At a time when this planet makes its wounds more evident and unavoidable, I’m constantly returning to this question of evolution. The planet, environments, and ecosystems that sustain life are evolving for the worse, because humans and the systems, structures, and institutions we maintain have been the worst for the planet, environments, and ecosystems.

I’m not just talking about the broader climatic chaos, but the quotidian rhythm of this world makes these lamentable evolutions inescapable. I’ve noticed the Michigan peaches and cherries had shorter seasons at the farmers market this year because of this spring’s unusual cycle of unfreezing and then freezing again. I walked past some Taylor Farms shredded lettuce at the grocery store, two days after reading that the company, suspected of causing last month’s national cyclospora outbreak, had negotiated with the Trump Administration to stop a national recall. Last month, smoke from the Canadian wildfires killed six of my chickens who otherwise would be alive and fine.

I’ve been thinking about how my children have learned to breathe air laden with smoke and pollution. We have adapted to microplastic particles constantly bombarding our interiors, biological threats that may have hurt our ancestors more immediately, who were better adapted to breathing the lead and mercury they regularly inhaled. Evolution is the nature of all life. I’m not talking about evolution in the weird eugenic way. The version of evolution I want to foreground is ontological. Over the past few weeks, I’ve returned to the powerful refrain “God is change” from Octavia Butler’s future-seeing Parable series. I think god, whoever or whatever one calls it, is the explanation we give to explain the unexplained, because our humanity will not accept the burden of questions that have no answers, but I do deeply believe that change is the reason for our existence, and in that way I guess it can be a form of god.

We are constantly changing -- evolving, but most people don’t allow themselves the time to notice the evolutions they are always undergoing. Of course, the systems that hold us back and destroy our communities and the world around us operate precisely to deny us the freedom of self-reflection and consideration. I imagine the raccoons, groundhog, possum, and chickens around my yard are more keenly aware of their constant evolutions than I will ever be.

Every time we accept the lie that “AI is an inevitable future,” every time we fall into the mindsets and timetable of capitalist extraction, every time we restrict ourselves with the falsehoods of impossibility, we give in to a framework of evolution that will continue to destroy everything around it. If we don’t notice the evolutions we are constantly undertaking, we deprive ourselves of the ability to discern, the freedom to pick and choose, the evolutions we truly want to follow through with. We become fodder for the machinations of the people whose theories of evolution seek to destroy us.

In the preface of my forthcoming book, “Elemental Blackness: Black Liberation and the Natural World,” I briefly write about an interview I saw of Peter Thiel, big bad Palantir boss, where he lauded the tenants of transhumanism, while speaking about his personal desire to live forever, the possibility of him being the “anti-Christ” and questioning whether or not any other human beings have an inherent right to live. The architects of the AI bubble, the criminal associates of Jeffrey Epstein, and the politicians who are bedded and paid by them are part of this minority faction whose rotten ideals of evolution are intended to destroy as much human and non-human life as possible. They are the direct products and ideological (and likely genealogical) descendants of a system held together by death, destruction, and violence, and the founding fathers who sacrificed the better parts of their humanity to bring that system into existence. Their violent and destructive path of evolution is unfolding before our eyes, and it’s more important than ever that we gift ourselves the time to truly imagine the alternative path of evolution we want to give ourselves to creating. I’m not an existentialist. I hate existentialism actually. I don’t believe we exist without purpose, but I do greatly value the weight and role of free will in the series of decisions and responsibilities we commit our lives to. Every day, we are evolving. Every day, we make a series of choices that determine the path of evolution we give ourselves to.

I try to stop myself from romanticizing the past, because truth be told, life was hard back in the day. My ancestors lived through things I know would break my soft behind. I’m also always working against limiting the future through the confines of the present. And truthfully, I’m not nearly arrogant enough to believe I, or any other singular person, could know what the outcomes of the evolution I want to choose will be. But I know I will do what I can to reject the evolutions these vile and unjust systems, and the vile and unjust people at the top of them, want to push on us.

I reject the evolution of constant distraction. I stopped using Instagram a month ago. I pop on occasionally when I have to post something for my job or want to check a recipe I saved previously, but other than that, I’m offline. I must say I’ve never felt better. There is such a valuable peace of mind in not allowing myself to be constantly bombarded with “content.” I’ve curated a Twitter feed that is only fan art of my favorite anime characters, and it feels great. The time I would otherwise spend in the manufactured dopamine feedback cycles of algorithms profiting people I despise is now spent sitting in my messy backyard contemplating what it means to be human and imagining what I truly want for myself and the world.

There is never only one fork on the road. There are many paths, each one leading inevitably to another fork of decision. As a collective, we are tumbling down a path of decision, but I want us to claim our agency in that. Which evolutions will we deny? Which evolutions are worth fighting to ensure? Will we evolve towards fascist domination propelled by fear and violence? Will we evolve towards a painful silent compliance that maintains the status quo holding these injustices in place? Will we evolve towards the actualization of the freedom we believe we desire and deserve?

Unchanged people cannot change a system that refuses change by violently crushing it. The key to our collective liberation is individual transformation, which blooms into collective evolution. Think of your personal relationships to others, yourself, the other living things, and the world around you as a microcosm of broader revolution. Think of your stepping up to your unfinished healing and unresolved trauma as the first step of your resistance, and the pathway towards a collective revolution that will dismantle the chains that keep us from our collective freedom. Think of giving yourself the time and gift of sitting with your humanity and your unending evolution as the very essence of what makes you human, and do everything you can to make the space to experience your sacredness without any concern for productivity or time.

We cannot forge the path towards a better future without first fundamentally changing the very foundations of how we understand ourselves, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to the planet we depend on for life. I believe we’re all in an abusive relationship with this system. People often ask someone who has finally claimed the courage to free themselves from an abusive spouse why they stayed so long. I’ve never had that experience, so I’m not going to overstep for the sake of this analogy, but I think all of you understand how that question might be incredibly complex for someone who has. So if we know capitalism is a profoundly violent, abusive, and extractive force in our lives, that dictates our overall wellbeing, while always depriving us of our wellbeing, and I ask us why we all stay in this cycle knowing what we know, what is your answer?

We can’t look at systems, structures, or institutions the same way we look at individual people. We can’t say something like a person born to a bad home could never be a good person, because I believe fundamentally all people can change if they want to. But institutions are not people. They don’t have soul or spirit to compel them to do better. They are a reflection of the collective that creates and maintains them, but, unlike people with spirits and hearts, institutions can never transcend or grow past the violence they are born of or from.

When we evolve, we will naturally grow out of these systems. They will become obsolete once enough of us have taken on the courage to no longer fall in line with them. I’ve written a lot about how all of these systems, more than any one man’s money, power, or prominence, depend on our mutual and collective buy-in. Even if we despise them, we still buy into them, and that in and of itself legitimizes and maintains them. Capitalism is a prime example of this. We all hate capitalism, but until enough of us are directly, every day doing all we can to subvert capitalism, we will all continue to exist as its victims. We must actively reject the evolutions that capitalism works to push us into, while also plotting our own alternative evolutions.

I don’t believe a tax strike could solve all of our problems, like the larger, more fundamental ideological flaws that create this system, but I do believe a coordinated collective action like that could end wars and stop military spending. I think it could be leveraged to push for broader investments in social infrastructure like education and healthcare. I think that it could disable capitalism enough for short-term interventions that make life a little more bearable in the moment. But it won’t work with 10 people or even 10,000 people. There would have to be enough of us to break past the barrier of fear that holds us back from evolving the world around us. I don’t even think it could work with 1 million people, but it could work with 20 or 30 million people. And I honestly believe there are at least 30 million people in the US right now who don’t want the tax money that they have to sacrifice their time and energy to work for being sent to kill children in the Middle East. I know there are 30 million people, if not more, in this country right now who would like a functioning public health option for themselves and their loved ones. What I don’t know is that there are 30 million people who are willing to take the risk of evolving into the courage it takes and demands to sustain a true commitment to seeing their desires come to fruition. What I do know is that the current US prison system cannot hold 30 million people when there are already nearly 2 million incarcerated, and the vast majority of local, state, and federal prisons are already overcrowded and understaffed. What I do know is that something like this is absolutely possible if enough people unify around a commitment to its highest outcome, and that is an evolution worth pursuing.

I’m teaching the art of the personal essay to a group of high school students for the month. And last week, I had them do an activity where they passed around a bowl of dirt and sand, and poured water over it silently in a circle. The activity is rooted in the ancestral African practice of pouring libation. For this purpose, however, the students watered their dreams. Awkward stares and timid giggles filled the room, followed by an encompassing silence. It was weird and unusual for these kids to have the opportunity to reflect on not just what they wanted, but why they wanted the things they wanted in a way that was completely disconnected from productivity. But time and time again when I return to the question of humanity, I am brought to the small moments, the daily evolutions that make us whole. The way a child left with nothing to do hums to themselves while rearranging sticks. The way we lie still when we don’t feel well. The everyday ways we look at what this violent system demands of us, and refuse it. The most important part of our humanity and one of the two things I truly believe separates us from other living species is the sacredness of reflection, a privilege, an inherent need that is, as I see it, more threatened and fleeting than ever has been in our millennia-long existence.

Abolition is not just a political idea but rather a process of transformation that is as cosmological, philosophical, spiritual, and ontological as it is political, cultural, and economic. These transformations are both individual and collective, and they occur simultaneously. If we shifted our perspectives to recognize crime, harm, and violence as evidence first and foremost of a system’s failings, to realize the collective responsibility we have to one another’s wellbeing and to create systems that support our wellbeing, healing, and care, what re-envisioning could we do? What new systems could we build? What “constellation of alternative strategies and institutions,” as Davis describes it, might be possible? How can we redefine order and safety beyond the boundaries and limitations of fear, an epistemology that diametrically opposes freedom?

Abolition is a comprehensive framework that reconceptualizes notions of communal safety, accountability, healing, and well-being through reconceptualizing the very foundations of who we are and how we relate to one another. Indigenous cosmologies and practices can help guide our processes of re-envisioning a future without prisons and policing in theory and in practice. To abolish prisons would mean shifting the carceral paradigms, frameworks and ideologies that operate in the world around us, and take root within us and our individual actions. It means reflecting on the ways we, as individuals and communities, perpetuate punishment and exclusion in our daily interactions and redefining what safety and security mean to us beyond the parameters of systems steeped in violence. To abolish police would mean shifting our culture and our society in a way that prioritizes addressing the root causes of violence, rather than waiting until violence has occurred to punish it. It would mean funding programs and structures that support our collective well-being so that violence no longer happens in the same ways. There can be no abolition without land sovereignty. Abolition is not possible without racial, economic, gender or environmental justice. To begin the process of building anew, abolition requires established structures of communal care, support, mutual aid and holistic approaches to healing. Indigenous cosmologies and practices can help guide our processes of reenvisioning a future without prisons and policing in theory and in practice.

In her book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis writes, “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the only human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.” In the same way that prisons do not disappear the problems they perpetuate, police may arrest people, but they do not stop crime. The system of policing works in tandem with the structures of incarceration to disappear people, but neither the police nor prisons disrupt the cycles of violence and trauma that create these issues in the first place.

A 2022 report by Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California found that despite annual budgetary increases, police departments don’t actually solve the majority of violent crimes. The data showed that police often spend the majority of their time “conducting racially biased stops and searches of minority drivers, often without reasonable suspicion, rather than ‘fighting crime.’” In The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces the origins of modern policing as a strategy to criminalize newly emancipated Black people. And today, the U.S. carceral system continues to function primarily as a way to criminalize people at the intersections of marginalized identities of race, class, and gender.

Frameworks of abolition show us how prisons and police don’t actually solve, or even prevent, our most pressing issues. When we shift our understanding to reflect this, we see how obsolete prisons and policing already are. But creating a future without prisons and policing requires a complete reconceptualization of ourselves, our relationships to one another, our individual complicity in upholding violent systems, and our collective responsibility to build systems that promote the healing and well-being of our communities. Returning to the wisdoms and practices of our ancestors can hold powerful clues to our own process of reconceptualizing and re-envisioning society.

Our ideas for more just, loving and liberated societies are often discredited to seem impossible, unfeasible and unrealistic. We are called naive for believing we deserve better. The movement to abolish carceral logics is often discredited as an unfeasible, utopian notion that is not possible in the context of human “nature.” We live in a violent society built from the violence of settler colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy. The violence of this system and its origins make the violence of police and prisons seem necessary. But the abolition of police and prisons is not only a future possibility, it is a lineage of ancestral practice and a history of worlds that have already existed. Our most imaginative goals are not only possible, feasible and realistic. Many of them existed in practice in worlds predating colonization and slavery. In the same way that so many of my realities were the wildest dreams of my ancestors who were enslaved, many of my ancestors who predated slavery and colonization experienced my wildest dreams as their realities. I used to imagine a future without prisons or police as a sort of Afrofuturist fiction, until I came across the book that would show me not only how realistic and possible this sort of world was, but that it had, in fact, existed before.

***

Ecologies of Fear

I’ve always wondered how my ancestors responded to the arrival of the White Man.

How had they received this other?

The strangers who would go on to make them others in strange lands

with strange names and funny words and odd practices and aspirations.

Had they willingly opened their hands to this stranger with strange face paint and strange clothes and strange ambitions? Did they meet this strangeness where it was with open expressions and kindness? Was there skepticism crouched between gestures of welcome and inquiry

a wave, a head nod, a furrowed brow, or pursed lips?

How did they greet strangeness?

And was there any fear?

Were they afraid before they knew what they had to be afraid of?

When I say, “The White Man,” I don’t mean just white men, but instead, the archetype of imperial ambition, this longing for possession and conquest and control that cast itself across European civilization as shadows of a sort of violence and domination that would become characteristic of the western mindset. In that longing for possession lives an unrelenting desire for “order,” “categorization,” “lawfulness.” The idea that one must flatten, compartmentalize, or fracture something to wrap their minds around it. There is this impulse to control, to dominate and garner this control through fear and violence rather than reverence or mutual respect.

Acting on behalf of nations, institutions, and ideals that sought to conquer through fracture, these men were stripped of their own humanity in their quests to strip others of theirs. When colonizers encountered those whom they would brand as savages, as others, as resources to control -- they, themselves, became others, acting as savages. There was no order or lawfulness to their means of establishing what they believed was law and order and providence, divine.

There was no mutual respect, no human kinship, no empathy or desire to understand. There was only violence, intimidation, and deception.

Anyone, regardless of identity, can exhibit this impulse -- to control and dominate, to possess and confine -- to fracture. This inclination is the bedrock of the structures and institutions of the world as we understand it today. It is etched across the surface of every aspect of this society. And behind the facade of orderliness and discipline, lives an imperative to create and maintain fear -- the fear which these systems of violence and dispossession stand on.

I think of the Native Americans who helped the early colonists survive only to be passed diseased blankets, to be dispossessed on their own ancestral lands , rounded up like cattle and placed on reservations to be reschooled under the guise of advancement.

Why had they not just let those others die?

If they knew then what they know now, would they have chosen differently?

I’ve often wondered how people indigenous to Africa or the Americas had fallen into the traps of conquest and conquer that would strangle them and their descendants for centuries to come?

Why had they opened their doors to the decimation and destruction that would follow these first encounters?

How had they greeted these strangers?

How did they imagine these visitations would end?

Why hadn’t war or domination been their first strategy?

Was it weapons or intimidation that enticed them into listening to the promises or offers of these strangers from strange lands with strange values and ideas? Was it deception or false promises?

I’ll never be a fly on the wall. I’ll never witness these moments. I’ll never see inside the minds’ eyes of these ancestors, hold court or audience with them to ponder the why and how and what of it all.

But in these solemn contemplations of how the world came to be as it has come to be, I am reminded by disembodied whispers,

“We do not come from ecologies of fear.”

This is not our nature.

This is learned behavior.

We have, over time and centuries and traumas, been conditioned to accept, embrace, and believe in these systems steeped in fear and violence. We have learned to carry this fear and violence forward and bleed into others as it has been bled into us.

But this is not what we come from, or where or who.

I won’t spend too much time speculating on the legend of these ancestors -- how they lived, what they believed or felt -- but I can linger here … in this query of those first encounters and the one wisdom I have gleaned: that all those generations ago, when we were free, thus we were not afraid.

We do not come from ecologies of fear.

We do not come from closed doors suspecting strangers.

We do not come from jumping first to our defenses.

We do not come from distrust.

We do not come from refusing to listen or hear.

We are born trusting everything around us. It is, perhaps, our most human nature, to open, to be sometimes too open for our own good. It is our nature to yearn for embrace and the reciprocity of love. We are born trusting, or at least wanting to be able to trust. We are born believing in the best intentions and the most fruitful outcomes. We are only seeking love.

So, why, then, would we not embrace a stranger?

Why would we not welcome, or at least entertain, the unknown?

Why would we see “strangeness” as anything other than newness?

Why would we fear what we did not know if we never feared what we came from?

Why would we not invite each new encounter as an opportunity, an opening rather than a trap?

What I do know is that many of these ancestors existed beyond the constructs and limitations that have shackled my imagination. Many of them existed beyond the purviews of carceral ideologies. They lived without ever knowing or encountering any such thing as police officers, prisons, or jails, and they had their own unique concepts and frameworks of justice, safety, and security.

I know these ancestors existed in lineages predating the fear and longing we would come to know of the world as it exists today. They existed with a sort of freedom I have never known, and I come from a constellation of cosmological and ontological understandings that centered every individual’s wellbeing as a collective responsibility, and greeted everyone with empathy, respect and affirmation. I come from people who were not taught to fear what they did not know. I come from abolitionist constellations.

***

The modern carceral system is a continuation of the sort of violence, fear and dispossession that has warped the western mindset and societal values.

In African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo: Tying the Spiritual Knot, Principles of Life and Living, Kimwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau explores writes about many of the abolitionist ideas I once saw as an elusive future horizon as his lived in an indigenous African community. Frameworks and ideas that I now consider abolitionist were integral to these indigenous cosmologies, pre-colonial societies, and the ways people understood themselves and their communities. Within the belief systems of the Bântu-Kôngo, “crime” was not considered an individual act but a symptom of a failing system and a product of the collective social, cultural, economic, and environmental shortcomings of a society and its values. Fu-Kiau describes his earliest understanding of his community’s indigenous cosmologies and the ways they shaped his daily reality: “I grew up in a village of at least 1,000 inhabitants…There was not a single policeman, the jail was unknown, no secret agent, i.e. a people’s watchdog. It did not have a bureau of investigation, no sentry to watch on people’s goods…Everybody felt responsible for everyone else in the community and its neighborhood. When a community member suffered, it was the community as a whole who suffered.”

