These sinister lines of the national anthem haunted me in the lead-up to July 4th, as the neighborhood kids set off fireworks, the grocery store displays were drenched in red, white, and blue, and everywhere seemed to have a “Freedom Sale.” There is no freedom in this country if you so much as insult the rich, no shortage of bootlickers to waste their hot, leathery breath reminding you that this country is willing to imprison or kill you if you don’t serve the interests of the elite. I can’t take seriously the idea that this country has ever stood for anything other than genocide. Our flag is a tally of stolen indigenous lands illuminated by bombardment, our anthem an ode to war, and our taxes a bottomless pit of resources for the oppression of resistance to this status quo at home and abroad. Forgive me for not feeling a swell of patriotism: my country is a terrorist state.

This week, I watched a man and his wife walk out of the immigration court elevators after a positive asylum hearing into a lobby full of armed middle-aged white men in plain clothes. The men cornered the couple, told me I had no right to be there and that I could not record them (I did and could, it was a public building), and dragged the couple into an adjoining room, its twin glass doors covered in butcher’s paper. After a few minutes, they threw the sobbing woman out of the room without her husband. We went outside to the other court support volunteers, comforted her, and helped her figure out what to do next. She was an American1 citizen, and every person involved in the extrajudicial abduction of her husband was sporting our nation’s flag or emblem, carrying out orders that, contrary to liberal talking points, are exactly what the United States has stood for for the entirety of its existence. July 4th is a reminder that this country began when wealthy white landowners convinced working-class people to take up arms to transfer power to them from other wealthy white landowners.2 It is operating exactly as it was designed.

America has been an inspiration and a bulwark for fascism since its conception. I see nothing worth celebrating or saving in that. I can’t pretend that I believe a reformed America can or should exist. I do not want to donate $5 to flip your congressional seat and ensure a more palatable person funds ICE/the IDF/my rights as a trans person being stripped away. I do not want to call my Zionist senators and beg for them to suddenly develop a moral compass. I do not want to resolve the budget deficit at the expense of millions of people’s health care access. I do not want more police, more prisons, more killing machines manufactured and manned by traumatized 20-year-olds no matter what “national security threat” is being touted as the reason for it. I do not want platitudes about “a nation of immigrants” or “fighting tyranny since 1776” or “we the people” because I don’t need a patriotic reason to say white nationalism needs to be eliminated. I don’t want to hear about what rights the Constitution or the Court does or does not deem suitable for people to have at any given moment. I want the whole thing to crumble—the whole facade of the benevolent and free America—and I want to have a hand in bringing it down.

If you are also thinking of the people killed by American bombs and dreading the fireworks and fanfare, if it fills you with anger and grief, you aren’t alone. The effects of hundreds of years of oppression, an ongoing pandemic, multiple genocides, and a climate crisis are compounding on each other and we’re watching it be unquestioningly celebrated. It’s horrifying, and we have no guarantee that any of our efforts against our country’s insistence on violence and authoritarianism will pay off. Their terrorism has been going on for centuries—I have only been alive for a little over two decades of it and it’s still difficult to take in the sheer magnitude of destruction that this country has done in just my lifetime. Sometimes, all I can do is feel the total despair for a while before figuring out what the hell I’m going to do next.

Fascists have successfully created conditions that make us doubt whether the preservation of our own lives is worthwhile if it means watching the wellbeing of our planet, our loved ones, and living beings around the world being destroyed at breakneck speed. The point is to overwhelm us, to make us frightened and reckless, all while distorting our perception of reality and ability to think critically through the proliferation of misinformation and resource-guzzling AI slop. I hear people say on a regular basis that they would be willing to or expect to die for liberation. It makes sense—death is the currency of power in this nation. However, as someone who has experienced suicidal ideation for the majority of my life, I’ve only recently decided I don’t want to die for a cause, even a noble one. I want to live. It is only in life that I get the power to participate in imagining a world beyond the horror show of America and Western imperialism that says death is the only way to something else. If we are lucky, what we are witnessing now is the death rattle of global capitalism: our country throwing its final tantrum in the hope that it will miraculously make infinite growth, conquest, and power possible. Otherwise, we are on a very long road through climate disaster, violence, and suffering on a scale far worse than we can imagine. Loyalty to this country is loyalty to death. My goal in this political moment is to increase the survival odds of myself and those around me who are under threat, to reduce suffering wherever possible, and to do my utmost to imagine and bring about a life beyond this. I believe our lives are worth preserving and our country is not.

Part of living in the United States is constantly running the calculations of how much you can afford to fight fascism while also trying to stay alive and out of prison under it.3 Knowing that the choice is between:

• letting the water slowly boil you in the hopes that you can put out the flames eventually, or

• trying to stop the fire by throwing yourself upon it.

