May we fight hard, may we live well, may we be free.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to marshal their energy and attention.
The US government is building concentration camps
Ways to fight back, whether the murder budget passes or not
The need for a counter-dream and a message from Angels in America
The federal government that promised to “drain the swamp” has built a concentration camp in the Everglades, and is working day and night to spend $171 billion dollars to build more prisons, transports and effectively a standing army of secret police to kidnap, imprison and disappear the people they’ve decided to dehumanize and demonize. A similar death machine killed relatives I have never met, and drove other beloved relatives into hiding, during the Nazi occupation of France. The majority of the US federal government have decided to ramp up their death machine. That is their greatest good, their rabid goal, the thing that has them drooling, the present and future they yearn for. They can’t wait, and in fact they are not waiting. They have not waited. You and I are living their dream.
We can fight to puncture that dream on many fronts:
Calling your own federal representatives and phone banking TODAY (there are many links and time frames in that thread)
Legislation that blocks the building of new prisons (here’s an example)
Undoing or blocking 287(g) agreements between ICE/DHS and local law enforcement (here’s a list and a toolkit)
Rapid response and community defense
People working in the construction industry can refuse these contracts. People who work in state and city government can slow down the permitting process. Many of you are already doing one or more of these things already. If you need my encouragement to add one to your list, or intensify your commitment to one, you have it. Remember to ask for love, support, slack, and care from the people around you as you escalate or sustain your fight. Thank you for what you have already done, and what you will do.
What I’m struggling with at this moment is the blank space where a counter-dream should be, one that will pop the miserific vision by burgeoning and straining it beyond its limits. A dream big enough to hold everyone. A dream that is not a lie based on other lies. I’m being truthful with you: I feel the need for it, but I can’t see it. I see traces of it here and there, and contribute to them myself, but a trace is small, and the miserific vision is huge. I want out of this sick dream; I want to live in the world. As my friend Christian Nagler once wrote in a prayer of protection against false police (this is real, he read it in my living room in 2004), “I want to live longer with people.” How to make that life, our lives together in the world, as big and compelling and powerful as the miserific vision? How to stimulate one another’s hunger for something that will not destroy? How to do this with one hand while also doing the part we know, the part in the previous paragraph, with the other?
I agree with Mariame Kaba that the fight for this world will be ongoing. I agree with Caroline Contillo that regrowing our connections will make life more livable, more powerful, more welcoming. I am pleased by the concreteness of Zohran Mamdani’s methods and proposals. The immodesty and excess of big dreams feel fake to me, dishonest. But I’m also thinking of the scene in Angels in America where human monster Roy Cohn is dying of AIDS in the hospital and Belize, who is nursing him, describes the afterlife to him.
BELIZE: Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths… Big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.
ROY: And Heaven?
BELIZE: That was Heaven, Roy.
I do not believe in “finally.” Final is for solutions, and the afterlife is for the dead. But I return to that scene, that vision, because it holds something to drool for, something beyond ugly and beautiful, something celebratory. Something like a deep fecund swamp teeming with the variety of life and the richness of death, like the land and water of the Everglades that the Miccosukee and Seminole Nations are working to defend. So let’s make our calls and sign up for our ICE watch shifts and feel the world as it is, with one hand, and with our other hand let’s feel our way into the swamp, its discomforts and risks and riches and silences. Let’s nourish a dream that we can get inside and multiply and emerge from, large and free. Let’s not wait.
PRACTICE:
If you can do so without hurting yourself, make a fist with your dominant hand. Clench your fist and bring up your bicep, like a little kid showing off their muscles. Feel whatever strength you have before you relax your hand and arm.
Now, with your non-dominant hand, make a free, sweeping gesture, as loose and wide as free as you can make without hurting yourself. Feel whatever freedom of motion you have before you return to stillness.
Finally, choose which hand you will follow today: your fighting strength, or your free and open vision. You can make a different choice tomorrow.
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I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.