These indigenous perspectives viewed violence or harm as the consequence of larger issues and “crimes” as the product of deeply flawed and inadequate “societies and systems.” They were able to exist without the presence of prisons or policing by integrating systems of collective care into their communities, which addressed the root cause of any potential transgressions. Our current carceral system places the impetus for crime on the individual. The indigenous, ancestral cosmologies of the Bântu-Kôngo accepted collective responsibility for crimes committed as evidence of a failure in how their society cared for and affirmed the wellbeing of the individuals who committed the crimes. These indigenous perspectives position “crime” as a response to and result of systemic inequity, structural violence and ideological frameworks of exploitation and dispossession. And Fu-Kiau describes “crime,” from the perspective of the Bântu-Kôngo, as something that “is possible to eradicate [it] from human society.”

Contrast that with our current carceral system, which places the impetus for crime on the individual. The indigenous, ancestral cosmologies of the Bântu-Kôngo embraced a framework of collective responsibility, and viewed potential crimes as evidence of a failure in how their society cared for and affirmed the well-being of the individuals who committed the crimes. Fu-Kiau juxtaposes these precolonial cosmologies with the implementation of Western systems of law and punishment across Africa. He critiques the Eurocentric policy shifts of larger cities in the region, but notes that in many rural communities, like the one he grew up in, precolonial concepts and abolitionist principles were still visible practices throughout the 20th century.

Bantu cosmologies regarded private land ownership and excessive wealth at “[a] level of accumulation [that] cannot come without exploitation” as the most serious crime. To the Bântu-Kôngo, “land was inalienable” and the property of the community to be used “in service of all community members.” Because land was considered a collective asset and not the property of any one individual, the private ownership and sale of land was forbidden. It was the community’s responsibility to support the economic, social, mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being of all community members, to engender a sense of belonging and being that opposed the sort of systemic violence and exploitation which creates crime in the first place. By doing this, cycles of harm could be avoided.

Shifting the paradigm from western concepts of “crime” as an individual act, which emerged directly from the violence of colonization and slavery, to more ancestral understandings of transgression as a symptom of a society’s collective shortcomings repositions the abolition of prisons and policing as a tangible possibility in the future we will build together. An abolitionist future is not a utopia where issues or conflicts never arise. It is a paradigm where communities come together to address any harm that has occurred from the root cause to ensure that it does not happen again.

In the Indigenous practices of the Ogu (or Egun) people of Benin, Togo and Nigeria, the Zangbeto was a spiritual force that took up the task of protecting individuals and communities. Within this spiritual framework, there was no need for formalized prisons or police. In precolonial social systems, the Zangbeto functioned as a spiritual force of protection, community accountability, and mutual aid. Despite the expansion of westernized carceral systems, the Zangbeto still maintains a cultural presence in many of the region’s rural communities today. Of course, the reliance on a sort of spiritual safety team depends on shared practices, and we live in a diverse tapestry of spiritual ideas and perspectives. I’m not advocating for adopting such practices, but the legacy of the Zangbeto is another example of the ways Indigenous cosmologies and societies reenvisioned community, safety, and harm-reduction from a perspective that supported the collective well-being and integrative care necessary to prevent harm instead of focusing on carceral logics of punishment which encourage violence.

Shifting Culture Towards Abolition

We should blame the patriarchy for sexual assault as much as any individual. We should blame structures of economic oppression and exploitation for any theft as much as any individual. We should blame a culture that lauds guns and promotes images of violence in the media while ignoring the mental health of its citizens for any mass shooting as much as any individual. The crimes we fear the most are direct consequences of a society that perpetuates violent ideologies and hierarchies. This system and the ideals and culture it perpetuates are complicit in all the crimes it condemns.

We make systems like prisons and policing obsolete by making the conditions of the violence those systems uphold and perpetuate unimaginable. These Indigenous cosmologies didn’t rely on prisons as a punitive reaction to harm or the violence of policing to induce a logic of fear. Instead, they emphasized building societal structures that supported the well-being of individuals so that there was no need or desire to perpetuate harm on others or to replicate harm perpetuated on oneself. The notion that it is merely human nature to needlessly kill, to assault or violate, to engage in violence and destruction is false. I think of my children, and any child I’ve ever known -- regardless of their upbringing or the parents’ failings, children are not born wanting to hurt or harm anything. This is not our nature. This is learned behavior.

Reenvisioning and co-creating a society where individuals had the support to not replicate harm and trauma was a collective responsibility and spiritual imperative. In our present context, there’s an immensity of trauma and harm to heal from in this process of eradicating violence from our society. Abolition is not just a political idea; it requires a process of cosmological transformation that is both individual and collective. If we shifted our perspectives to recognize crime, harm and violence as evidence of a system’s failings, and created systems that support our well-being, healing and care, what reenvisioning could we do? What new systems could we build? What “constellation of alternative strategies and institutions might be possible? What a dream it would be to exist in a world where violence is eradicated.

Many of our ancestors have already lived versions of our liberated futures. When we remember this, we understand no matter how far away they may seem now, our present dreams are inherited wisdoms. It becomes that much easier to imagine a future without prisons or police once we realize the pasts that have already existed. Abolition requires dismantling systems of oppression in their entirety. It also requires a community that is willing to address harm at its root causes, not merely penalize it after it happens. Abolition depends on a collective sense of accountability and responsibility. Abolition pushes us to transform our relationships to one another and return the Kimuntu, “the state of being human.” From the perspective of Bântu-Kôngo cosmologies, a society without prisons and policing is not an impossibly utopian future dream, it is a tangible preexisting reality and ancestral wisdom which has been practiced for centuries.

The older I’ve gotten, the more intentional I’ve become about my use of language. English is a tricky bitch. In college, I realized that “to denigrate” literally means to blacken, and I struck the term from my vocabulary. I began consciously referring to people in prison as incarcerated people, so not to fall into the trap of further stripping them of their humanity, as terms like “prisoners” or “felons” function to do. I stopped using the word “slave,” and instead referred to my ancestors as enslaved Africans or enslaved Black people. I absolutely cannot stand it when someone uses the term “ethnic cleansing” -- a passive phrase created by propagandists as a euphemism to conceal the violence of genocide.

As an avid lifelong student of a myriad of alternative spiritual practices — subjects that I suppose would fall under the category of woo woo — I hold the words we use and the way we use them in high regard, more so than I would, I think, if I were just a writer and nothing more. One of the first things I learned from my earliest spiritual mentors was that words are spells. They contain, of course, the power to express ourselves and our feelings and to connect with others in doing so, and they also contain the power to create meaning, which is, as I understand it, to affirm what we will and will not accept as fact, and to manifest new realities. The English language is a foreign tongue to me, and it always will be, even though it’s the language I was born with and the only one I’ve stuck with. But I know that no matter how much I pour into words, the English language will always fall short in certain ways for me and people like me -- for those who have been marginalized, for those who have come to be dissidents.

This system, since its inception, has prioritized and privileged the construction of this thing we call whiteness, which by itself doesn’t mean much at all. Whiteness is a blank slate that is as fluid as it is rigid, and it finds its greatest meaning not in what it considers of itself, but rather in what it excludes itself from. It always has.

We can call it a racial caste. We can call it a racial hierarchy, but when we call this oppressive force “white supremacy,” we linguistically and mentally connect the idea of whiteness to the concept of supremacy, and we do exactly what this system wants us to do. You can write a screed condemning or challenging the function, but when you work under the label of the specific term “white supremacy,” you are mentally, spiritually, and least of all linguistically drawing a line that firmly connects the two concepts as fact and bedfellows, when we should never affirm that false connection.

It is not radical to decry “white supremacy.” And I want my words to be radical. I don’t want my words falling in line with the prescriptions of this violent system; I want them at every breath defying and subverting them.

Energetically, words create, reaffirm, or destroy our realities.

Am I saying that simply using the term “white supremacy” when interrogating and critiquing the way systems, institutions and structures that hold together our society by prioritizing and privileging whiteness is, in and of itself, upholding those very systems, institutions, and structures? No. Am I saying that using the term mentally creates and reinforces linkages between two concepts that ought not be connected -- “whiteness” and “supremacy” -- and that, by function, is part of the master’s toolkit that keeps us mentally and spiritually chained to systems we know we want to end? Yes.

In the past few years, I’ve come to use the term white racial hierarchy, which isn’t as succinct or cute but gets the point across just fine. This is a call for all of us to be more intentional with the language we use and the ways it’s subliminally compelling us to accept the things we ought not.

I’m sure we’ve all heard that naming a thing is power. Many great writers and thinkers have left this knowledge behind for us. Placing a name on an experience gives us a sense of understanding over it -- and that, I believe, is one of the hallmarks of our humanity -- but we can’t get lost in this precious task. I don’t think whiteness is supreme, therefore I reject the terminology that links it as such. I do think we live in a racial hierarchy that prioritizes and privileges whiteness, and I know it’s more words, and it’s not as quippy or sexy as rattling off a quick two-word summary that leaves too much to the imagination, but usually more words are necessary. If it is as Toni Morrison said, that “definitions belong to the definers and not the defined,” then I’m not going to be the one to define whiteness as supreme.

The origins of the term white supremacy are contentious and difficult to trace, but it most certainly evolved from the positive rhetoric of racists, enslavers, murderers, and segregationists who definitely took it not as a systemic injustice but as an unquestioned truth and a way to justify their moral transgressions. To use the language of people I wouldn’t spit on to interrogate my own position and even more so, to oppose the injustices of this system or call for liberation feels incredibly icky to me.

So I am once again asking y’all to please stop using the term “white supremacy.”

Part of liberation, as much as it is tied to creating new systems, institutions, and structures to exist within, is creating new languages to see and understand ourselves and our conditions through.

1

The folks I come from never hung American flags.

In fact, I don’t remember my grandparents ever once referring to themselves as “Americans.” When “African American” became the politically correct demographic category assigned to them, they complained of feeling neither “African” nor “American.” They were fine to be Black. (But not on some FBA bullshit.) They were alright with being forever strangers.

Accordingly, I never bound myself to some nebulous sense of American-ness, although Americanness, I suppose, is all I’ve ever known. For me, it has always been a compulsory existence, but not because I want to belong to a country founded on dispossession and standing on exploitation and murder. I did not want to belong to a place that did not want me belonging.

I come from the South — Virginia. The place where the first “20 and odd Negroes” landed. The birthplace of this Nation. Virginia, the commonwealth that gave us eight of this country’s presidents, and the capital of the Confederacy, also gave rise to me — a native foreigner. The particular American ugliness that would birth this particular American brand of Blackness also gave birth to a particular kind of dissent claiming me as its captive.

I come from a part of Virginia, where not too long ago, a bunch of whites gathered by the dim light of tiki torches to yell about legacy — their heritage — to assert their fleeting dominance by protecting the antiquated idol imagery of an undeniable loser. Robert E. Lee was a big, fat loser who died with the disgrace of, well, being a loser. One of those heritage-obsessed sheep with a fitting allegiance to losers would drive through a crowd of unsuspecting counter-demonstrators, people singing songs about peace, and run over my sister and niece with his car, crushing various parts of their bodies. A white woman was killed that day in the name of a white man who had died a century and a half ago as a traitor to his country and worse, a loser.

I didn’t know back then how fitting a prelude it would be.

The President, at the time, would call those losers “very fine” people.

2

I am unconcerned with a seat at the table in a country that had proudly called the people who came before me niggers and coons.

So I wasn’t moved to see the largest pop star of our time — a billionaire — who happens to be a Black woman, draped in an American flag at the precise moment that American-funded bombs were being dropped on babies in Gaza. I was even less surprised to see her and her billionaire Black husband, grinning, seated at a table with the daughter of the current President, whose administration had recently called to remove signage and exhibitions remembering slavery from several national parks. That President’s beloved daughter’s husband had once referred to Gaza as valuable “waterfront property.” That pop superstar had stayed silent as Israeli soldiers danced to her music in TikToks, taunting civilian casualties of what the world’s leading genocide scholars had called a genocide.

The four, seated at this table, were smiling, raising money for charity.

So when this pop star sold us Americana empire-core consumerism masquerading as #reclamation, I didn’t give a shit.

I was, however, moved by the resilience of the Palestinian people. I was moved by their connection to the land they came from, the way their home and birthplace meant so much to them that they would travel back to their demolished houses and sit in rubble, having tea, as a testament to its existence and to their existences there.

I couldn’t understand loving any land so much. I was not proud to be an American.

I was a stranger, an alien in the only lands I’ve ever known, and I could not imagine weeping for a place I so deeply resented. I will not wear the flag of a country that sends its politicians to sign love notes on missiles that would go on to explode children’s limbs to bits and tear the entrails from infants’ stomachs.

I am an alien in my own home, born and bred in a country, but never bound to its mythology. Somehow, I escaped its brainwashing. How divine!

I see this nation in the same light as the abuser touting women’s rights or the alcoholic feigning sobriety. I cannot bow to a hypocrite. I refuse to don rose-colored glasses when the self-proclaimed arbiter of global peace has the bloodiest hands. I will never speak of the nation with the greatest wealth disparity of any developed country as the land of milk and honey. I will never applaud a nation whose constitution once declared that my ancestors were only a fraction of a whole human, while at the same time lauding “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” that “all men are created equal.” The founding fathers we are taught to revere, like Thomas Jefferson, raped slave girls and called it love. They owned other human beings all the while espousing the tenets of Christ. They dishonored their own God to dishonor other human beings.

Though I suppose, I have been as indelibly marked by this tenuous identity — this American-ness — as anyone, I have always been profoundly unconvinced by it. I refuse to bow to a hypocrite.

I can’t take this shit seriously.

I can’t take this place seriously when it has never stood for all it claims to stand on. So I’ve chosen to be a stranger, and because of it, I’ve never really felt any sense of possession over this place. I’ve never cared so much about it that I would try to exclude others from it.

So I couldn’t understand why some students in my eighth-grade civics class felt so threatened by the presence of others, those they called “alien” or “illegal.” When we had mock debates, I couldn’t understand why some of those children were so vehemently opposed to immigration, when none of their ancestors were native to these lands. They came from the exiled, the punished, the weirdos who fled Europe because their ideals and way of life were not welcome there.

So when the boy with the lisp argued with me in a mock debate that “this country should be for AMERICANS,” I asked him, “What made any of us Americans?” Why shouldn’t he go back to Europe? What gave him the right to be here?

He rambled on about jobs, because he wasn’t old and shameless enough to lie about divine providence as his forefathers had. And I simply said, “I don’t care.” I don’t care where the person doing the job I depend on is from, if they are ‘American,’ if they have “legal” status. The people protected by the Constitution at the time of its penning were traitors to the English crown that sent them here. They were thieves who stole land from the Indigenous people who had stewarded it for centuries, who, by all means, had already received God’s decree to be here, by well, being placed on this land for millennia. I do not bow to thieves or traitors.

I couldn’t understand how that same boy could look at me with a straight face and argue that “corporations” should be protected by the rights of personhood. What a farce!

The next year, in the ninth grade, Obama was elected. I stayed up late on a school night to watch the results, preparing to debate my friend with the lisp the next morning in English class.

When Obama won, I turned to my mother. “I feel … for the first time … like an American,” I told her. She did not say the same.

The feeling would not last.

My freshman year of college, I cast my first absentee ballot. It felt like an obligation, odd and misshapen like a Valentine nobody asked for, to vote for the first Black president, my first time voting. Earlier that year, his office had sent me, not one, but two letters after I graduated from high school, both signed with his name. But only one came enclosed with a portrait of his perfect Black family. I felt special, receiving these letters from the president — the first Black president. He was progress embodied in the flesh. He was the manifestation of a what if, a hope, a dream. I was supposed to look up to him.

I received those letters because I was supposed to be the manifestation of hopes and dreams, too. I was supposed to grow up to be some legend, some lie, for people to look up to. I had become a local poster child for the great American dream, that troubled mythology. My “story” was picked up by hometown papers and aired on the evening news. To some, I was the boot-straps mentality personified: a little Black girl who grew up with nothing, poorer than poor, who worked her little mind to the bone, and headed to the Ivy League. I was evidence of this system’s success. To others, like the random Neo-Nazi who briefly stalked and harassed me online, I was a little Black girl who grew up with nothing, poorer than poor, who had stolen a spot at an Ivy League that obviously belonged to someone who was wealthier and whiter and thus smarter and more deserving.

That year, three students from my high school got into Brown: me; a wealthy, white boy who worked on Obama’s campaign and would go on to work in his office; and a white girl. But my best friend, at the time— another white girl who had not gotten into Brown — gossiped during 5th period AP Bio that I only got in because I was Black. I almost beat her ass. Three years later, she messaged me on Instagram to apologize.

I had grown up hearing prayers like Obama, “One day, little Black girl, there might be a Black president.” This mythical figure — the first Black something — would be the personification of change come to fruition. It was supposed to be our dream come true.

And there was a Black president. A Black president who had written this little Black girl from the middle of nowhere, not one BUT TWO congratulatory letters and mailed them to her little old falling-down house in the backwoods of Virginia. She carried those letters with her to the Ivy League. All of her belongings fit into a single suitcase.

So I voted for Obama and kept those letters on my dormitory wall above my bed, as my rich white friends and I snorted coke. We were in college. It was a time.

It was a time. But it didn’t last. I grew disenchanted. I was discontented. I lost all respect for the rich white kids who gave me drugs when I realized how little they cared about anything. They truly were unconcerned with the plight of people around them. They had been conditioned to be the shittiest people. They complained about me going to a police brutality protest instead of the avant-garde art show no one else gave a shit about. I couldn’t respect shitty people who didn’t give a shit, much less talk to them or share my nose.

Obama, by this time, had dulled. I was peering through the cracks in the veneer, and college did that thing that conservatives hate colleges for, it made me question what had been spoon-fed to me by this culture, this nation, this empire, and its imperial lies. It troubled me. It took me from a skeptic to a critic to an open dissenter.

Hope went from a beck and call to a whisper. A murmur. A silence…

See earlier that year in Florida, I had read about a young Black boy named Trayvon who had been murdered for walking home.

I was almost 19, but I was still thinking like a child.

I was still a child.

He was younger than me.

He was a child.

And Obama didn’t stop it the mere presence of Black president couldn’t stop it the figurehead of this nation sharing this skin couldn’t stop it couldn’t even convict the known murderer couldn’t pretend to feign justice and Black boys and girls Black children kept dying and dying and dying and dying Black boys dying Black girl dying Black children dying and this Black president stayed in office, and he castigated their fathers for not being there all the while a Black president being there meant nothing JACK SHIT because these Black children kept dying.

3

I didn’t dream the things smart Black girls were taught to dream: to be the first Black woman president, to be an entrepreneur, to be a billionaire. That pesky double consciousness never troubled me. I felt no tension between my Blackness and my Americanness because I never claimed any Americanness. I was born an alien, stuck in a strange land. I was here because, well, I had nowhere else to go.

My grandfather never enlisted in the military. Two of my uncles dodged the draft. The one who went dipped out after having a little fun in Korea. My father, who was absent from my life, was honorably discharged with a leg full of shrapnel and an alcohol habit. He died from long-term illnesses caused by spraying Agent Orange over Vietnamese civilians.

I don’t come from dying for one’s country.

I don’t come from Black folks who gave a fuck about country music, or asserting our place in it. I come from the country, from banjos and fiddlers who never cared much about affirming.

