Friday essay: we’re all ‘political’ now – but can that lead to real change?

It was the summer of 2024 in Carindale, Queensland. I had gone to a salon for lashes and somehow found myself inside a political monologue. The gen Z eyelash artist was white, university educated, hit hard by COVID, barely getting by. She was also fiercely anti-vaccine – and devoted to Donald Trump with the confidence of someone who had found, at last, a story that made the chaos cohere. I mostly listened. Her world had too many moving parts: lockdowns, debt, work that did not pay enough,…