From Columbia Missourian
November 14, 2025
by Noah Siela
Suze showed up with a mop bucket and the kind of balance that comes from living without a safety net. One hand on the handle, the other holding sprays and rags, she climbed my icy back steps like someone who had solved harder problems than gravity. Inside, she moved like a person clocking into a world that had already decided what she was worth.
For a few months last winter, she cleaned the house back into something we could live in. My wife and I both worked too much. Three adopted kids, bills stacked, the usual treadmill. I told myself we were buying time, but it never felt right.
One afternoon, as she was heading out, she noticed the bumper sticker on my car. Direct Action Gets the Goods.
“That yours?” she asked, hand on the knob, mop bucket beside her.
It was. That was how the conversation started.
Suze was an anarchist. Not the cartoon kind, not chaos or smoke bombs. A self-taught anarchist, which felt purer than discovering Chomsky in a dorm room and quoting him like scripture. She talked about anarchy as a way of living in defiance of invisible hierarchies: the boss, the landlord, the gatekeeper, the bureaucrat. She said it was about unlearning obedience before obedience unlearned you.
It would have been easier if she had been naïve or self-serious, but she wasn’t. Suze was sharp, funny, grounded in the real. Her politics were not a hobby. They were a form of survival.
And what still needles me is how much I agreed with her. I believed the system should be dismantled, that reform was just delay. But I had also spent my life inside it, helping it run, convincing myself that incrementalism was sanity.
Nine months into this administration, it already feels like we have forgotten what the last one was supposed to teach us. The people who promised to steady the ship are congratulating themselves for not capsizing, as if simply not being monstrous counts as moral progress. The counter to extremism has hardened into a kind of managerial calm that confuses competence with change. And the rest of us, people like me, call this progress because we are too tired to call it what it is — survival disguised as virtue.
Suze had no patience for any of that. She said we confused order for peace. She said the country kept mistaking quiet for justice. She said power depends on our willingness to believe that nothing can change.
I backed the politicians who tried to push the standard ones out of their stupor. I rooted for them, donated, felt righteous for a week, and then watched them get crushed. They were choked off financially, mocked or turned into cautionary tales. And what did I do then? I sighed, rationalized, and went to vote for the husk MSNBC had been selling since they first came to Iowa with cameras and a pork chop on a stick. The alternative was fascism or fascism-lite, and voting for the husk felt responsible.
But that kind of responsibility was what built the runway for fascism in the first place. People like me kept choosing the safe option until safety itself became hollow enough for something cruel to step through and call itself renewal.
Nine months in, I cannot tell if anything is being fixed or if we are just learning to live with the noise again. The housing market is still a casino. Schools are collapsing under fake wars about books. The cost of staying middle class feels like a lifetime subscription to exhaustion. The movement that was supposed to meet the moment seems mostly concerned with civility, as if politeness were a political plan.
Suze didn’t care about civility. She was too busy surviving to need permission. She cleaned houses for people who had the luxury of fatigue. She never softened her anger into something manageable. She still believed in tearing things down. She believed in breaking what breaks you. And every time she left our house, I watched her walk down the steps and thought, there goes someone who has not yet surrendered to the lie of balance, who refuses to call exhaustion wisdom.
That bumper sticker we talked about is not on a rusted-out van. It is on a newer Subaru, the official vehicle of liberal habitual choices, which makes me the cliché, the guy who talks about wrecking systems while driving a symbol of keeping them comfortably intact.
The bitter joke is that the whole arrangement, two adults working too much, three kids, me buying time from someone who had none to sell, was never about luxury. It was about exhaustion pretending to be stability.
A few months of gleaming counters. Suze paid. And me sitting here now, realizing that nine months into this government, the woman with the mop is the only one still telling the truth.
Noah Siela was raised on rural gravel roads, shaped by a Midwest college town and an East Coast city and is interested in the people who make those places unique. He is director of Columbia Public Schools’ Adult Education and Literacy Program. He writes a monthly column for the Missourian.
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