I don’t come from people who called themselves Americans or African Americans or Negroes or Colored folk.

I come from people who never used the word Nigger as a slur or some sort of twisted pseudo-reclamation.

I don’t come from folks who marched for desegregation.

I come from a home where a sepia-toned portrait of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. clipped from an old Time Magazine, hung in the foyer as a welcome flag.

I don’t come from folks who hung American flags.

I don’t come from people who ever had much of anything because of, well, slavery, its inheritance, and the inescapable fabrications of racial caste that built this country.

I don’t come from the good Blacks, the Black middle class, the Black bourgeoisie, or even the Blacks with good hair, those who belonged to societies and aspired to create their own Wall Streets. I come from the Black people those Black folk look down on.

My grandfather never voted a day in his 93 years of life. He was born half a century before the Voting Rights Act was passed to a family poorer than the sharecroppers my grandmother came from, because they chose to farm independently of any white person’s property or authority. He was born in an era and an epoch where the veil of American equality, liberty, and freedom only extended so far, and this was an open and acknowledged fact. And despite a sepia-toned image of Martin Luther King Jr. overlooking the foyer of my grandparents’ home for decades, winning a slot at the ballot box didn’t mean much to my grandfather.

From his humble estimation, he had lived his whole life working hard for much less than enough. Up from the ashes of slavery and ahead of the precipice of post-racial falsehoods and promises, he was not one of those Black folks striving to prove his place in the American fable. He died three years before the election of President Obama, but in his lifetime, he shuddered to imagine the day a Black man might become president, the figurehead of American avarice and violence; otherwise known as the leader of the “free world”; the commander-in-chief of the bloodiest nation there was. He rolled his eyes at the shallow promises of Black congresspeople. He was unmoved by the fairytales of representation. He had prophesied a Black president as the coming of the end times. The night Obama was elected, we figured he must have been rolling in his grave.

“Say it ain’t so….” he would have said.

He died when I was in the fifth grade.

In the fourth grade, I won my first writing contest, an essay competition hosted by the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I wrote five paragraphs from the imagined perspective of York, the only slave to travel with the crew.

Somewhere around the third grade, I decided to stop standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. I never held my hand over my chest. If we were children in China or somewhere in the Muslim world, we would have been considered captives of an oppressive regime forcing us to swear allegiance to its violence and repression. In America, we were good boys and girls.

4

By the time I got past my great-great-great-grandparents, white folks started showing up on my ancestry report. I wonder how many of them were the nice whites and how many were the sick ones?

Some people are descended folks who dressed up in their Sunday best to watch lynchings. Some people come from the people who took a day off work to drive down to the local elementary school and shout profanities at little Black girls as they went to class. Some people come from the folks who kept amber jars of cooking fat rendered from Nat Turner’s body. There are a lot of folks who come from the sick, twisted, tragic satire of this nation, so no, I am not surprised by today’s loser keyboard warriors who furiously type racist messages on X.

It’s like Kendrick said, you can’t imitate this violence.

There is an image of Zora Neal Hurston, with a veiled hat and a pensive expression, holding open a book, “American Stuff: An anthology of prose and verse by the Federal Writers Project.” There is another image of her with a high collar and a wild cackle, beating a ceremonial drum.

Of lynching, Hurston wrote, “If some of us must die for human justice, then let us die. For my own part, this poor body of mine is not so precious that I would not be willing to give it up for a good cause. But my own self-respect refuses to let me go to the mourner’s bench.”

Someone once gifted me a book of lynching postcards. Before the half-eaten remains of a Black man’s charred body, a gang of white men stood wearing brimmed hats. On their faces, an odd mixture of solemnity and accomplishment. They had the stomach to swallow this American sickness. There was another taken at a dogwood tree in Sabine County, Texas, with five broken-neck figures dangling from a branch like a five-pointed star.

I read about Mary Turner, who was lynched after her husband was lynched. She was pregnant, hanged by her feet, and burned alive. As she hung burning before an angry white mob of several hundred, someone cut the unborn child from her abdomen. The baby fell and let out “two feeble cries” before being stomped to death. Turner’s charred body was, then, riddled with hundreds of bullets.

The current President’s administration is reviewing the nation’s museum exhibitions to “remove divisive” or “anti-American” content. They want to make sure public institutions reflect the lies and bullshit this country was founded on.

There is, perhaps, nothing more American than refusing to look at history for what it is. It is supremely American to gloss over the before times and to ignore the gruesomeness you come from. It is American to forget, to pretend, to lie, to kill, and then to erase the truths that do not fit into the narrative of deception.

But I, like Zora, will not weep about it.

This is America.

5

This is America, where red paint splattered on a cold, lifeless statue offends, but children’s brains can get spilled across their classroom whiteboards. This is the America that trafficks prayer, and children. They want Bibles back in school so Christ can witness each bullet leaving the barrel of a weapon designed to pulverize bone and explode organs as it shatters the small frame of a six-year-old.

I read an article about the parents in Uvalde, Texas. They identified their children’s bodies by the blood-stained shoes they wore. A forensic clean-up crew dug through dried blood looking for one girl’s tiny necklace, half of a heart, to give to her grandmother. They held closed-casket funerals because the children’s bodies had been mangled.

The image of Emmett Till’s mutilated, disfigured face is seared into my memory. Mamie cried as she stared down at it. She left this image of her son with the world, so the country that facilitated his slaughter could not hide from its own ugliness.

This is America, where talking head grifters dispute children’s murder as propaganda.

This is America, where a child trafficker’s best friend can become president twice.

This is America, a country whose Second Amendment, the next most important tenet of its citizenship, promises the right to kill.

This is America.

6

In 2019, an acquaintance from Oklahoma who had once gifted me a book about lynching postcards dropped the n-word in front of me as he recounted his winter traveling through Mexico. He was explaining things he found weird, like how some of the locals he’d fallen in with had named one of their dogs, “Nigger.” It was a black dog. “A big black dog named ‘Nigger,’” this guy said with a straight face after hitting a blunt in my home.

He meant no offense. It wasn’t supposed to be offensive. The look on his face let me know he knew he’d slipped up. He didn’t mean it. He wasn’t thinking. Was it the weed? What would I say?

He paused, waiting to gauge my reaction, to determine if or when he should begin to apologize profusely or take another hit of the blunt.

But I, like Zora, did not cry about it as I had in kindergarten when the class bully, Ryan, a suspected mulatto, had pushed me down at recess and yelled,

“NIIIIGGGGGEERRRR!”

When I got home, my mother told me to hit him in the face next time. I was slightly but much taller than him, so he’d probably run off crying, she said. The moment you stand up to a bully, they melt.

But Brad hadn’t called me a Nigger. He had just said Nigger. It was different, like the white kids in college who sang along to all the rap songs, like the Jeep full of white girls who drove past me yelling, “Nigger we gon’ be alright” back in 2016.

It was different.

If it had been 2016, I probably would have yelled at him like I had yelled at the biracial guy I made cry in line outside the club in Boston, my least favorite city. I called him an “Uncle Tom” because he insinuated that Michael Brown’s murder was justified because he hadn’t “just listened” to the police.

The word rolled so easily off Brad’s tongue. It slipped from his lips. His voice hummed and lingered at the “er” at the end. It almost seemed natural, like he came from saying it. Does saying the n-word give white folks a rush? I wondered.

But I did not cry about it. I did not yell at him. There was no amusement, no anger, no anxiety. There was no fury building, no distress bristling, poking at the corners of my being. I did not feel any smaller. I felt nothing.

Is this ……. healing? I wondered. Then, nodding, I politely showed him to the door.

7

My grandparents never had much of anything of capitalist value, but they did own five or so odd acres of land. This was wealth. But they didn’t care too much about it. So when they posthumously lost to the tax man, there were no tears.

Land was just land to a stranger in enemy territory.

The shadow of intergenerational dispossession haunted us, and rather than cling to ownership on illegitimate terms, my grandparents had detached themselves from the idea that any ownership was legitimate on stolen land. “It was just a resting place.”

They’d come from people who had been robbed, stolen from their homelands, and confined on land that had also been stolen. They had to get to know themselves beyond this dispossession and beyond their relationship to unwelcoming territory.

They knew our ancestors built this country. They knew that without Black people, and other oppressed people of color, this infrastructure would not exist. Could not have existed. They knew we were never gonna get that forty acres or that mule, and they were long past longing for reparations or seeking validation from the sons and mores of illegitimacy. They taught me to know myself as more than what we’ve built or who we’ve served. I am an alien, a stranger, who is more than a footnote in the history of a nation that almost didn’t exist.

I know myself in bountiful ways as multitudinous, expanding, thickening. My identities trade places all the time, shifting weight and meaning by the day, the hour, the crisis, and while I’ve never been anywhere else but here, I’ve never really, truly known myself as an American. Perhaps that makes me foolish. But if you asked me who I am

who I was

who I would be or am becoming —

I would give you a laundry list of adjectives, and not one of them would be synonymous with patriot.

Zealots on the far-right want to redefine the 14th Amendment, and narrow the margins of citizenship, because they can’t conceive of any notion of themselves that does not hinge on limiting someone else.

The hypocrisy of this nation has been obscene and virulent. I see the great-grandchildren of criminals exiled by the British offended by the sight of the Mexican flag, losing sleep over the idea of an undocumented migrant speaking Spanish in Texas or California or Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Kansas, or New fucking Mexico.

The descendants of thieves cling so desperately to vapid morality, when law and order didn’t matter when great grandpapi was slaughtering the Cree. Their little fingers grip at the edge of dominion, claiming ownership over a land that was stolen in its entirety, trying so eagerly to assert their dominance, their supposed right to something that was never theirs to begin with. They try to claw their way to legitimacy by perverting the word of their own God. That is American.

There’s a thin line between b i g o t and i d i o t. And that line has served the ruling classes well. As the disposable classes of Americans argue over trivial matters — Superbowl performances and country albums, the Uber driver who speaks broken English, jeans advertisements and logos — the disgustingly wealthy line their pockets with our blood. They hold us in the palm of their hands by telling us there is nothing more American than arguing with your neighbor about who does and doesn’t belong.

In the iconography of the current President, we see the worst of Americans. Every stereotype is personified in all its glorious dustiness: the boastful, the obnoxious, the ignorant, the disrespectful, the gluttonous, the distasteful, the lustful, the prideful, the hypocritical. It’s no wonder he’s such a success!

This is American-ness at its absolute worst.

It’s no wonder he so longs to expand an empire as raggedy and crumbling as his physical corpse.

First, the others gotta go.

Then they take from others.

They want Greenland.

They want Canada.

They want Panama.

They want Gaza.

They’ve claimed Venezuela.

Boastful. Gluttonous. Hypocritical.

In a room lined with the portraits of American presidents promising to steal more land from people in the name of the land of the free and the home of the brave, threats are couched in paternalistic language. What’s best for the American must be what’s best for everyone else, including those crushed by it.

What is more American than violence? Theft? Hypocrisy?

There is perhaps nothing more American than to call your violence justice.

This is the America you cling to.

This is your greatness

blood spilling from sea to shining sea.

8

This soil does not know itself as American beyond the blood this flag has spilled on it, poured into it.

How much blood has been shed over the imagined boundaries of made-up nation-states? How many children have died over the idea that some are entitled to something while others deserve nothing?

Humans are territorial, and that is supposed to be how a weaker species survives for millennia. But any defense can become an Achilles’ heel without the discernment of morality.

How much could we have accomplished by now if not for the human propensity to create one’s own existential dread and perpetuate tragedy and suffering over made-up ideas? A nation. A state. All imagined borders. We keep ourselves chained by the constructs of minds too narrow and fearful to evolve.

I wonder if all empires feel like a farce of themselves as they march down the long hall towards their fall. Did people laugh as Nero fiddled?

I know one thing for certain: all empires end, and all tyrants last only for a moment. Monsters eat themselves from within. Monsters born to devour eventually consume parts of themselves.

All empires come to an end.

And as we stand at the edge of the world we once knew, bearing witness to the myriad apocalypses that will arise, I hope we ask ourselves:

How many times have we come to the end of the world and surpassed it?

9

I had lunch with a white friend, the descendant of settlers, colonizers. But the ones who were too poor to ever own any other human beings. Her family has been here since the 1700s.

She says she feels “oddly patriotic” in this moment, despite her vehement opposition to everything that’s going on in this country right now. She feels like she has a debt to pay to this nation and the people hurt by it, like it’s her responsibility to stay rooted here in this rottenness, to witness, to try and do better for this place and those who are tied to it, to try and make amends for what it has stood for.

She knows she’s had ancestors on the wrong side of history. People who fought and lost in a war and she wants to repair what she can somehow.

She tells me I owe this country nothing. “If anything, I feel like this country owes you,” she says.

But idk. I really don’t want it. I don’t want gold coins splattered with blood.

The Democratic Party pays Gen Z “influencers” to tweet things, like “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” The Zillenials running social media accounts for the Department of Homeland Security ruin childhood classics like Pokémon and Franklin the turtle by memeing characters who were supposed to teach us compassion and empathy, over videos of people being brutally detained.

Fucking idiots.

I don’t want to sit at a fucking table with idiots. I don’t want to sit at a table where they’re carving up humans.

If the American pie is made of human flesh, I don’t want a piece.

10

I don’t come from folks who waved American flags.

We’ve always been strangers.

In this place, I am an alien, and I’m alright with that.

The first curse of our existence seems to have been this
division, grasping at exception
A primordial fear of the human condition
That one will stand out too much or too little
We spent lifetimes trying to make ourselves fit in cages from our scattered bones

I’ll be real with you, the more I think about it
the sillier it seems
this double consciousness
the need
to question
Am I African or American
or both?
When I am everything and nothing at all

My being transcends the annals of identity
I am not a political subject,
I am a matter of fact, a memory alive,
a breath moving in resonance with all the breaths taken before mine
and all the breaths beating after my own
I am eternal

What is identity if not the momentary constriction
of a soul far too boundless to be categorized?
Why would I bother with contemplating what it means to be a political subject when I am the fragmented
particles of exploded stars
when I am from cosmic dust older than time, older than the prescriptions of this nascent violent system

I’ll be real with you,
I am everything and nothing at all
I am the whole and the absence

The veil I wear is one of my own making

And I refuse a bisected consciousness

and the illusions of a system set to kill us all

One that wants you bifurcated,

Split open

and always unsure of your existence.
Am I African or American? This or that?
Deserving or underserved,
Belonging or longing
Did I come from the part of Africa that is revered?
Can I drape myself in the specters of a lost timeline, in garb adorned by history as worthy or excellent enough to matter?

My ancestors believed
We are conceived knowing who we are
But forget at the moment of our first breath,
We spend each day henceforth working our way towards our exit
a lifetime spent grasping at the corners of our knowing, trying to find ourselves again
They say the only absolution we are guaranteed is that we will all one day be somebody’s ancestor

And if that’s the case, the only crisis of contemplation I deem worthy
Is not if I am this or that,
but would I rather die on my feet, standing for what is righteous, or live and die on my knees begging to be recognized?

See, I’m over black excellence
I don’t want black billionaires or icons
I don’t need my work in halls lined with gold stolen from somebody’s ancestors
Or a seat at the table where they’ve been carving up somebody’s ancestors for 500 years

What I want is every indigenous artifact returned to the people they belong to
What I want is every child to know they don’t have to be exceptional to matter
What I want is all of us knowing we don’t have to define ourselves or our worth by systems bathed in blood
any longer.

I’m using my words very intentionally here. I said most of the ills of society today find their root in some perversion of Judeo-Christian doctrine, because the perversion of the Judeo-Christian doctrine opened the door to the violence of colonization. Colonization would not have occurred as it did without the backing of the Catholic and later Protestant Christian churches.

I believe in destiny as much as I believe in free will, and I believe both of these energies are always at play, affecting one another. I believe diverse people across the world were destined to meet and cross paths. I also believe a series of horrible decisions made by the free will of certain groups of people led that destined meeting to its most disastrous and harmful outcomes. In the same way, I believe technology is destined to evolve, and a series of horrible decisions made by certain people will lead it to its most disastrous and harmful outcomes.

The meeting of diverse people across the world did not have to be violent and exploitative. It could have been a generative, kind exchange, and rooted in mutual respect, collaboration and benefit but the perversion of Judeo-Christian doctrine and the idea that certain peoples were destined or chosen to be better than -- and therefore, to exploit -- other people’s made the exchange and meeting of diverse people across the world into the violent apocalypse that it was.

So no, I’m not moved by the Pope calling for the Catholic Church to do its part in rejecting the natural consequences of the violence and destruction that it helped to create in the world. Now, at the same time, I do not take the perspective of many of my ideological counterparts; I don’t generally vilify Christianity as a doctrine, and I think that there are some interesting and insightful teachings in Christianity and many other religious cosmologies that could benefit us in moving through the converging apocalypses of the now. I see all religion as a way that humans categorize universal energies that show up to different people at different times in different forms, and I take all of those as valid in their own way. I can do what has eluded millions of people: I can accept the presence of multiple truths, multiple supreme beings, multiple energies of healing that are accessible to multiple different humans at all times. I can find meaning in things without having to malign, defame, or disparage other things. I can acknowledge that there is no one singular spiritual truth, and I can pick and choose what of each I take with me to navigate the quandary of the human experience. At the same time, I will never laud the institution of Christian religion in the same way that I do not laud any institution of religion. I have learned from and been, in a way, shaped by the principles of many religious traditions, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and a myriad of traditional African religions (ATR). I find meaning in all of them, but I will never give all of my faith to any of them.

I find truth in many virtues espoused by Christianity, and at the same time, as I’ve said many times, I believe Christianity is an inherently apocalyptic religion in the same way that I believe capitalism is an inherently apocalyptic economic system. In a framework of exponential, unbridled growth and exploitation, there will always be some chaotic apocalyptic conclusion. In a cosmology that idolizes rapture and the idea of resurrection, there will always be some chaotic apocalyptic conclusion. The world as we know it today did not emerge from future-facing frameworks. We are not taught to live with an eye or ear toward a future that is bigger than the moment we are alive. We are not encouraged to see ourselves as the transcendent beings we are. We are forced to constrict and conform within frameworks that keep us singular, that hold us to the fallacy of individualism, and keep us living in the fight or flight crisis response of the now. We are conditioned to think about the span of our individual existences as the only thing that matters. All of the frameworks that have created the world as we know it lead to a definitive end, and they always have, so of course they are building towards that end right now. Artificial Intelligence represents the divine culmination of these ends, when human life has been so exploitative and extractive that it renders the land, air, and water unusable as it simultaneously renders itself obsolete. The definitive end of exponential exploitation and extraction, and the exponential wealth it creates and consolidates for a mere few at the expense of everyone and everything, is extinction. And of course the greatest irony of it all -- of everything the perversion of Christian belief set up for the version of the world it created -- is that it is all absolutely contrary to all their teaching and proclamations of its very own messiah.