Knowing that the choice itself is disappearing as the water heats up. This country’s most powerful people have been stockpiling weaponry, propagandizing the public, and devising ways to wait out periods of political unrest for centuries, and have intentionally kept the majority of us one emergency away from material ruin so that we feel our options are between our lives and our principles, because often they are. I take calculated risks but stop short of things that seem like they are highly likely to end in serious injury, death, or imprisonment because those in power in this country actively usher in new forms of violence daily and will not stop whether I live or die, if I am free or not. This really became apparent to me after Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation—the callousness and general apathy with which his act of protest was received reified the lack of conscience and empathy on which our country’s violence relies. The level of risk I’m willing to take might change once I’ve had a child and built a support system that could take care of them in my absence, but for now I really believe my purpose is to care for the people around me, including those who are taking those bigger risks, as we try to figure out what the hell else to do.

How do you preserve your life while trying to bring down the system you live under? I think it starts with getting very fucking clear on what you will or will not do to survive. American industry relies on constraining our choices and making us feel like we have to take actions that don’t align with our values to have a good life—as the security guard working at the court on Wednesday said to me when I asked why he was defending the abductors, “Do you see what’s happening in the world right now? If we don’t comply, we end up on Trump’s B-list.” The reality is that fascists need us to do their dirty work, and they need us to feel like that’s our only option. They need us to grind to get on the A-list instead of spending our time taking care of each other and dreaming up new worlds. My hard lines look like this: I will never work for a “security” force in any capacity, nor will I work for companies on the BDS list, fossil fuel companies, land developers, or AI companies of any nature. I also won’t stay in any job that tries to limit my civil rights on or off the clock. If that puts me on “Trump’s B-list,” what-fucking-ever.

Most, if not all, paid work has some level of connection to fascistic powers, so I do my best to work for companies that have as minimal a connection to those powers as possible. I left working in higher education because I was at a state university that supported the genocide of Palestinians and punished anyone who spoke up against that. I couldn’t stomach my salary being pulled from genocide and ecocide profiteering and my labor being used to create additional revenue streams for the university by teaching hundreds of tuition-paying students for them over the course of my PhD. It didn’t sit right with me that I was setting the example for my students that it’s fine to silence yourself and be complicit with genocide for a paycheck. The non-profit education company I currently work for openly discloses that it receives money from a local weapons manufacturer and a fossil fuel supplier to the tune of about a quarter-million dollars per year (around an eighth of their total yearly operating budget). While I don’t know what their investment strategy looks like, they hold a relatively small quasi-endowment (i.e., funds invested to generate revenue) totaling less than $3 million (for reference, my undergraduate university had an endowment of over $300 million and my graduate university’s was over $1 billion), so comparatively, the amount of money that could be making its way back to those industries is orders of magnitudes smaller than the last two places I have worked. At this job, I am able to speak and teach openly and express opposition to the expansion of the fossil fuel and military industries without fear of retaliation or punishment, something I feel is pivotal to responsible biology education. My students are not a major revenue source for the organization (beyond an enrollment fee of $150 or less, the program costs families nothing). I am willing to teach for this company because they are educating students on how to develop their own value systems, including value systems that might upset their funders, knowing that this may very well impact their bottom line. Emory does a similar calculus in deciding how to navigate work and we check in with each other regularly about how to deal with situations that feel morally compromising, like being encouraged or required to use AI or having to talk to students about fossil fuels after a visit from a company representative.

There is no job on Earth that will pay you to bring down global capitalism, and honestly, it’s doing a fine job of that itself. Capitalism is an unsustainable system that is eating itself as we speak. Emory told me about David Suzuki’s claim that we’ve lost the chance to prevent climate change because capital still has precedence over biological realities.4 His advice:

“For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together… Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it.”

The American government is not only unable to respond to these emergencies, it is actively planning to use natural disasters as a means of mass murder through a combination of planning to eliminate FEMA,5 preventing NOAA and other scientific organizations from using DoD satellite data to forecast hurricanes and other disasters,6 and supporting the construction of a concentration camp in the Everglades only capable of withstanding Category 2 winds.7 This isn’t a new tactic, it’s just a more overt escalation of existing environmental injustice that will require forceful opposite escalation at the local level to combat. We will have to be literally anti-American to survive a post-climate change epoch because the government is totally fine with us dying in service of global capitalism. And even if global capitalism were to end tomorrow, there would still be mass casualties because things have progressed past the point of no return. This is the cruel dialectic our nation has been enforcing since it started.

What I’m trying to say is that every year our country continues to exist, we get further from a future that is just, pleasurable, and livable, and closer to total destruction. That’s what I’m sitting with this week, what I thought about last night as the fireworks on our street continued into the early hours of morning. I’m trying to let myself accept what I’ve thought for a long time—that this country is beyond saving, that I never wanted it to be saved in the first place, that I want to dedicate the rest of my life to helping do damage control for the Earth and the people around me because I want whatever replaces the United States to still be a living world with humans in it. My friend M, an anti-war activist of 40+ years, reminded me the day the US officially joined Israel’s attack on Iran, “We don’t fight fascists because we will win. We fight fascists because they are fascists.” I hope that will be enough.