There Is No Joy Without Resistance
by Kiri Anne Ryan Bereznai (She/They)
Berlin, Germany
Lately, I’ve been thinking about courage, faith, and that joy might actually look a lot more like suffering than safety.
In February 2025, I left my home and family in the US to live in Berlin, Germany. My wife is a German citizen, a child of refugees and immigrants. I will never forget one Saturday morning in 2023, in our home in West Michigan, waking up to one of the earliest Israeli atrocities in the current intensification of the Palestinian genocide, and yet another anti-trans bill passed in the US.
“We need to make a plan to leave in the next few years,” she said.
My wife studied political science at university, focused on the social developments leading up to genocides. She said it with such seriousness, with such an absence of cynicism or irony that I felt completely secure in simply replying, “Okay, I’ll be ready.”
Neither of us could have guessed how correct her assessment would become.
As we finally arrived in Germany, I suppose I did believe I was being whisked away to safety, to a comparative paradise full of affordable, healthy food, socialized health care, climate caregivers, educated citizens, public transportation, worker’s rights, and a quality of life that I could have never envisioned from inside the bubble of the United States’ profit-driven, corporate controlled society.
In some ways, it is that, but also, it’s surprisingly a lot of the same nonsense that I crossed an ocean to get away from. In my everyday life here in Germany, I still experience the most casual & socially accepted racism, transphobia, & xenophobia. The grip that Zionism has on the political imagination of the German government is mind-bendingly heartbreaking.
At a Pride parade in July, my wife was arrested because the police believed that her pink triangle hat - the same pink triangle that the Nazis used to mark homosexuals and transsexuals in concentration camps - was a red Hamas triangle. The stubborn, unexamined defense of Israeli atrocity in 2025 leads the German police to revisit its own state-led atrocity in 1943.
The social-political contract is this: that to live freely, you must be willing to look away while the lives of others are brutalized and taken. If you see or hear anything, you must say nothing, ask nothing. The price of any freedom, stability, or simple joy is that we are indifferent to the suffering of others. Anyone can see the horrors in our proximity, hear the cries of families torn apart by ICE, watch as SNAP recipients go hungry, as Palestinians are blown apart waiting for aid convoys. But in order to continue on living, we must be convinced that somehow they deserve it, or that it is cosmically correct, or that it has nothing at all to do with us. As soon as we give voice to our awareness of what we see, our joy is at risk.
Is there anyone more evil than the person who makes you hate the inclinations of your own humanity toward compassion, fairness, peace, freedom, & life? Is there any act more vile than to instill fear of doing the right things? “What are the right things,” you ask. “Not everyone agrees on “the right things.”
Take a moment to exist in your body.
Feel the unique ownership that you have over it, the happinesses that fill it and give it shape; your family, your work, your passions, your home, your city. Take a few deep breaths in, infused with all of that definition and character and freedom that belongs to you and defines you. Now, think of one reason why you deserve to have all of that snatched away, taken by force, burned to ash, scorned, and erased.
Any reason. Just one, why you, specifically, should suffer beatings, starvation, incarceration, enslavement, torture, rape, exile, being ripped from your children, ripped from your homeland, ripped from your livelihood, wrenched out of your peaceful existence & cast into a life of embodied and spiritual suffering.
Can you think of one? Can you think of one good reason that pain at the hands of other humans should define your human experience? Can you think of any scenario in which you would find yourself in that experience not gasping for intervention, not desperate for relief, for rescue, for a restoration of hope? Can you think of any length to which you would not go to preserve your safety, your dignity, your right to live and to exist? Can you think of any emotions other than rage and despair that you would feel if your small, simple, human life was the intentional target of the bombs, bills, blockades, and beliefs of billionaires?
Can you think of any question you would ask but, “Why me?”
And if so, then why them? Why Palestinians? Why trans people? Why Sudan? Why the Yemeni people? Why Ukraine? Why immigrants? Why will you aid, abet, and abide the bodily suffering of others that you would not agree to endure yourself? Is it that you are cruel?
Maybe you are. Maybe I am, too. But maybe we are also afraid. Maybe we are willing to withhold food from the child of another that we would gladly steal for our own because the police helicopters are literally circling our neighborhoods. Because the guns and the laws ARE pointed at you, daring you to break the silence, to speak, to resist.
Protection and preservation of our own is a powerful motivator, but they will always be a hollow comfort. We may live, but our home will be a mass grave, and our commute to work and to church and to class a sickening, morbid dance over bodies, a tour of atrocities that we co-sign with our votes and our taxes, with our complacency, our cooperation, our silence, and our failure to sacrifice our joy for justice. In this life, we are wronged, yes, but we are also wrong. There is no peaceful life for anyone while some suffer disproportionately. That is a haunted life. A cursed life. Fear asks, “How can I avoid my own suffering?”
Courage asks, “How can I alleviate the suffering of others?” Some will take up arms & fight. Some will create indelible photographs, reflections of our humanity and inhumanity alike. Some will perform songs, write books, give speeches. Some will transport food & medical supplies, house refugees, record stories. Some will give money, create jobs, gather & share data, expose the victimizers. Some will march, some will die, some will be killed. This is not a new fight, not a new enemy or a fresh threat. But we are a new force, a new wave of resistance that proclaims, “The integrity of my joy demands that I risk it, that I suffer with those who suffer, that I speak for those who will not be heard.”
I am a neurodivergent, immigrant trans woman married to a neurodivergent, immigrant trans woman, in exile from my home. I am choosing joy by making my folded hands into raised fists, my unceasing prayers into unceasing protest, my bowed head and bended knee into a battlecry:
“I exist, so I resist.”
Kiri Anne Ryan Bereznai
Kiri Anne Ryan Bereznai (she/they) is a writer, musician, and artist working at the intersections of faith and queerness. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, and Focus on the Family (but they were MAD mad), as well as being a frequent scapegoat in hit pieces by the Institute on Religion & Democracy. They are also the songwriter and frontwoman of The Rapid Onset, a melodic post-hardcore punk band creating personal and political protest music championing queer lives and liberation.