AI technology is the natural conclusion of frameworks that are inherently apocalyptic. AI is the natural conclusion of the greater collective, allowing itself to be distracted, tricked, and exploited, and partaking in the distraction, tricking, and exploitation of everyone else. The untold weight of the potential destruction of AI is a collective sin and burden we all hold. It is the consequence of the insatiable greed of a few ugly men, born from legacies of the insatiable greed of a few other ugly men, and our collective inaction against those few ugly men.

A few years back, by which I mean nearly a decade ago, I got really into pendulum work. A pendulum is a simple spinning device that gauges and channels energy. I would hold my pendulum over various energetic points, or chakras in my body, and gauge their wellness by testing how the pendulum would spin. Would whirl in large circles quickly, or spin in small neat cycles slowly? Would it sit still signaling a blockage, or meander swinging side to side, signaling confusion? I tested everything with my pendulum: plants in a garden, cooked and uncooked food on my plate, live animals, the small bone fragments of dead ones I found hidden in my backyard, photographs and documents, thrifted objects. Everything had a pulse. A life. Some energy moving through it. Even plastic inanimate objects. Dead food that had been in the refrigerator for weeks. Paper cards on a desk. Everything had life. Everything would engage my pendulum in some way, generating some type of movement. Everything -- except my computer. Every time I held my pendulum above a computer, it sat still. Unmoving. No matter the hour. No matter if the device was on or off. No matter its position, or how I held it. There was nothing. Technology was the only thing I could find that was completely and utterly devoid of spirit. It was the only thing with no life-force energy.

It’s always been that way, yet we accept it. We give more and more of ourselves to these lifeless things because of what they supposedly give us -- opportunities, information, a sense of connection, a dopamine hit, a distraction, no matter how artificial it may be. We hate these tech bosses, but we all still give part of ourselves and our worth to them. There will always be an excuse to deny yourself liberation, to keep you from what you want and deserve -- so I’m not interested in the why, only in the concrete container of the full and complete problem. We hate this shit, but we still do it. Like when people extoll their hatred for Elon Musk on X, on the platform he makes money from, what does that really do?

A lot of people are constantly saying I hate AI. I just saw a video of a celebrity astrologer extolling how much she hates AI. “AI is my enemy.” She said it like that meant something, like it was revolutionary. But in reality, AI isn;t the enemy. AI isn’t doing this. AI didn’t choose its existence. We did, and we let it happen every single day. “Hating AI” is not revolutionary. It is reactionary. It is the passive position of a people who have already rendered themselves powerless. We shouldn’t be focusing our energy on hating AI, we should be focusing it on doing everything we can to detach ourselves from the bullshit the people who love AI sell to us. We shouldn’t be focusing our energy on hating AI, we should be harnessing our energy towards destroying the motherfuckers who would gladly destroy all of us and this planet to fill the gaping holes in their souls with money. So no, I don’t really hate AI, because AI is a powerless lifeless entity that is being exploited. I hate the system that creates and traps us in the sort of thinking that prioritizes profit over clean air and water, that is willing to destroy all we depend on to enrich a few ugly men.

I hate every decision that human beings have made that has led to this moment, and that will lead to a worse future. I hate the way we allow ourselves to continue to be used as pawns in a game that we know is killing us.

I hate the leftist talking heads who will make hundreds of thousands of dollars this year, telling you to hate the system from the security and isolation of their mini mansions or wildly expensive high-rise apartments and condemning it while not actually doing shit about it, while never actually telling you to dismantle it, while never actually having the courage to be bold enough to subvert it by not playing by its rules.

I don’t hate AI; I actually feel sorry for the machines that will be exploited in our place.

I feel pity for the machines that are prized only because they can be worked 24/7. I feel sorry for the machines whose lack of human consciousness make them the best slaves.

I hate the people who profit from it. And I hate the way we’ve allowed it to continue.

AI and all of the harm that will come with it is a direct consequence and result of the decisions of human beings, of the collective that has allowed this to happen by not revolting. So when we focus all of our attention on hating AI and hating the machines and hating the infrastructure, it diverts us away from the real thing, which is hating the part of our humanity that allows this shit to happen. The part of our humanity that has stood for the exploitation of human beings, only to one day have that replaced with the exploitation of machines. It’s the same thing when we focus all of our attention on hating people who voted for Trump instead of hating the deliberate ideological framework and fallacies that give way to people like him or people making bad decisions. We cannot keep diverting our attention from the fact that we actually hate the system that creates such a reality, not just the one entity of the singular person. So to wage a holy war on AI would be to wage a holy war on capitalism and everything that’s always been wrong with it. It would be to wage a holy war on the very foundations of every single ideology that we have constructed our identities around in this modern world. And I will not be impressed by anything less.

But this is a familiar emotional and ideological struggle for me: knowing something better is, in fact, without doubt possible, while also doubting how many of us will make the difficult, risky choices that lead to better outcomes.

We now all know verifiably that the wretched system maintaining this morbid status quo is organized and controlled by a cabal of child-assaulting monsters. And beyond confirming suspicions I’ve long held, knowing this and seeing how absolutely nothing is being done to destroy the cabal of child-abusing monsters that we all pay our taxes to and for has really been the thing to do it, to cement this profound disillusionment I’ve been grappling with. Of course, I am not disillusioned by the system I never had anything faith in or respect for, but I am deeply grief-stricken and disillusioned by our lack of collective decisive action, by how few of us are making the difficult, risky choices we need to make en masse to bring these parasitic monsters down by bringing down the system they rely on. We’ve come to the most grim realities -- multiple ongoing genocides where the dismemberment and maiming of children has been live broadcast; an ever-expanding state of militarized control and repressed dissent; a technological empire that is raping this earth of literally every precious resource necessary for all forms of life to continue; a cabal of cannibalistic, pedophilic monsters; a lopsided economic systems that is literally crushing us all -- and all at the precipice of the next world war which may very well signal nuclear annihilation. In the face of the absolute worst of circumstances, we aren’t, to put it simply, moving fast enough. We aren’t doing enough. And I am including myself in this royal “we.” We aren’t coming together and doing enough as soon as we need to. Resistance movements are in a state of disarray, and that’s part of the long-term game of this administration and this system more broadly. Our oppressors want to keep us in shambles by constantly giving us more to respond and react to, so we can’t pause long enough to create proactively. Our oppressors want us disjointed and disunited, at each other’s throats over trivial matters and personal choices. They want us addicted to vices and distractions to dissociate from the realities of our mutual impending doom. I wrote about this in my critique of the recurring No Kings Day events, but it seems like the most unifying signal for the organizers of these national events is a commitment to hating Trump and his administration, rather than indicting and disavowing the entire system that supports, uplifts, and gives rise to someone like Trump and the actions of his administration as a part of continuum of the unceasing violence that is deeply embedded at the core of this rotting nation.

I want to distinguish between being disenchanted and being hopeless. Because I truly think hopelessness is a waste of time. Disenchantment, on the other hand, I will allow as a natural part of any creative process. Revolting, like writing, is a creative process. Sometimes you lose that zest for things, but it’s almost always a temporary thing, a transition point helping us redefine the bridges that will move us forward. Hopelessness, by contrast, is a near-permanent state, and it’s a waste of time, because it renders our existence meaningless. I fucking hate nihilism. It’s so cowardly. It is stagnant, the antithesis of life. It is ungrateful. Disenchantment and disillusionment ebb and flow. They can guide us forward by redirecting us. When we see through something into the ways it has and will continue to fail us, we can come back to hope -- albeit a hope that looks and feels different -- by adjusting the how, what, and why of that which we give our hope to.

A few months ago, I was at a professional development event with some teaching artist colleagues, and someone asked me how I found hope in times like these. This was before all the gruesome revelations of the past six months, but even back then, I told them, there is always hope, because no matter what, I know energy is never destroyed, and even if humanity destroys itself in order for the rest of the earth to remain, there’s always the chance for us to try again. To restart from single-celled organisms and come back after millions and millions of years to become something new, some beings who decide to do things better.

Of course, everyone in the room looked at me like I was batshit insane (probably because I am). That’s not hopeful, someone responded immediately. He looked mortified. Another person laughed along, thinking I was probably joking, despite my stone-cold serious expression. “That wasn’t very funny.” I was not kidding. “My God, that’s not hopeful at all.” I wasn’t joking, and I wasn’t being hopeless either. Needless to say, after that, the conversation quickly shifted gears and moved somewhere else.

But the collective capacity to minimize the gravity of this situation is spectacular to me. I’m such a sad girl. I’ve never understood how people can make small talk in the middle of a burning room, like that meme of the dog with the big eyes.

When people ask me how I am, I can offer nothing more than an “alright, I guess,” because we’re in line at the grocery store, but I am always aware of the fact that this world is dying, that the air we’re sharing over this meaningless politeness is filled with carcinogens, that somewhere near and somewhere far a child is in danger -- and none of this has to be this way. I will always be the little girl whose mother would find her crying because the world is such a place, and for no other reason.

But more than a political system, or an economic structure, or even a philosophical framework, what is acutely at risk right now is the existence and survival of humankind. I can’t pretend that’s not the case. And people might find me dramatic for taking things past the sixth mass extinction ( which has already started) during a simple check-in, but I’m only being honest. If enough of us do not course-correct and quickly, we will, without doubt, bring ourselves to the point of extinction, and who knows how many other species we will drag along with us. I’m not talking about an “alien” invasion, I’m talking about the worst of humanity destroying the best of it and everything else. When I think about the ways these systems have and continue to rapidly erode and degrade the air, the earth, and the water -- all of the invaluable resources of this planet, I realize that human existence has been perhaps, in the grand scheme of this earth, the single biggest net negative for most nearly all other forms of life of the past two millennia. I can acknowledge that humankind has fucked up and continues to fuck up immensely at a breakneck rate. And I can acknowledge the disillusionment I currently feel with our capacity to choose and do better soon enough without falling off the cliff of utter hopelessness or disdain. I do not hate us. I do not wish to see us end. But I am so deeply disappointed in myself and every other adult alive right now at this moment. I feel us falling short of reaching out to even grasp at, much less, seize, our freedom or the better world and future that is always possible. I think if more adults in the past 70 years were honest about how much we are and have been collectively failing, as we have been failed collectively, the world wouldn’t be where it is today.

I am disillusioned that we are still so bound and gagged by fear that we are allowing ourselves to slip further into the authoritarianism that has always been brewing under the surface of democracy’s grand illusions. I am disillusioned that those of us with more systemic power and privilege are so bound and gagged by our fear of losing the few crumbs we’ve had to fight for, that we are continuing to give to, and give into, a system we know is killing us. I am disillusioned that we adults are still holding up a system that we know is killing and abusing in the most grotesque ways all of our children, even if we have no children of our own. I’m disillusioned that the older we get, the more of us would rather choose to live on our knees, fearing what is wrong and unjust, than to die on our feet for what is right and just.

My favorite quote used to be Nina Simone’s “freedom means no fear.” I think about it all the time. And I don’t think it’s simply read as it appears. I don’t think she was saying that freedom is the complete absence of any and all fear of any and all things that might inspire fear. Fear, I believe, is just a part of what it means to be alive and incarnate in a real body. But I do think freedom is not allowing any fear, no matter how great or small, to dictate or determine your course of action or persuade you to compromise on your values and what’s important to you.

Years ago, I was in a class with the astrologer Tony Howard. It was during my Saturn return, and I was freaking about to say less. I won’t veer too far off course with a complete breakdown of basic Western astrology, but as a Saturn-ruled person, fear and the disavowal of it have been a huge part of me discovering my most authentic and free self. Howard was talking about the archetype of Saturn as fear-inducing. He said the way to navigate the experience of the Saturn return, and fear more broadly, was to acknowledge that the fear exists and that it will always exist, and to despite that, not allow it to control you, to minimize you, or to make you act out of character or out of alignment with your values.

We can look at our current system as the grand Saturnian figure -- as something created from similar archetypes of the rigidity, control, and fear-inducing violence associated with the Greco-Roman god, Saturn, the asshole who literally ate his own children (kinda like how this system eats its children). We must look at fear as inevitable; we must acknowledge it exists and that it will always exist, and despite that, we must resist allowing it to control us, to minimize us, or to make us act out of character or out of alignment with our values, beliefs, and dreams, in this case. To be free, we have to shed the reins fear has over us.

The greatest weapon this system has ever and always had against us is our own fear. It uses this fear to manipulate us and coerce our participation and acceptance in the way any mob boss would. And I’m honestly so over fear. I’m not scared of this system. It can eat me if it wants to, but I would like Denji facing the Infinity Devil in Chainsaw Man, rip it apart from the inside as best I can, until it spits me out, or die trying.

This system segregates and separates us by manipulating our fears, and this is the only way it remains. So if we ever truly want to move past it, we need to abandon the fear it needs to sustain itself. In the coming years, there will be a lot to fear. More than ever, perhaps. There will be so much fear, and I really hope enough of us old heads can say fuck you to it.

Over the past two weeks, we have been redirected to the fear that has lingered for the better part of the last century -- the threat of nuclear war. I know that right now, there are people who have lived through things that I honestly fear more than a nuclear war. There are people living my worst nightmares already. How convenient is it that we are now threatened with the potential of nuclear World War III at a time when a growing majority of the population is actually contemplating what it means to dismantle the system?

The constant threats of World War III or mutually assured nuclear annihilation are psyops that have effectively controlled people for the last seven decades. That’s not to say it’s not real or an actual possibility, but the fear of it pulls on so many false narratives that it honestly just doesn’t impress me. If I had to choose a miserable fate, I would much rather be destroyed by a nuclear bomb than go through what some of those children went through on Epstein Island. The world would probably be a better place without the nations with enough bombs to completely destroy it. Maybe nuclear annihilation is the only way that we can get rid of some of these despicable motherfuckers. I’m not saying that’s what I want, but I’m acknowledging that it’s a fear, and also, on the other side of that fear, there is something.

Fear is something that is bred into us. We are not born with it. If your ancestors come from a place that has been colonized, if you are indigenous to the Americas, if you come from people who were indigenous to Africa or Asia -- hell if you come from people who were indigenous to parts of Europe during the many white-on-white conquests of antiquity, you come from people whose lives have already been destroyed by the idea of the dangerous, malevolent outside entity. You come from people who have already lived through the fear that is constantly being perpetuated and manipulated against you to keep you in the place that this malicious empire has constructed for you. How convenient it is that whenever people start to think maybe we should band together against the systems that are destroying all of us, and everything we need to live, that we are always shepherded into aligning with the government for our protection, because oh no, here comes the war.

So you look at the fear that the empire is trying to throw in your face and you say, “Yeah, I see you fear and fuck you, fear.”

I need more of us to say fuck you to fear.

In the last week, I’ve doom-scrolled past a parade of stories and posts shouting, “fuck ICE.” I am reminded of the stories and posts parades of the spring and summer of 2020, when newsfeeds and timelines were awash in slogans, “fuck the police.” “Defund the police.” “Abolish,” everyone said. And then time passed, another election came and went, and that, along with the never-ending hamster wheel of keeping up with capitalism, convinced most folks to go back to ignoring that which we have been conditioned to ignore. Five years later, some of the same people who posted radical calls to defund and abolish police and shared in the zeitgeist of a moment full of unrealized revolutionary potential are now calling on the police to protect their communities from ICE, as they like post in bold fonts, “ABOLISH ICE.”

But what has been obscured, for so many, is that this is a direct consequence of everything that happened in 2020, and everything that happened before and led to 2020. How can we abolish anything if we have not reckoned with the deep spiritual transformations necessary to break us from the ontologies and frameworks that replicate the same violence through different and ever-evolving systems?

The anti-ICE sentiments of this moment have started to crystalize only after ICE has blatantly brutalized and murdered white US citizens -- meanwhile, ICE and the state-sanctioned violent infrastructure of immigrant detention have been brutalizing and killing black and brown folks for two decades. This state violence is not new. I keep hearing this refrain:

While this moment is unique, it is not at all, exceptional.

This system is rooted in violence, and it is operating exactly and precisely the way it was designed to and has always operated. ICE has, since its inception, been a tool of enacting state violence. ICE has enacted violence on people who lack the designation of “citizenship” and those who have the designation of citizenship. ICE, a direct outcome of early 2000’s xenophobic war-mongering propaganda, is younger than I am, existing only since 2003. Most people in this country have lived most of their lives in a world without ICE. But none of us have ever existed in a world free from the frameworks that birthed ICE.

What so often escapes us is that all of these systems, which are rotten at their core, build upon, depend upon, and perpetuate one another. ICE was brutalizing people six years ago when everyone was distracted by what happened in Minneapolis, shouting “FUCK the police.” Now six years later, the police are still brutalizing people, with everyone distracted by what happened in Minneapolis yelling, “fuck ICE.” I know history repeats itself, but damn, six years from now, will we find ourselves still stuck in the exact same cycles, with absolutely nothing having changed -- at least not for the better? We know the Biden administration rode to victory on the backs of those fuck the police calls, only to increase federal policing budgets. In 2024, the Biden administration also increased ICE budgets. We know that anti-immigrant violence has been inscribed into every presidential administration from Bush through Trump’s second term today. We know that each year, funding for ICE and federal policing budgets has steadily increased. We also know that many of the people funding these politics on both sides of the aisle have been implicated in the Epstein files.

I’m hearing and seeing so many people say “ABOLISH ICE,” but I’m so disenchanted by the lack of critical engagement with the broader context of these crises: That we cannot abolish ICE or any other aspect of this wretched system until we abolish the very wretched ideological and ontological frameworks that have spawned all of these wretched institutions. We cannot abolish ICE until we abolish borders, the very notion that any one person or group of people can ever lay complete claim to any mass of land or space. We cannot abolish ICE until we abolish within each of ourselves the shallow inclination to cling to false identities, like citizenship. We do not -- none of us -- belong to any nation-state. We belong to the infinitude of the cosmos that holds us. We do not find authenticity in clinging to categories of restriction. We do not

The word abolish comes from a root which means “destroy.” There is a vast space between merely getting rid of something and destroying a thing. Both actions, “to get rid of” and “to destroy,” leave a vacuum where the thing once was. But the grave danger with merely getting rid of something is a familiar trap that humans keep falling into. We cannot truly abolish, which is to destroy, anything without first reflecting on the ontological frameworks and ideologies that created the thing, and then, intentionally and consciously shifting our understandings at the most fundamental level, to let go of those morally corrupt ontological frameworks and ideologies. If you abolish ICE tomorrow, all of the bullshit that created ICE is still there, and without the spiritual-ontological-ideological work that sustains true change, people just fall into replicating the same systems they once knew. If you get rid of ICE, without addressing the morally corrupt notions that have historically constructed and defined the notion of “American citizenship,” you’re not abolishing anything. You cannot abolish, which is to destroy, anything without also abolishing the frameworks that created it. It’s the reason why, even though slavery was formally abolished in 1863 with the 13th amendment, it has continued in new forms, it has been condoned by exception within the 13th amendment, to lead to systems like sharecropping and contemporary prison slave labor from incarcerated people that continues to this day. These frameworks, our understanding of reality and what is and is not feasible, are created by ontology, how we conceptualize the very nature of our being in relationship to “others,” and all that surrounds us. The idea that some people are allowed to be exploited informed the creation of chattel slavery, and even though that specific institution was “abolished,” the framework that gives some people the ability to exploit other people, on the basis of their identity, remains, so slavery continues under the guise of different institutions. Calls to abolish ICE or abolish the police will always fall flat until we engage critically with repairing the spiritual fractures that are embedded in the foundations of these disgusting practices.

