, or a perfect plan. You don’t need permission to care. You just have to stay human.
Rebellions are not built on certainty. They are built on courage.
They are built on the belief that even if the empire seems inevitable, we are too. Our resistance, our care, and our refusal to give up on each other.
Rebellions are built on hope.