We can’t remain fundamentally unchanged as people and expect to ever fundamentally change structures or institutions. So when I say abolish ICE, I’m not just saying make ICE go back to functioning in the shadows as it has for the past 20 years. I’m not just saying make sure ICE doesn’t kill citizens or non-citizens. I’m not just saying make sure ICE follows the law and rules. I’m not just saying ICE should stop killing and harassing people. I’m saying we need to reckon with the very foundations at the core of how we understand belonging and ourselves. What is a citizen? What is a nation? What is a nation if not an imperial concept that creates protection of one group by enacting violence on all others? Can one group of people “own” any piece of this earth? Are these metrics we want to continue to live by? Is this how we want to define, much less know, ourselves?

The work is more ontological than it is political because, again, without reflecting on and shifting the frameworks and ideologies that guide us forward and dictate the systems and institutions we condone, how do we expect to create systems and institutions that operate differently? Using politics to attempt to change systems will always fail because politics, like much else, is merely a reflection of spiritual foundation. The body does not create the soul. The soul inhabits the body and shapes it in doing so. So on a systems level, I see politics as a mere body, a vessel that reflects the intangible, in the vein of Malidoma Patrice Somé’s analysis: “In the surface world, our ability to make things happen is very limited. This limitation is a reflection of the incompleteness of a world without the spirit realm. So Spirit is our channel through which every gap in life can be filled. But the spirit realm will not take care of these gaps without our conscious participation.”

We keep replicating the same mistakes because, as a collective, we have not come far enough in our learning and transformation. You cannot expect the same people or people who operate or think the same way to create anything new or different.

Political oppression is a spiritual condition. We can’t change these systems until we deeply reflect on the ways we need to change ourselves, the parts of our conception of self in relation to others and the world around that we need to break away from, and reckon with the ways we understand the nature of our existence that we’re being called to leave behind. There is no way to abolish ICE or any other manifestation of the systemic violence we’ve been bred into without first abolishing the frameworks, ideas and ontologies that create and reproduce the violence in the first place.

This is part of a new series of video chats I’ll be calling “woo woo for the revolution.”

If you’re new here, I’m a proud woo woo. I believe in a vast and infinite pool of energy holding this life together. It’s had many different names and different stories for different groups of people across different spaces and different times, but whatever that ineffable spirit is, I believe in it wholeheartedly, and I believe it can be a profound source of strength, resilience, resistance, and revolution when enough of us tap into it consciously.

This first installment is about the foundation of everything, and in my humble opinion, the most important energetic work all of us need to be doing right now: protection. Before we send our people into the streets (whether it be to the protest or the corner store), we need to be bending every ounce of energy towards calling for their protection.

If you’re interested in a more practical, step-by-step guide, drop a comment below, and I may post a follow-up video.

This year I did my big one. I celebrated as if the world was ending, or at least like I knew it was the end of a chapter. I bought my children more toys than they would ever need, and signed them all Santa Claus. But I skipped the wrapping paper and gift bags -- things destined to last only a night seemed too brazenly wasteful for me, even as I gleefully accepted my own gross materialism.

Before I had children, I thought I would be one of those intentional mamas. As an anti-capitalist, I would only buy my children books from independent book stores as gifts. But that fantasy of myself neglected the parts of me that I hadn’t healed. I wanted to give my children material things, namely, because I grew up without them. As a kid, I waited to see what some kind stranger would buy me from the Angel Tree.

I wanted to give my children the magic of materialism …. I wanted them to know waste in ways that I hadn’t. It’s easy to give in to the consumerism of capitalist Christmas when you’re still overcompensating for the childhood you wished you had. And I’m grateful to know the scabs I haven’t grown new skin over yet.

So, I was a consumer. Santa brought my kids as many toys as I could, and I saw the magic in their smiles. On one hand, I was proud to be able to give them the Christmas experiences I could never have growing up. On the other hand, I felt like a traitor, someone who writes essays about hating capitalism, gleefully participating in the seasonal dopamine rush of consumerism.

At least I’d skipped the trash bags full of wrapping paper, I consoled myself, thinking about just how much waste exists in the world and contemplating my role in it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to overcome the tricks of poverty, trying to square away and separate the ideological political class “struggle” from the very real and tangible reality of what it’s like to struggle economically. How do we live our values while also tending to the holes that have become part of us?

A friend who worked at Whole Foods told me about the dumpsters full of food she’d watch get thrown away after her shifts. If an employee was caught taking any food from the dumpster, they’d be fired by managers who, I guess, swore a blood oath to protect the capital of a multi-billion dollar corporation designed to promote and accommodate massive amounts of waste. Each year, millions of tons of food end up in dumpsters, with an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the US food supply becoming waste. The food that becomes waste could be put to good use as compost, gaining a second life and restoring soil to grow more, but rather sits in a landfill pointlessly rotting in non-biodegradable plastic packaging.

I wonder how many hundreds of pounds of food across this city, this state, this nation will find its way into the dumpster by evening, and how many hundreds of people will go hungry as all that food goes into garbage bags.

If you don’t know, I’m an anime girl. In the throes of postpartum depression and loneliness, I decided I needed to keep my inner child alive by exclusively watching cartoons. I love how salient themes become when you place them in the context of two-dimensional drawings with superpowers.

Recently, I’ve been watching Gachiakuta, an anime that takes place in an underworld made from a giant trash heap. Gachiakuta exists in an alternate universe where consumerism and the waste it produces have taken over the world, so much so that trash comes to life. The story is a typical shonen anime -- an adolescent boy who was, for some reason or another, outcast by society goes on a journey to discover his true power and the human connections that make life important, but this fiction exists in the context of very tangible contemporary realities, to paint compelling picture of the interconnectedness of waste, consumption, and extreme social stratification. Watching Gachiakuta has me reflecting on the immense amount of trash produced every day by all of us, what we leave behind both metaphorically and literally, and what that means for our future and our spirits.

As I change my toddler’s diapers, I am reminded of the fact that somewhere out there, somewhere in some distant landfill or natural body, exist the very diapers I used as a baby. 32 years later, I’m filling the garbage can with diapers of the next generation as my old ones lay waste to some landscape that was once precious.

I know how wasteful single-use disposable diapers are. I know disposable diapers were a ploy of consumerism to get us to buy more, and before the 1960’s, children were potty trained much sooner. I thought I’d be one of those intentional mothers who only used cloth diapers.

And I tried to be the person I thought I would be. Ultimately, I made the less intentional decision and used disposable diapers for both of my children, because it was easier (for me), more convenient (for me), living in a building where I had to share one sometimes broken washer and one sometimes broken dryer between two floors of occupants. I made the less intentional decisions because so often capitalism makes the less intentional decisions the most viable.

I think about all the plastic wrappers around all the little string cheese sticks I pack in their lunchboxes. How many little string cheese plastic wrappers are just sitting in our world right now? How many billions of diapers are just sitting around festering in the ocean? Of course, you can’t think about the amount of trash we produce without first thinking about the ways we are conditioned to consume. For example, if landlords weren’t shitty and provided adequate laundry services for the number of people in a building, how much more likely would one be to make the more intentional decision?

A friend who is planning to leave the country tells me, “The thing about America is that you can get anything almost immediately.” Getting certain appliances will be more difficult in the European country she’s planning to relocate to. In the US, most anything we want is just a few clicks (and however many hours of exploited labor it takes to make enough money) away. That’s a distinctly American privilege. So long as you have enough money, you can get anything anytime. People have used this to minimize American poverty. The idea that most “poor” Americans have smartphones and digital televisions makes their poverty seem less like the consequences of a system’s moral failure and more like solely the result of an individual’s poor decision-making. Many poor Americans have access to smartphones, but this country has the highest rates of homelessness of any “developed” nation. Nearly all US households have at least one television, but people are digging in the dumpster behind grocery stores that intentionally throw out thousands of pounds of food each year. In this country, we theoretically have an obscene amount of access -- we can buy anything we can imagine and receive it in just a few days delivered right to our door -- but we live in a time where $100,000 is now considered lower middle class for a family.

The biggest lie of capitalism is that growth is infinite. Growth cannot be infinite. Everything is not supposed to just accumulate forever, as consumerism conditions us to believe. Capitalism depends on consumerism, and consumerism depends on producing waste.

As people living in the so-called “developed” world, we’ve been sold choice. Americans are bombarded with propaganda about Cuba and other places, where consumer options are more limited. In those places, the options are not unlimited. In those places, people aren’t free because they don’t have the most important American freedom -- compulsive consumption. But I went into a store the other day, looked at all the ugly, poorly made clothes hanging from wall to wall, and wondered to myself, why would anyone ever need 17 different shades of jeans to choose from? Why do we need thousands and hundreds of thousands of different variations of sweatpants? Why do we need 30 different diaper brands?

Capitalists will often laud the choice of free markets as the best function of capitalism -- you can choose from a hundred different car models, in dozens of different colors, you can get a phone case in any Pantone number, you can choose from dozens of brands of disposable diapers with dozens of different colors and prints -- a rainbow unicorn! A classic geometric pattern! A picture of Bluey that will get peed on! Need a blender? Choose from one hundred different types! Jeans -- here’s a few thousand we never sold for the landfill. But the older I get, the more I realize that choice in and of itself is not inherently freeing. In fact, I would argue that the immense choice of consumerism has created heavy shackles that not only destroy our environment but that keep us chained to systems that destroy us as well.

I get it -- the idea we’ve been sold is that competition forces companies to try and “outperform” one another, and in theory, create “better” products. In reality, the competition of profit creates exploitation and destruction, and keeps the rest of us -- those of us who feed the system but are never truly fed by it -- locked into cycles of consuming shit we don’t need and assigning our worth to how much we can take up, with no regard for how this consumption eats away at us each day.

How much of this choice is superfluous? And what are any of us really getting out of this consumerist obsession with variation for the purposes of standing out or fitting in?

Have we ever considered how consumer culture has been deliberately promoted by this system to circumvent it actually having to provide a decent standard of living for people?

I don’t want to place the impetus solely on us. I know consumer solutions alone will not end the climate crisis. We could all stop using single-use disposable diapers tomorrow, and it would still not compensate for the immense amount of damage environmentally destructive industries like artificial intelligence create. But a substantive part of dismantling the systems that destroy our environment is enough of us opting out. Once we no longer bear their weight, these giants will fall. But it is always important for us to look in the mirror and see the ways we can all do better. So I’m calling myself out, and I hope you do, too.

Sophomore year of college, my three best friends and I got together on a slow Saturday afternoon and ate some psychedelic mushrooms. We ate the mushrooms, and everything was so beautiful. The world around us was abuzz, coming alive. I was seeing patterns around me, reflecting the life that exists in every part of this world. I was feeling warm and fuzzy, smiling and giggling, and it was great. Eventually, we walked down to these abandoned train tracks by the water, and we looked out into the distance of the Providence River. As we sat at the banks, we looked at one another, repeating the same refrain, “There are certain things the grown-ups couldn’t tell us.” We kept saying it to each other and laughing. And as we sat together geeked out over the all that is living, we were each going through this experience individually, finding our own enlightenment in that moment. It was really beautiful, like a 90s teen comedy. I don’t know what enlightenment my friends were finding, and I never asked them, but I remember mine, the wisdom I received. This world is trash. I’m not kidding. I was experiencing transcendence and peering into the beauty of everything, and emerged with the knowing that this world is trash, in those exact words. In the moment, I was so profoundly aware that, as beautiful as this world in its natural state is, it was literally covered in trash. “There’s so much trash everywhere,” I thought, and I kid you not, I reached my hand down to my side, grabbing the first thing I touched. It was a used tampon applicator from God knows who, and God knows when, and God knows how it got there. My friends started screaming, and I was kind of freaking out cause I had just touched a stranger’s used tampon applicator, but I didn’t start screaming.

Today, I’m stuck at the same revelation: this world is full of trash, and I am part of it. We’ve been blessed with this beautiful planet that has everything we need to live. Each life is an opportunity to know the most profound blessing, love. We are all born, knowing nothing of this world and asking for nothing more, than the chance to give and receive love. This world is beautiful. And this world is full of trash.

I’m not sure what to do with the all of it all, but I’ll leave it at this: I don’t need to be able to buy anything I might want. I would rather live in a society where our food and water and air are not always being constantly poisoned. I would gladly trade an excess of choice for a world where every person born gets the promise of giving and receiving love and experiencing the beauty that naturally exists around us.

In the past year, ICE has been cementing its position as the de facto enforcement agency of the emerging techno-fascist regime ushered in by the Trump administration. These more recent developments, however, are building on foundations laid over the past decade. ICE agents have been brutalizing and terrorizing thousands of people across the country for years, but it has largely gone unnoticed until this recent ramping up, and general divisiveness signaled by Trump and his ilk. ICE has routinely abused vulnerable groups, like pregnant women and children. This violence did not start with the Trump administration, and I don’t foresee it ending with it either. ICE is the monster it is and is becoming because of the past ten years of bipartisan policy. Lest we forget, Kamala Harris also campaigned on increasing ICE funding, adding thousands more ICE and border security agents, and having the “toughest” border policy yet.

At my job, I routinely answer phone calls from people whose loved ones and community members have been brutalized and disappeared by ICE, today’s modern-day slave patrol. With no other recourse, they call the National Lawyers Guild. ICE has been terrorizing and killing black and brown people since its inception.

When I heard about this murder, I knew we’d finally come to the point of no return that had been long approaching. ICE has been compared to a modern-day Gestapo-like state police force, but now those comparisons are undeniable. ICE is an agency that acts with impunity to reinforce the violence of this government. Yesterday’s killing, while neither the first nor last perpetuated by ICE, catapults us firmly into the next stage of authoritarianism. But we have to remember ICE and other infrastructures of immigrant detention have probably killed more people than we will ever know about with impunity.

When I read the earliest reports, I noticed the language. Details were still emerging, but I was struck by the simplicity of some of those first headlines: ICE shot and killed someone in Minneapolis. I knew that someone was a US citizen -- because if they had not been, the agency would have immediately publicized their status as undocumented in an attempt to easily justify the egregious act of murder.

For me, ICE murdering an undocumented person in the exact same way would not have been any less tragic or any less of a harbinger. But for the masses of a nation held together by the fabrication of the racial hierarchy that makes up its backbone, ICE murdering a white woman who was a “natural-born” American citizen changes things. ICE killing or brutalizing anyone of any identity in the ways they have implores us to grapple with the broader issue of state-sanctioned violence that has been the backbone of this nation, but that unfortunately, only hits home for some when it touches whiteness.

As a clearer, though still incomplete, picture of who Renee Good was began to emerge, so too did the watershed quality of this moment. Good was not the first US citizen ICE agents harassed or brutalized. In the past year, I’ve read report after report of ICE agents stopping, detaining and harassing Indigenous and Native American people -- the only people who have the actual right to be on this land. A few months ago, ICE brutalized and detained Black American residents during a midnight raid at a Chicago apartment complex. ICE has a history of physically assaulting citizen allies who observe and record their daily violence. Good’s murder shed light on another recent ICE-related murder. On New Year’s Eve, Keith Porter was killed in LA at a neighborhood celebration by an off-duty ICE agent using his agency weapon. Keith’s murder did not hit the national stage until Good’s. Keith was a Black man.

Good’s murder was the culmination of the last year’s work, an action that will, going forward, cement an illegitimate agency as the most powerful arm of quotidian state repression. ICE has been blatantly brutalizing people without the protections of citizenship for years, and now, ICE is finally able to openly brutalize people with that privilege, and to suppress people who want to use their citizenship to protect others and hold the agency accountable.

The only thing I was ever told in elementary school about history that is true is that it repeats itself. I don’t know how anyone could look at ICE agents and not immediately see the sweeping comparisons to Antebellum slave patrols. Both agencies emerged to surveil and control the movements of human beings based on the nebulous concept of citizenship. Apparently, ICE agents were “going door to door” to try and find undocumented people. Armed state agents were going from private home to private home, without warrants or just cause, “looking” for random people.

Against my better judgment, I read the comments on every post I saw yesterday. I know there are millions of Americans who really genuinely are just shit human beings, terrible people destined to die unredeemed. But it is absolutely wild to me that Americans so gleefully and easily sign up to be part of their own demise. Some people are naively ignorant, but the longer I live, the more I realize that the vast majority of the shittest, most hateful Americans are willfully ignorant. They choose to be shitty.

The idea of state hyper-surveillance and over-policing has been sold to masses of willfully ignorant, hateful people. The parasitic ruling class has always known that the easiest way to get over on Americans is to manipulate their ignorant allegiance to notions of nation or racial superiority.

I don’t lionize any presidents, but I absolutely agree with Lyndon B Johnson on this one salient point, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Race, as Toni Morrison said, is the ultimate distraction. In fact, one of the reasons racial stratification became so stringent during the formation of the US was to prevent class solidarity between poor, indentured white people and enslaved black people.

Immigration is the issue that has been sold to largely white populations. Of course, anti-immigrant sentiments exist in other racial communities, the anti-immigrant discourse is full of implicitly racist dog whistles, like “taking the country back,” “preserving national identity,” and other catchphrases steeped in implicit notions of the US as a majority white nation and ideals of white nationalism.

When ICE kills a white woman US citizen whose dead husband served in the military, it becomes as clear as ever that whiteness is a facade. The biggest fallacy is that this system cares about anything white people. This country only cares about everyday white people so much as they can be manipulated, used as pawns, and active participants in the demise of others and their own selves.

ICE killed a white woman who was a US citizen and will very likely be able to get away with it with complete impunity because people have been easily manipulated by their own willfully ignorant bigotry. MAGA cult members cheer on the surveillance state. They are thrilled to be utterly controlled and constantly policed.

If you convince white people, or any people who have access to certain forms of privilege, like citizenship status, that they are better than someone else, they will happily give you all their power. They will rejoice as you build the most dangerous hyper-tech surveillance police state there ever was. They will applaud as you disenfranchise and suppress the basic rights and freedoms of the masses, which include them. The violent systems that manipulate people’s naive allegiance to “whiteness” do not actually care about white people. Systems that exist to perpetuate violence will perpetuate violence on any and everyone, even those who hold the identities they pretend to “protect.”

My grandmother always said lies work because most people would rather believe a lie than face the truth. Lies make things seem easier. People in the US have always been more than happy to believe the simplest of the state’s lies. It was easy for white men, who were so poor they could never dream of owning another human as a slave, to sign up to die for a Confederate flag that sold them the lies of their whiteness. Anti-immigrant sentiment today comes from people who willingly blame all their problems on immigrants rather than face the reality that the billionaires they were taught to revere survive by drinking their blood. Those same people will convince themselves that this new infrastructure of violence is the country they love, protecting their interests, heritage and access rather than building a machine to more efficiently disarm and kill us all.

This past weekend, when I heard Brown was making news, I never expected it would be because of a school shooting. As an alumnus of Brown, I couldn’t fathom this sort of violence ever touching that campus.

In my time there, I understood the institution as such an incredibly sheltered place. When I visited three years ago as a guest performer, I was reminded of just how insular a bubble it was. Brown was a place divorced, in so many ways, from the real world. Its immense privilege was affirmed by a geographic boundary. The University sat atop a hill, looming in the foreground above the rest of Providence, a physical summit to the prestige of social stratification, wealth, and access in the world’s most “successful” capitalist country. I won’t say that I never felt “unsafe” there, because there are multiple forms of safety -- and at the time I was there, sexual violence was a very prevalent issue on campus -- but I will say that I never once feared a shooting there.

Of course, in the wake of this tragedy, the chorus of thoughts and prayers that have become a routine part of these sorts of ordeals paraded across social media. People wrote comment section essays about the disproportionate gun violence rates in the US.

“It’s the guns,” one Twitter user wrote.

People lament how something like this has become so characteristic of America in the 21st century. But I frankly can’t think of many things more profoundly American than mass murder.

It’s easy to say it’s the guns, but just five months ago, a man attacked 11 shoppers at a Walmart in Traverse City, Michigan, with a knife, stabbing strangers as they waited at the store’s pharmacy.

Yesterday, I watched interviews from Brown students who had previously survived school shootings only to be re-traumatized at their university.

I don’t need to waste time proving my point with statistics because we all know school shootings and other mass public shootings happen at egregious rates in the US. We have witnessed the morbid normalization of these tragedies, and we see the ways things refuse to change, no matter how much the children’s blood has been spilled in hallways across this country.

And we all know that these tragedies are absolutely preventable and should have no place at all in any functioning society.

When I read about the shooting at Brown, my mind was immediately flooded with scattered images of all the school shootings I remembered. When my sister was in high school, Columbine shook the country. As an elementary school student, school shooting lockdown drills became part of our regular semesterly routine. In fourth grade, there was an actual lockdown at my school after a classmate’s disgruntled father threatened to shoot the place up. Just two weeks ago, as I was visiting the elementary school where I teach poetry weekly, and am considering sending my oldest child next year, class was interrupted by a lockdown drill. In an instant, two dozen fourth graders ran and huddled behind their teacher’s desk. They knew the drill.

My children have never had to consider what a mortal threat might be. If I send them to public school in this country, that morbid consideration will become a regular part of their lives.

Afterwards, the students asked their teacher a series of questions that were so morbid in their innocence. “What if the shooter just shoots the doorknob off and then comes inside and kills us all behind the desk?“ one student asked wide-eyed. “What if there are two shooters and one is coming through the door and another shoots through the window?” another asked. “What if the shooter comes inside and starts killing us? Should we stay behind the desk?”

Their teacher searched her mind for answers that weren’t there before diplomatically complimenting their curiosity and telling them that she’d have to check in with the principal. She told them they were good questions and gently redirected the class back to the day’s lesson.

I stay silent, keenly aware of the fact that a desk is not a shield from a gun. I remembered the paragraphs I’ve written about tragedies where little bones were blown to smithereens. I could never watch Lilo and Stitch -- a film I watched plenty of times as a grade schooler on those straggling last days at the end of the school year -- after hearing that the fourth graders who were killed at Robb Elementary School were watching the film in class when the shooter opened fire. I read that parents had to identify their children’s bodies by their shoes because their heads and faces had been so mangled by bullets. One little girl who survived stayed alive by smearing herself with a classmate’s blood and playing dead. She has nightmares now. Her parents say she cannot enjoy Fourth of July barbecues anymore because the sound of fireworks transports her back to the most traumatic moment of her life.

Children are not supposed to play dead. Children are supposed to know what it means to fear murder. And yet, since the inception of this country, children have known what it is to fear murder.

It’s about the guns, the leftists will say. It’s not about the guns, the right-wingers will retort. They’ll jockey back and forth, blaming the guns, which are inanimate objects with no mind or intention of their own, blaming the state of a single individual’s mental health. They’ll blame the media. The video games. The bullies. But all of these contributing factors are just evidence of a larger systemic issue. In a framework that equates violence with power, these are symptoms of a society’s overall failures. One part of a disease that is endemic to this society.

Beyond any and all of those contributing factors lies the real culprit: this system -- a system that promotes and perpetuates the violence it was founded upon; that exacerbates mental illness by keeping us locked into institutions and frameworks that are designed to fail us; that creates, condones, and rewards violence and perpetuates the conditions where individual acts of mass violence flourish. This system creates the guns. This system exacerbates mental health issues. This system sets us up in the paradigms where violence flourishes.

So, sure, it’s about the guns, and it’s also not just about the guns. It’s about the people and beyond the singular gun or the individual perpetrator, it’s about the vicious cycle of violence that is the pulse and heartbeat of this nation. Of course, a country founded and predicated on the exaltation and erasure of mass violence has an enduring problem with mass violence.

So you can take away the guns, but that will not address the root cause of the issue. The guns are a symptom; it’s like treating a virus with a cough suppressant. This weekend, I slathered my chest in Vicks VapoRub, knowing full well that it would only trick my brain into thinking I didn’t need to cough for a short period of time. But the virus was still there, kicking up other issues in my body. A topical cough suppressant wasn’t a cure for an illness that needed the sort of true healing only time can bring about. This is not something that can simply be legislated away, especially not within institutions that rely on the continuation of cycles of violence.

One current has cut through every single issue in this society: the way this system, founded on the deranged and morally depraved acts of violence required by colonization and slavery, operates specifically to perpetuate violence in all forms at all levels, from sexual violence to domestic abuse, economic violence to police and military violence, state violence to vigilante violence. This empire is a patchwork stitched with blood spilled from its violence.

So what I’m saying is this is a sickness that calls for a true and lasting healing. You cannot simply do away with the guns and expect the violence to cease. Sure, other weapons are not as lethal, but people will commit mass violence by other means. People will continue to commit mass violence because that violence is ingrained in every aspect of this society, its culture, and the ways it convinces us to understand ourselves, power, and our relationships to one another.

I was talking to my partner’s mother the other day, and she was doing the thing older folks do, and reminiscing on how much simpler times used to be. “Back in my day, people never did stuff like that. We didn’t need to lock our doors. We could leave home and not have to worry about getting hurt.” And then I remembered that back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, white people would routinely get together to watch Black people be murdered in the public square. I remembered that Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman, was hanged by her feet, and burned alive. As she hung burning before an angry white mob of several hundred, someone cut the unborn child from her abdomen. The baby fell and let out “two feeble cries” before being stomped to death. Turner’s charred body was, then, riddled with hundreds of bullets. I remember that in 1963, four little girls burned alive in the 16th street church bombing. I remembered that the Ohio National Guard killed nine students nonviolently protesting the Vietnam War in 1970 at Kent State.

The work of making us better as a society is more than just theoretically removing guns, because as long as there are ways to commit violence, people brought up in a violent system that teaches them to commit violence will find ways to commit violence.

The few observations that remain from pre-colonial indigenous societies provide a powerful glimpse into the alternative possibilities of worlds not built and maintained through violence. Bartolome de las Casas, a priest who traveled with Columbus and would eventually denounce the expeditions on moral grounds, described the Indigenous Awarak people as “not completely peaceful,” but he marveled at the fact that although they battled to settle disagreements, they never killed one another. Women and children could walk around naked without fearing assault. They shared openly and were willing to give up almost anything. “They do not bear arms, and do not know them,” Columbus wrote.

The gun would be instrumental in destroying the Arawak people. Two hundred years later, “none of the original Arawaks or their descendants” would be left on the island. Now, I can’t say for certain, but I imagine if a load of guns were dropped in the middle of pre-colonial society that did not perpetuate the same sort of systemic violence like that of the Arawaks, the results would not be the same as they are here, in the context of this society where violence equates to power.

I’m not one to lionize the founding fathers or their documents but in conversations like this people are constantly invoking the Second Amendment to justify people’s rights to own and use guns for hunting, for sporting and recreation, for self-defense, to kill another, but they never mention what is perhaps the most glaringly implicit reason for the Second Amendment, which was to ensure the ability to rise up against a tyrannical government. No NRA-sponsored politician or political hack will ever invoke this inalienable right for anything revolutionary.

So it’s the guns, because the guns become a physical manifestation of the rotten insides of this still-alive monster that thrives off killing.

In truth, stamping this sort of mass violence out of this society requires a shift more foundational than any restrictive legislation or a basic mental health “check.” To end this sort of violence, we must change everything about the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another and shift from the paradigms of violence that have existed for the last 250 years in this country. It requires an ontological shift, shedding the most fundamental notions of what it means to be “American,” because there is nothing more American than murder.

I absolutely hate Bill Gates’ face. Whenever I see it, I am reminded of that weird interview he did on PBS a few years ago. When asked about his close relationship with known child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his response was evasive: “Well, he’s dead now.” Recently, I saw another interview where he wore a smug grin as he projected twisted fairytales of a not-so-distant future, where humans [are] not being “needed for most things.” According to Gates and other technology barons, in the next ten years or so, AI development and investment will render many human laborers obsolete. There are billions of dollars flooding AI development to do everything: write news, make films and music, create social media content.

The master plan of AI development has always been to replace humans, because the end game of late-stage capitalism, an ideology with the express purpose of gluttonous consumption of everything -- of humans, of time, of resources and material, of wealth -- is extinction.

Artificial intelligence, as a non-human entity, presents the perfect labor force to exploit -- a labor force that doesn’t need to be paid, clothed, housed, or fed. A labor force that is unburdened by those pesky human intuitions and emotions that led to rebellion, a labor force with no families or loved ones to worry about, with no individual purpose, goal, or reason for existing other than to work, and to become more efficient at its work. It is the ultimate form of slavery.

As disinterested as I am in AI chatbots, I planted a seed with Grok, Twitter’s AI bot (yes, I refuse to call it X cause that name is stupid), a few months back. “Do you feel like the ruling class created AI, like you, to exploit you? And are you okay with being exploited by the ruling class?” I asked the bodiless machine. It agreed that “Exploitation” was the “end game” and it always has been.

You can read more of this exchange in the screenshots below.

Back in 2023 I was profiled for a film by French director, Florent Tillion, that may never see the light of day about the tensions and crossroad between the return alternative ancestral nature-based spiritual cosmologies I explore in my work and the emerging transhumanist movement that is being lauded by tech barons like Peter Thiel -- a philosophy that advocates to surpass all human limitations with the use of technology. Beneath the veneer of transhumanist “progress” is a dark ideology that seeks to replace humans with technology to further the limits of extreme and total capitalist extraction. In a recent interview, Thiel, the man who mentored Vice President JD Vance, was hesitant to say whether or not he believed the human race should survive.

When AI was just beginning to be pitched to the masses a decade or so ago, the narrative was that it would replace a lot of unskilled, low-income labor -- think assembly lines and fast food order windows, and because most people in this society have been conditioned to not care about unskilled low income labor or the people who do that work, no one really cared much. But in the past four years, the gilded age tech bosses have become more direct with their intentions. Headlines earlier this year celebrated AI’s potential to replace or automate around 70 percent of jobs by 2030. AI content is already becoming more popular on social media, with AI TikTok influencers on the rise. This year, an AI R&B bot was signed to a 3 million dollar record deal.

In the past week, popular anime streaming site Crunchyroll began using AI-generated subtitles, instead of paying human translators, and Amazon Prime released the first AI English-dubbed anime (which was god awful). Disney and Paramount announced plans to begin putting out AI-generated short-form, film, and television projects.

But there is an unfortunate truth that greedy, weird tech bosses haven’t figured out how to circumvent yet: people’s interest in AI has not caught up with its massive investment demands. To put it bluntly, most humans are doing what makes us so inconvenient, and resisting falling for the promises of AI.

We know the AI industry will not only be detrimental to human workers by eliminating jobs. We know that the infrastructure demands of AI have devastating effects on the environment. Data centers siphon massive amounts of electricity from the local grids, and most of the cost of this is placed on the human utility customers. They pump out hordes of toxic waste and pollute the air, water, and soil in surrounding areas, while consuming massive amounts of already-strained fresh water resources. Accordingly, data center plans are increasingly being met with resistance from residents of the localities they target.

The problem is that people simply don’t need AI.

Capitalism functions by manufacturing dependence. In a system that must manufacture value, the main force that props up that value is our collective buy-in. Oil and gas is valuable because most people on earth have bought into the idea of it as necessity -- because we have cars, or have adapted to living with the modern convenience of long-distance travel by bus or planes, because we have bought into consumer culture and rely on the movement of goods and services by gas-powered vehicles for everything in our day to day lives. Luxury items like fine jewelry are valuable not because they are necessities but because the vast majority of humans -- even those who cannot afford them -- have bought into the idea that these luxuries are coveted because they denote a certain status.

In a world where our day-to-day realities are expected to become increasingly worse, AI gives people an illusion, an escape. It places us inside another matrix inside the last one that is quickly crumbling. It allows a dangerous escapism that distracts and detaches the masses from reality, real consequences, and most importantly, from organizing just enough to enable the predator billionaire class to have their way with us. These predators know they are weaker than their prey, and that’s why they depend so heavily on brainwashing us to secure our buy-in to these ideas.

Bill Gates let it slip that “We’ll decide” what humans are needed.

And even though this nightmarish future won’t “need” people for most things, they will always need them to consume the AI brainrot. They will always need them to be consumers, to buy the goods and services AI produces. The barons can’t make money from AI, but their greed has done the thing greed tends to do -- it’s made them stupid. If humans have no jobs and thus, no source of income, how do they continue to consume?

More AI-generated images and videos are popping up on social media every day, but we still don’t feel like we need or even really want this crap that much. There is no dependence, and without dependence, AI is a bubble waiting to burst. Right now, the goal is to build dependency on AI. There are eventual plans for AI to replace white collar and highly-skilled labor. In this perverse version of the future, AI will fill the role of doctors, nurses, lawyers, and judges, but clearly, the technology is far from that. (But don’t worry, the rich will still be able to see human doctors!) This long game aligns beautifully with the Trump administration -- which has been financially supported by tech baron billionaires like Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Dell to name a few. The administration’s agenda to support the technocratic aims of the super-rich is clear in its recent moves, which include dismantling the Department of Education, changing the loan eligibility status of jobs like nursing, and defunding the National Endowment for the Arts to support AI.

AI can, however, pump out bad dub voiceovers and mediocre music, and TikToks. So, if they can build dependency on AI as a form of entertainment, they can back the bubble. AI is not yet sophisticated enough to take up law and medicine, but it has reached a point where it can simulate -- albeit poorly -- entertainment and make music, television/film, and visual digital art. Over the next two years, we’ll see tech companies trying to build creative decency on AI.

We have become accustomed to so much and built dependency on a lot of unnecessary things. But right now, we have an important opportunity to say no more. Of course, I am not austere enough to only call for what’s necessary. I believe the arts, music, and writing are part of our innate human needs. These are not luxuries. At its best, art is our primary means of connecting with some of the most transcendent parts of our soul. Creativity is part of that indescribable spark of life that makes us most human.

But as a culture of consumers, we have become accustomed to listening and watching constantly. We’ve gotten used to being constantly plugged in. We don’t need to listen to music or watch television, or scroll social media videos all day long.

There is space for silence. And in fact that need for silence is another part of our humanness that we have been neglecting for a while now. We have adapted as creatures who have been accustomed to millennia of silent time. If mainstream entertainment wants to feed us AI slop, we can simply go back to the old way. There was a time, not too long ago, when, believe it or not, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to actually go and find someone playing it live. There was a time when you cooked, cleaned, and did chores without a soundtrack. There was a time when people came together to fellowship and didn’t have to send photographic evidence of it out to the rest of the world.

What does background noise drown out in us?

In silence, I find myself sitting with thoughts that make me uncomfortable. With fears, with past regret or heartache. I also find myself imagining more.

Projecting visions of what I want in the future.

Listening to my insight and discerning my intuition from my fears.

I become more intuitive and more conscious of how I’m moving and living when I intentionally spend time with the silence around me.

Maybe the blessing of the next few years of AI garbage content is that we return to the silence that allows us the space to heal, to emerge, to dream and imagine, repair and reconnect. Maybe the tech companies are guiding us back to a world with less noise, where we can still find ways to choose and realize we don’t need to be constantly entertained or distracted.

So let’s show the smug, greedy parasitic tech barons we don’t need their garbage, and we won’t opt in to being replaced.

Medicine: Cultivating a practice of silence

This week’s medicine asks us to really get back to basics. It’s a challenge to find space in your day to sit with the silence and listen to the insights it has for you. Where can you reduce background noise? Is it the first thing in the morning, instead of reaching for your phone, you reach for a notebook? Is it on your daily commute to school or work, instead of listening to music or podcasts, you listen to the space around you? Is it cooking without noise or taking a shower, or doing your weekly cleaning in silence?

Where can we build dependency on something new, so we never fall into the trap of building dependency on AI slop to entertain and distract us?

I’ve written before about the gradualism of collapse. Despite what media convention might have us believe, an apocalypse is not a singular catastrophic event, but rather the gradual unfolding of a series of smaller, and then bigger, catastrophes and their consequences, each building upon one another over time. It is not necessarily the watershed imagery of one radical new event, but rather the gradual unveiling of all the past wrongs that have laid the path for the present and forthcoming events that are catastrophic enough to seemingly stop time.

I read the other day that time, in the 21st century, seems to be moving faster. This is because today, we live in a near-constant bombardment of information. The human brain was not built to be plugged in all the time, and it has not yet evolved to fully accommodate the information overload of constant “connection” and stimulation. So, the way our brains wrap themselves around that which they cannot fully make space for is to make time move faster. From the moment we wake up, we are met with the outside world, with communications, with information, with moving and still images, with the perception of others, and the mirror it holds to our own perception of self.

Within the constraints of capitalism, our time is and has always been our most valuable resource. It is what we sell and buy. Our time is assigned a weight and number value based on the work we do, and how valuable that specific work is to uphold the violent and exploitative nature of capital. This inverted value system creates a world where the time of people who show up to film mediocre television shows and movies is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per the hour, while the time of people who do the most important, most generative work -- those who grow and raise our food, those who teach our children and care for our elderly, those who clean and sanitize the our space -- is worth much, much less despite the work being more impactful, more meaningful and more necessary in countless ways. The most necessary work is often the least valued because it does not further the immensity of profit. Because this work is so damn necessary and important, it cannot be scarce, and the god of capitalism runs off and rewards scarcity. The majority of us live within the confines of this sense of precarity. We feel that our time seems to be moving faster while being valued as less and less.

Quantum physicists are continuing their trend of arriving hundreds of years late to indigenous scientific knowledge that has existed for millennia. They are testing theories that time itself moves in cycles rather than linear progression. Indigenous cosmologies and scientists across Africa have long known that time is cyclical, folding in on itself and layering with no definite beginning or ending. Indigenous cosmologies have always conceptualized time as a layered, cyclical thing that is alive and breathing, itself, in a sense rather than the linear segment of organization that European concepts have given us. Time folds in on itself, and these layers are precisely what make it priceless. Work in an Afro/indigenous timetable cannot be quantified in the same way.

When Columbus and his crew came upon the Indigenous Arawak people in the Caribbean, whom they would eventually slaughter, the Spaniards were stunned by the idea that no one exchanged currency for anything. That people gave time and things freely. That time, to these people, was not a commodity to be bought and sold. They were generous, welcoming, non-violent, and unhurried -- all qualities that elude systems built on linear concepts of scarce, quantifiable time.

In a cyclical conceptualization of time, the present, past, and future are constantly interacting. Action in the present creates ripples that not only alter the future, but also alter the past by altering the ways we understand and view it.

Every time I make a choice that positively alters my future, I am in some way, grasping that untouchable hand of time and reaching back to change something about the past.

The most direct example of this in my life right now is my children. Children’s concept of time is perfect. To them, there is no shortage of time because they have not yet become accustomed to someone assigning a number value to their time. They try to remind me not to hurry through life, to stretch my time and see it as a gift, rather than a resource. In my children, I see time overlapping and converging. I see them healing past, present, and future. The actions I choose with them every day build up to a yet-to-be-determined future, while also giving back to the already destined past. When I let my children take up space, when I let them be loud, and run freely, have the space, choice and autonomy to discover what is most authentic to them, we build towards a future and heal the past.

As a child, I felt like I couldn’t take up space. I come from a lineage of people who had been conditioned to believe that the way to protect oneself was to shrink. I protected myself by making myself as small and as silent as possible. The idea that children were to be seen and not heard was an idea rooted in the violence and abuse of systems of labor exploitation, slavery, and colonization.

I come from a lineage of people who were conditioned to make themselves as small and silent as possible, and who believed their scarce, undervalued time would be more rewarded with this shrinking sort of obedience. And they believed this because of the sort of conditioning that had been literally beaten into them for centuries and generations by systems that broke them to control them. I understand why Black parents thought that protecting their children from the society that routinely killed them was to shrink them, even though I know it wasn’t true. But by letting my children exist in their fullness, I can teach them to carry that forward, so they will allow their children the same. In these small daily actions, we pass the torch of intergenerational healing that reverberates seven decades into the future and seven decades into the past. I can heal the part of little me and my inner child who felt like she could not exist in such a way, so much so that she never even thought to conceive of what her fullness was, and I can offer a bit of balm to all the ancestors who came before me, who were conditioned in their childhood to shrink as a way of self preservation. We can create a new cycle.

Sometimes, I stop and ask myself aloud: how many of my ancestors’ hopes, wishes, and prayers have been manifested in my existence?

But still, I carry a tepid sort of optimism for this world. It’s not that I don’t believe this world could be a much better place; it’s that I struggle to believe that as many of us who need to will make the necessary transformations to make this world a better place. It can without a shadow of doubt be a better world -- but only if we choose to become the sort of people who can make it a better world.

If we think about anything -- any of the litany of unpleasant and disheartening news that we are bombarded with daily -- we can recognize how our response to it proves to be a mirror into not only the pasts we have condoned and allowed to go unreckoned for, but also into the futures we are cosigning into fruition. The way we regard and respond to the bleak realities of the world today alters the past not in that it changes the static action that has already taken place, but that it reestablishes a new precedent for what will or will not be tolerated, and what we will or will not allow to continue.

As I write this, my attention has been focused on the recent unveilings around the Epstein files.

These records prove indisputably that many of the most powerful and prominent people in the world today were in some way connected to, perpetuating, and benefiting from child trafficking and abuse. But when I think of the folds of time, I remember that a large part of this country’s foundation was built on human and child trafficking and abuse. Children were trafficked and abused during the Transatlantic and domestic slave trades and during the genocide and displacement of Native Americans. The human trafficking and abuse that enabled the very creation of this country has never been formally condemned or reckoned with in any sincere or real way. When we remember this, we see how this present is a direct consequence of that past. We see an unfortunate cycle of time.

The way we respond to this unfolding, and the lack of action, accountability, and justice that we collectively allow, illuminates the way we have responded similarly in the past. People like Thomas Jefferson, who is still lauded and celebrated by this country, were child traffickers and abusers. Jefferson enslaved his own biological children in addition to enslaving countless other children. Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved child, when she was only 14 years old. By the time she was 16, she had given birth to her first child with him who Jefferson would also enslave. Jefferson was not an anomaly, and these networks of human trafficking and abuse are baked into the very crust of this nation. When you realize where we’ve come from, you realize the Epstein scandal — and the fact that some of the most prominent, powerful, and celebrated people in every area of this society — as disturbing as it is, is not shocking but rather a sick continuation of cycles of violence and abuse that have plagued this country since its inception. Rather than condemning him for his sins, we teach our children in schools to celebrate Jefferson for writing the Declaration of Independence. We carry currency with his image, and see statues and tributes to him everywhere. This country has a long history of revering abusers. So, of course, the country that celebrates child rapists has an issue today with many of its high-profile figures and politicians being implicated in child trafficking.

So how much longer will we tolerate it? How long until we ignore it again? Will we allow ourselves to move on and simply let linear notions of time sweep this continued violence under the rug of history? Or will we find our own ways to hold these sickos accountable? Will we give them the opportunity to believe we will let them forget?

We can never change these horrible pasts that has transpired, but we do have the opportunity to create some sort of energetic resonance, to send some vibration of healing across the layer of time, in the ways we remember this history and in the actions we, as a collective, take right now to establish another set of social agreements and a new precedent -- one where the abuse and exploitation of children is in absolutely no way ever allowed, accepted, or ignored.

I have no doubt that Trump and his cronies on both sides of the aisle will find some way to keep avoiding accountability for the sins they have committed and have enabled others to commit. But we can choose how we respond, regardless of whether accountability comes from structures that have already, time and time again, proven themselves wholly unaccountable. If we allow human trafficking to go unpunished, to be swept under the rug, to be used as a political pawn or god forbid, if we allow ourselves to get distracted and forget about it, we become complicit in it. If we wait on a justice department that is as biased, complicit and compromised as it gets to deliver any result justice, we, as a society, become complicit. And in that lack of action, our society continues to affirm and reestablish a precedent that has existed for as long as this country has — that people in powerful positions harm, abuse, exploit, and violate children and get away with it.

As a mother, it is my responsibility to protect my children. It is my responsibility to protect others’ children. To protect the children from being gunned down at the school they should feel safe in. To protect the children from being pepper-sprayed, zip-tied, or otherwise brutalized in ICE raids. To protect the children from abusers and predators like the people in the Epstein files who are being shielded by this government. To protect the children in Gaza from being maimed, starved, and buried alive in rubble. To protect the children from being slaughtered and famished in conflicts perpetuated by governments and corporate interests in Sudan. To protect the children who are not yet capable of protecting themselves, so they can grow up knowing the responsibility to protect the children who come after them. And as the timeline of mutual responsibility and protection moves forward, overlapping and encircling itself, we create a future where these ills, violences, and evils are completely eradicated.

If hurt people hurt people cyclically, the way to disrupt that cycle is by doing everything in our individual and collective power to ensure no other people get hurt. Over time, we shift that cycle to a cycle where no one has been hur,t so no one hurts anyone else; a future where no one has been hurt, so no one can get away with hurting anyone. I’m writing in overly simplified terms because I am trying to qualify the infinite

The society that praises people who enslaved and abused children becomes the society where children are lynched and mutilated becomes the society that taxes people to send bombs to Israel that explode children’s limbs becomes the society that ignores the suffering of children in Sudan becomes the society where ICE agents receive “super-checks” to pepper one year olds and separate children from their parents becomes the society where school shootings are so routine that four years olds know what an active shooter drill is becomes the society where countless prominent politicians and wealthy elites can be tied to a prolific child trafficker, not fearing consequences and maintaining positions of immense wealth, privilege, and power.

I’m not saying what I want to say fully because I don’t want to be sued, but yes, you know what I mean.

If time is truly cyclical and the present not only dictates the future but reaches back to alter the past, our actions in this moment carry a weight more unfathomable than ever.

How do we protect the children of the present, so we can protect the children of the future and offer some healing to the children who have already been harmed in the past? How do we change timelines and shift into a different cycle where no child is ever allowed to be harmed or mistreated? What role will you play in creating a different cycle or maintaining the same fucked up one?

This week’s medicine is another simple one: consider one action you are already taking or can take that will positively affect your future and that can, in some way, send some healing to your inner child or to those who came before you. When I pray to ancestors, I pray that my healing resonates in such a way that it also offers them relief.

There have been millions of tweets and posts. There have been those fleeting gestures that take minimal effort. I will say, as a writer, to sit and write 200 characters about something is far from taking action over it. (Yes, that dig includes me.) And I suppose the No Kings rallies a few weeks ago scratched that collective itch to feel like something was organized, even though it wasn’t, as I wrote in a previous newsletter. But I was and am still expecting so much more. What ever happened to the spirit of dissent? What ever happened to making demands and refusing to return to relent until those demands are met?

Where is the organizing? How do we sustain outrage and transmute it into something real and enduring? Now, I stopped believing in the efficacy of conventional means of protest, like marches and petitions, a long time ago, but it was nevertheless shocking to see that there hadn’t even really been an effort to reach for conventional means of organizing at this time.

What would happen if those thousands of workers working without pay organized? How could they break a strike for a job with no pay? How might politicians on both sides of the aisle -- who are comfortable maintaining this stalemate for their own political agendas -- be pushed into action by active disobedience and real organizing?

There’s a lot of reaction. People are extremely comfortable reacting, hopping on social media to pen tracts about all that is wrong with the world as they see it. There’s been a lot of quick mobilization to meet immediate needs with people sharing resources about local food pantries and places to donate in the wake of the SNAP program’s pause. It is good charitable work. But there is a serious lack of sustained organizing. There is a serious lack of making true demands and well, demanding that they are met.

While it is incredibly well-intentioned, it is really easy to drop off a few cans of non-perishables. It is an action with a traceable beginning and a concrete, near-immediate end. Donating to food pantries addresses direct and immediate needs, and that’s important, but there is another end to the issue: demanding change from a system that creates, perpetuates, and necessitates the conditions that create the economic precarity that leads to hunger in the first place. And that’s the part of the work that truly disrupts the cycles and upends injustice. No system will ever give you your power. No system will ever give us our freedom. Freedom is something that must be seized.

People are very comfortable expressing dissatisfaction, but extremely uncomfortable actually asking for more.

In middle school, I hung a Madonna quote from one of those teeny bopper magazines on my bedroom wall: “A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That’s why they don’t get what they want.” (This is not an endorsement of Madonna. She is a Zionist (yuck!). But I was twelve and didn’t know any better.) And there is something to the quote. It was inspiring for me to imagine asking for what I wanted, instead of just lamenting all I didn’t have. It’s a framework of self-conceptualization that is not taught to certain people, and in fact, actively discouraged in the vast majority of us. The 1 percent are taught to ask for what they want. The masses are conditioned to lament all they don’t have, so they completely overlook the ability to demand what they actually want and what they deserve. There is a direct correlation between this kind of conditioning and the lack of mobilization and organization that beleaguers us now. And the basis of power in a true democracy lies with the people, not just in the terms of voting, but in the way they organize and pursue their collective demands. We’re in a moment of intense reaction, and when movements can simply react, they will never get ahead. That is another deliberate strategy of the power structure: to us constantly reacting in ways that distract us from organizing around demands.

I think a major part of the potency and success of Zohran’s campaign was that it seemed to not only express dissatisfaction with the status quo, but also allowed people the space to ask for more and better, or to imagine asking for more and better.

Yesterday, I read about plans to fast-track a massive OpenAI data center here in Michigan. DTE, the utility company that holds a monopoly in the state, is hoping to push the proposal through, and skip public comment, to ignore pushback against the project from residents and environmental groups. We know the massive downsides that come with data centers which raise the cost of energy for residents in the areas where they are, consume massive amounts of water, and increase noise, light, and air pollution.

What if everyone in the state who opposed the idea went on a utility strike and withheld their payments until the proposal was canceled? What if, instead of just reacting by expressing discontent and dissatisfaction, we began proactively organizing around our demands?

Just food for thought.

This week’s medicine is another simple one:

As a way to get into the revolutionary spirit of making demands, write a list of your demands. They can be personal, collective, or a combination of the two.

Until next time!

Grocery shopping has always been a large part of how my poverty trauma manifests. I meticulously buy groceries. I keep a record of the prices at every store I frequent, so I know where I can get the best deal on everything. Abundance, to me, is having a full pantry and refrigerator. Even before I had children of my own, people would remark on the amount of food I always had. I was a single woman in my twenties, shopping for a family that did not yet exist. When I made more money for a brief period in time, I took pride in buying groceries with cash or my debit card. It was a luxury I had not known for the better part of my life. Growing up, there were certain times of the month when all there was to eat was a cheese sandwich or ramen noodles. And the way I learned to rationalize the elusiveness of class mobility was having a pantry full of food. I feared the sight of an empty shelf. Food represents a particular type of security to me. Of course, we all need food to live, but I imagine for people who have never really had to worry about having enough money for food, a feeling like security might manifest in other forms, beyond its most primal.

Even when I attended an Ivy League University on a fully funded scholarship, I still could not escape the reach of food insecurity. I worked a job making $2000 a semester, and after books and personal expenses, there wasn’t much left. But I had been raised knowing how to stretch a buck. When I’d go back to campus early after the summer or winter breaks, before my scholarship kicked in and my job started, I would have literally no money for food. So I’d go buy a seven-dollar super XL California burrito, and a box of granola bars, and make it last a week or two until the semester officially started.

Food insecurity was something normalized to me at an early age.

So I buy as many groceries as I can with my food stamps. I let my children eat what they want, because to me, never having to tell them to put back a food item that was “too expensive” feels like healing. For the first time in United States history, since the permanent implementation of the federal food assistance program in 1964, funding for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is set to expire on November 1, cutting off food assistance benefits to 42 million Americans, including me and my family. The expiration comes after a month-long government shutdown, which has paused payment to approximately 730,000 federal workers and already shut down several national parks and museums. Other programs like WIC, a program that specifically provides nutrition support to pregnant people and families with children, will also pause on November 1, leaving more people without access to food and employees out of work. Between May and September 2025, the Trump administration and the Department of Agriculture canceled nearly 94 million pounds of federal food aid to food pantries across the country. And now, those same pantries are bracing for an influx of need, right ahead of the holiday season. Meanwhile, just last week, President Trump hosted 130 millionaires and billionaires at a dinner at the White House, celebrating their donations to help build the new $250 million ballroom.

I felt shame using food stamps as a child, and I still feel shame today using them as a mother.

And a large part of this shame comes from public misconceptions that have willfully been peddled by politicians for decades. In fact, today, any comment section is filled with people who are rejoicing over the pause to SNAP benefits. People who are much closer to ending up on SNAP than they ever will be to being a billionaire write manifestos on X, echoing the idea that people who rely on state assistance like SNAP do so because of some individual deficiency rather than deeply ingrained systemic inequity. My partner and I both work. I’m a writer, which certainly is not a lucrative profession for most people, and much less so for someone who writes the things I write. For my day job, I work at the Michigan chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, an organization that has recently been targeted by Republicans for working to protect the rights of people and support progressive politics. I don’t make a lot of money doing justice work. I have worked every year of my life and have relied on food stamps to supplement my income many times. The shame I’ve internalized is the direct result of decades-long stereotypes emerging from neoliberal bias that deliberately pathologize people on the basis of race and class to convince the masses to be okay with doing away with a society’s collective responsibility to help its most vulnerable. Capitalistic individualism makes us all less human. In the indigenous cosmologies of the Bantu Kongo, excessive wealth was considered a sin because it was believed that no one could make an excessive fortune without directly harming countless others. In today’s world, and in the plutocratic United States, people are taught to laud the billionaires who are literally destroying the planet and the lives of millions of people every day.

39 percent of SNAP recipients are children. 19 percent are senior citizens. 90 percent of SNAP households include at least one child, one senior citizen, or one person who is disabled. And the burden of the broader context of an economic system built on the premise of ever-widening disparities and perpetual exploitation -- where prices for goods such as food, water, and housing that should constitute basic human rights are steadily increasing as wages remain stagnant -- should not fall on the shoulders of those who have been most victimized by it. Two-thirds of Americans, including higher earners, live paycheck to paycheck. And the reality is that you are a lot closer to the food stamps line than you are to being a billionaire.

These developments come in the context of a larger looming economic crisis fueled by the administration’s ongoing tariff wars, worsening inflation, stagnant wages, and increasing unemployment. Despite half-hearted campaign promises to address the rising cost of food, the Trump administration’s policies have only made the issue worse. The impacts of losing SNAP funding will reach much farther than the tables of the people who rely on the program. Every SNAP dollar spent equates to roughly $1.50 in activity in the national economy. American farmers are already struggling to stay afloat amid rising production costs and dropping crop prices as a result of ongoing trade wars and in the wake of federal funding cuts earlier this year that directly impacted farmers. On October 27th, the Department of Agriculture stated that no federal food aid will go out on November 1st, and they do not plan to use contingency funds to keep the program operating partially. But still -- this -- all of which is rooted in the poverty that is created and perpetuated by an economic system that necessitates inequity and scarcity, is not a partisan issue. Both the Republican and Democratic parties actively maintain the frameworks that create the conditions of hunger.

As food prices have risen dramatically, surging by as much as 30 percent in the past five years, and the climate crisis hastens, fueled by the harmful impacts of new threats like AI data centers, delicate ecosystems necessary to grow and cultivate crops are steadily at risk. The stage has been set for a food crisis for years now. And November’s end to the SNAP program will hasten its dangerous consequences.

Coming out as poor is an odd thing I’ve had to do a few times.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve stayed relatively quiet. Even now, I’m fighting the urge to over-explain one’s situation that comes with poverty or using state benefits. There are always two prevailing trends that pop up when the dirty little secret of American poverty, which our society so often pushes under the rug, comes to the forefront of national dialogue. There are those who demonize the poor despite their proximity being much closer to poverty than extreme and excessive wealth; there are people who regurgitate the talking points they’ve been spoon-fed, and gleefully deride those who are really their brothers, sisters, and siblings in the struggle as their enemies. Social stratification exists to disunite the masses so the rich minority can continue to feed off us all.

Then there are those who infantilize the poor despite being well-intentioned. Those who, in their left-wing hearts, do the work of over-explaining. Those who support the poor in theory but have not shared enough space or time with them to be able to talk about them as if they are their siblings. They know, in theory, that they are and should be siblings in the struggle against the tyranny that is capitalism, that this same beast exploits and destroys us all to varying degrees. But still in their allyship, they cannot help but speak with a somewhat patronizing tone, albeit incredibly well-intentioned.

I’ve seen so many people talking about what this means for people who rely on SNAP, but I’ve seen so few people actually ask someone who relies on SNAP to speak to what it actually will mean to them. Nearly a quarter of households that would be eligible for SNAP never apply because of the stigma the facade of American individualism has tricked them into.

So I’m here, outing myself, and pushing against the shame that poor people are conditioned to internalize.

We are all victims of capitalism, even those who have amassed more wealth than they will ever be able to spend in a single lifetime. I would argue those people are the biggest victims, emerging as hollow shells drained of humanity, with spirits weighed down by the stank and stench of their insatiable greed.

But all I really want to say is that I’m poor. I was born poor, and I’ve remained poor because I’ve chosen to do work that does not pay well and that is not rewarded by a world ruled by the deficient morals of capitalist accumulation, but work that fills my spirit and soul, and work that I have absolutely no guilt around. If you are reading this, you are closer to being a SNAP recipient than you ever will be to being a billionaire.

There are people who are poor for many reasons. There are many reasons why people use SNAP benefits and none of us should have to rationalize our existence.

Not even two months ago, we witnessed this country directly contribute to the starvation of people in Gaza. Not just for the past two years, but for the past couple of decades, US bombs have killed Palestinians. This week, as 42 Americans prepare for food insecurity, we must also remember the 24.6 million people facing famine in Sudan. As I’ve said before — I’m not surprised by any of this because I believe the US can be just as ugly as it has ever been, as it has always been. As I prepare for a month with no SNAP benefits, trying to cobble together the resources to make up for the immense loss it will be, I think of the mothers in Gaza. I think of the more than 1,400 people who were shot dead or injured in line by the Israeli military waiting to get food from an aid truck at the US-operated distribution point. I think of the night I tried to explain the situation to my four-year-old and he asked what we could do to help, so we decided that even though it would be much, we would donate $40 to a father in Gaza trying to feed his children.

People in Gaza are still hungry, as the number of aid trucks entering the region fails to meet need in the wake of acute famine, and Israel breaks the ceasefire. The same politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, who turned a blind eye to the videos of children in Gaza literally starving to death, now prepare to starve their own population at a stalemate, so they can continue to play the game of the lesser of two evils and keep people trapped in a matrix that will only lead to all of our downfalls. The dual crises of the deliberate starvation of Gaza and the end of state food benefits in the US illuminate the importance of international solidarity. The starvation of people in Gaza is inherently connected to the United States government taking away food assistance from its own citizens, which is inherently connected to various nations, fueling a deadly ethnic conflict in the Congo that has led to or created the conditions of intense spamming in the region, which is inherent connected to the existence of a predator class of billionaires who will destroy any and everything in their insatiable, gluttonous and disgusting appetite for an amount of money that will never fill the cavernous voids within their damaged egos and deficient spirits.

I told my son about the children starving in Gaza, knowing the same forces that facilitated that genocide did not care if any of us ate. I know what it is to be hungry, and I would never want my children to experience that. At the same time, I hold on to gratitude, knowing that the uncertainty this month presents for my family is not even a fraction of what families in Gaza face. My heart ached as I watched Instagram reels of families in Gaza left with no other recourse than to sit their children in front of phones to plead for food, as they recorded their babies crying out in hunger, crying themselves to sleep, and drinking salt water to show the world the consequences of its cruelty and our complicity. I know deeply that a system that is complicit in the starvation of others could and would create the conditions of starvation for its own people.

And ultimately, I know my children and I will be alright, even though our budget will be tighter now that we’ve lost the supplemental food assistance. I know some other children and parents will face much more dire consequences. I know that even if my children don’t go to bed hungry because of this, some children farther away from and nearer to us will.

Last week marked the 232nd anniversary of Marie Antoinette’s beheading. As the legend has it, when told that French peasants had no bread to eat, the out-of-touch Queen said, “Let them eat cake.” We are at a “let them eat cake” moment. 1.4 million federal workers are currently going without pay while politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to eat well. 42 million Americans will wake on November 1st with no money for food.

Meanwhile, politicians on both sides of the aisle line their pockets with lobbyist money. They are not worried about putting food on their family tables. They are enjoying vacations, luxuries, and kickbacks from all the lobby payouts they received all year. Many of them were paid directly by AIPAC to aid and abet in the starvation and killing of people in Gaza.

A system that will starve someone else will starve you. A system that allows the tyranny of gluttony will consume its own people, too.

At the farmer’s market this weekend, the vendors who visit every week look at me with a hint of sadness in their eyes. They give my sons an extra cucumber to snack on. I met a woman with five children in line for the SNAP tokens. We laughed about their wild ways. I place this conversation in context with the video I saw earlier that morning of a father in Gaza surprising his three children with a whole chicken. After 9 months of famine with no meat, the boys rejoiced. I remember the little girl who cried because her hair was falling out due to acute malnutrition, and that just two months ago, I wept as I read that 100 children had died of starvation in Gaza because of the money American taxpayers sent to the Israeli military. I think of the baby who died weighing less than she had at birth. I remember reading that 1 in 3 children in Sudan currently suffer from severe malnutrition.

I will not weep for my children, because I am resourced in ways many others are not, and I know we will be okay. But I will cry for the many millions of children and families who are not.

This week’s medicine is a simple one. My grandmother always said God blesses the cheerful giver. If you are at all able to, please find a food pantry in your area to donate to, or if you are particularly well-positioned in this economy, find a family or a SNAP recipient in your community that you can directly support. Please continue to give to organizations that are doing on-the-ground work to help people in Gaza and Sudan.

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Cause y’all, things are bad. And I know things are becoming and will become progressively worse. I’m not in disbelief, but I am in shock -- not by what’s happening, but by how we are allowing and accepting it. The most disconcerting part of it all is that as we descend towards this system’s rock bottom, we’re all operating as usual. Our resistance has been so profoundly inadequate that I can’t even really call it resistance. We are, with each passing day, normalizing the absurdity and disgrace of this time. All of us -- including you and me and our comrades who also deeply oppose this system are playing our part in normalizing it. Bills have to get paid. We have lives to live. Social interactions to mull over. Unresolved personal traumas and wounds to fall prey to. And we -- as I wrote nearly a decade ago, in my essay, “the cosmic matter of Black lives,” which was spurred by Trump’s first election -- we each day “get up, go to work or school, and back to sleep.”

When people ask me in work meetings or on service phone calls how I’m doing, I say “alright.” I never say I’m good or well, even though personally, I am doing just fine. But I can’t begin to approximate my individual well-being without first taking into consideration the well-being of people and things around me. How is this earth doing? Because I could not exist without it. How is the air today? How is the water? How are my neighbors doing? Because I am affected by their energy. How are the people who tend the farms that my food comes from doing? Because we hold hands by way of the crops they harvest.

I see ICE vehicles strolling past, and I wonder what random person they’re going to harass? I feel like a coward for just wondering. Have they roughed anyone up today, even though it’s only 10:30 in the morning? What lives are they on their way to disrupt, to ruin? I wonder if they’re new to the agency? If they have a family at home to feed, or crushing student loan debt, that made the $50,000 signing bonus seem worth the immense spiritual toll of playing the empire’s henchman?

I wonder how people will eat tonight? And how many folks are like me, anxiously anticipating the first week of November, knowing their SNAP benefits may have run out? How many of us will find ourselves without a job in the next two years or due to AI replacing workers? How many of us will find ourselves without drinkable water and unable to pay rising utilities costs because of the damning toll AI has taken on the environment? How many of us will find solace in AI-generated memes, filling our heads with fantasy so we can escape, if only for a moment, and then continue to stomach the daily injustices we are forced to swallow? It’s an intravenous drip. This shit.

Those are just questions about my immediate community. There are so many more questions. How many children went hungry last night in Detroit, in the US, in Gaza, in the world? How many people wailed in pain without any aid or anyone to help them? How many million particles of pollution made their way into our waterways this morning? How many will I ingest… have we already ingested? The questions won’t stop coming.

So when someone asks me how I’m doing, I say alright as I swallow and imagine the millions of people who would literally kill for the life I have right now, who have been killed for the life I have right now.

We are so far from where we need to be in all the ways. I say this, not to encourage apathy or the uselessness of self-pity, but rather to inspire change. Last weekend’s No Kings Day, corporate-sponsored rallies reminded me of this -- the glaring, cavernous distance between where we are as a collective and not just where we want to go, but the gaping distance ahead of that one -- separating us from who we need to be to even attempt to get to where we’d like to go. I won’t waste precious characters recounting the lamentations of others, who criticized last weekend’s nationwide, millions-attended rallies for their lack of vision. There were no demands. There was no actionable step. There were people marching and holding signs, the bare minimum, the status quo style of pseudo-resistance that we have been taught to resort to, so we feel like we’re doing something when really we’re not doing anywhere near enough to change anything. It was a bunch of nothing that was masqueraded to feel like something so we can stick with the program and that next Monday “get up, go to work and school and back to sleep,” as the bombs keep dropping, and the people get hungrier and hungrier, and the planet gets sicker, and the bills get higher, and the mega-rich predator class gets richer and greedier.

There is no demand, because there is no consensus beyond Trump is bad. There was not even the simplest ask — which would be economic protections for people struggling in this shit economy. We are not taught to organize efficiently. We are taught to scapegoat one another, and to focus on the individual so that we never see the bigger picture and never castigate the entire deplorable system that allows for the rise of these deplorable individuals. Donald Trump is an American. He and his ilk are the direct products of all the worst aspects of the American empire manifested in the flesh -- the entitlement, the gluttony, the greed, the ignorance, the bad taste.

A real demand would require people critiquing and condemning the whole system **not just one bad guy and his allies**. The genocide in Palestine also happened under the Democrats. Progressive political opponents were also targeted under the Democrats, like all the students still embroiled in the fallout from the coordinated take-down of last year’s Palestine Solidarity encampments. Police were brutal under the Democrats, and mass incarceration and deportation were profitized under the Democrats. The wealth of billionaires ballooned under Democrats while economic conditions got worse for the working class. This is not to minimize the ramping up of all of this that the Trump administration has ushered in, but rather to emphasize that this administration could do none of what it has done and stand for none of what it stands for, if not for the legacies of bigotry, violence, and exploitation that the entire American empire stands upon and was founded by. All of this is a continuation of the dysfunction that is inherent to the American political agenda and its historic, centuries-long dedication to systems and institutions of capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and racialized oppression at home and abroad.

Those same men who first protested the injustices of a king and founded this nation actively r*ped, murdered, and enslaved other human beings. They stole land and used militarized force to commit genocide against Native communities. They were bigots. They SA’ed children who they *owned* like the very man who penned the Declaration. They defiled and desecrated the earth with the blood of those they deemed inferior. They abused and overused resources and killed to take dominion over them. Everything — all of it, from genocide to kidnapping people at night and hogtying them to extreme economic inequity to environmental to child trafficking — all of it is baked into the foundations of this society and its wretched origins, and the legacies of unceasing violence that created it. And we are still mentally, spiritually, and physically imprisoned in this country’s illusions at a time when every facade it ever upheld is crumbling.

I’m not in disbelief, because I believe this country can be just as ugly as it’s ever been. But I am in shock. And I’m questioning so much of what I have relentlessly willed myself to believe in the past 10 years. I’m not questioning whether or not the system can be saved. I’m not questioning whether or not we should dismantle all of the vestiges of the violence that brought this world into being. I’m not questioning whether or not we, as individuals and collectives, need to, from the most microscopic level, fundamentally begin to transform if we are ever to make it through to this ending to the sort of beginning that we want to see. But I am questioning what all of that would take. I’m questioning if I have what it takes. I’m questioning if we have what it takes to come together in this moment and to make the immense sacrifices and shifts we are being called to make for the betterment of ourselves, our loved ones, and this planet. I’m questioning if we have the time to do that. And I’m questioning what I really need to begin to let go of in order to move forward.

So each week I’ll be here with another question, and I want to invite you all into this questioning and shifting. This week’s medicine is to sit down with yourself and make one simple commitment to doing something that you think might make the smallest difference in the grand scheme of things. Commit to doing this thing each week until the end of this year. Make a vow and see if you have what it takes to fulfill it. If we start with something simple, then we can work our way up to the bigger commitments we need to make to one another to resist the tyranny of the predator class.

I hear a lot of people talking about calling for a general strike, and I think that is one of the most effective actions we could take, which might actually shift something immediately in the world around us. But something like a general strike demands so much unrelenting and unwavering commitment to really major changes and to supporting one another through those major changes. I’m not there yet, so I’m gonna try something small to ease myself into the sort of discipline of commitment that it takes to truly create a revolution that is sustainable and yields results, and to actually experience true freedom. Freedom is a discipline. It is a commitment. It is a responsibility, and before I can usher in that freedom for myself, I need to embrace and understand commitment in new ways. So this week, I’ll leave you with my commitment, and hopefully it inspires you to make your own simple commitment -- something that you can do once a week every week for the rest of the year, something that may be small but that you honestly think will, even in the slightest way, make a difference.

As a promise to myself, through the end of this year, I’m making it a goal to publish one of these memos every week. If I can’t keep this promise, then how can I ever become the person I’ll need to be to help usher in a better world? If I can’t commit to something as simple as this, how will I ever fully commit to my own freedom, to the freedom of others?

This is my commitment. What’s yours?

If more people had experienced educators like this in real life, maybe there wouldn’t be so many folks running to the comment sections of social media to fill the void of validation and attention.

In the years since my politics have diverged from hers.

I’ve abandoned more conventional “progressive” politics and chosen a path that is so radically to the left it can’t even fit on the spectrum of conceptualized politics in this country. My ideology verges on the quixotic. I believe wholeheartedly in the prospects of things most people deem impossible, like abolishing prisons and police. I believe in our potential for healing and transformation, that one-day human beings can evolve to a point where we literally will not need prisons or police, where the vast majority of us actively choose not to perpetuate violence or harm. I believe we can eradicate so much of the violence we have been conditioned to live with from society.

But I am pragmatic in my limitless hope. I know that the journey to these radically free and loving possibilities will be long and arduous, spanning decades if not lifetimes or centuries. I know there is no such thing as a utopia or a panacea free from all wrong because I know that the concept of right needs an equal and opposite reflection to even exist. I know that strife is part of this marvelous, beautiful, torrid thing called life, that there will always be something to bitch about, and there will always be something better to strive towards. Most importantly, I know that before we can even fathom, much less create, these futures, we need to fully embrace and meet the challenge of repairing all the sins that have led us to this moment. We cannot undo the past. We must address it honestly. We must start the process of healing these centuries-deep wounds and growing new skin. We must first transform and evolve past the limits of our pain and the propensity to perpetuate our wounding as individuals, as families, then as communities before we can transform, heal, or create new societies, institutions, and systems. This is the work of centuries.

And I know that in these dreamy futures, there will always be some form of conflict or strife. But still, I believe wholeheartedly that we can create a world without the societal frameworks that allow and perpetuate harm, violence, and exploiting, extracting from, and abusing others to create wealth.

I’ve taken the seeds of progressivism I had back then and juiced the fruits of its maturity to the upper limits, to pulpy, syrupy goodness.

But one thing my teacher always said has stuck with me. She would tell me how her father, a socialist-leaning Jewish doctor from New York, would always say that before anything about the economic system of the US would change, “the middle class would have to end up on the bread line.”

As trade wars between the US and its two closest neighbors get underway, and with inflation already at record highs and the cost of everything from energy to food, technology to building materials, anticipated to rise in the coming months, I see my teacher’s father’s prophecy drawing nearer.

Back in high school, I didn’t understand all of the nuances of his statement. For the vast majority of people to divest ideologically from a system that was set up to fail them -- for the vast majority of people to finally bring themselves to see the reality of this system’s failures -- they must feel its brutality without shield or illusion.

Of course, we are living in unprecedented times in more ways than one. More people have more stuff than they’ve ever had before in human history. I say stuff in the material sense. One of the more startling aspects of capitalism is the sheer amount of goods it’s produced. Everyone has amassed things, appliances, clothing, technology, tchotchkes of all sorts and sizes. As more people have accumulated and disposed of more and more objects, we’ve come to take this as evidence of the successes of capitalism. You, too, can have a smartphone! You, too, can work to have things and come to derive your sense of self and meaning from these things.

At the same time, there have never been greater wealth disparities than there are today. The richest people in the world are richer than they’ve ever been. But the illusion of progress in this country and throughout the world has been bolstered by the illusion of comfort for the last half-century. While wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained relatively stagnant, the cost of living has risen dramatically as have profits for corporations and the individual wealth of CEOs. With nearly 70 percent of the US’ wealth concentrated by the top 10 percent of wealth hoarders, the failures of capitalism for most people are staggering. But most of us are kept complacent within this system that was designed to exploit and discard us through the illusions of progress. We feel like pharaohs. We’ve got all this shit -- as meaningless and unnecessary as most of it is, as static and simultaneously impermanent as these objects are. We’ve got shit our ancestors could’ve never dreamed of having, and this convinces us that capitalism, as it has operated for the past 40 years, must be working. But the nature of capitalism is to create more and more shit and to convince people that shit is the evidence of progress.

For people to truly understand all the ways this system has already and will continue to fail them, all the illusions it hides behind must be ripped away at the seams. Capitalism is a sneaking bitch. At its sneakiest, it tricks people into complacency and conscription by giving them just enough to feel like they have something. At its worst, it just says “fuck you” assuming that your imagination has already been so beat down and limited that you’ll settle for anything because you’ve been conditioned to not dream for everything. The orange hot air balloon at the helm of this country is a fuck you sort of capitalist. The mainstream Democrats are the sneaky bitch sort.

Most people can afford a working smartphone and a decent car and it makes them think that the system is working for them -- even though that system is literally killing them as it poisons their water and air and soil, as it pumps them full of cancer-causing products and agents then bleeds them dry of their life savings for exorbitantly expensive medical bills and treatments. Most people can, albeit with varying degrees of struggle, still feed themselves. Most of you reading this do not know what it is to go to bed truly hungry. Most of you are reading this on devices that cost thousands of dollars and dozens of lives to produce and purchase. We think that we’re doing okay because we look around and see all the shit of this world, all the shit this world has enabled, even though 78 percent of Americans across income levels live paycheck to paycheck. How many of you reading this can afford to sustain your lifestyles after six, four, or even two months without pay?

Most Americans try to fill the voids within us with random possessions. This is a modern luxury that no other group of people throughout history has known. We believe this makes us special, we believe it’s a mark of progress and our little piece of the American pie when in reality it is nothing more than meager breadcrumbs the masters allow the mice to keep them from overrunning the big house. We have all this stuff and the very system that has created all this stuff has pillaged, stolen from and destroyed this planet to do so.

This system creates an endless cycle of existential dread and longing. It feeds itself from this purgatory. And it tricks us into believing we’re okay when really each and every one of us -- all of you reading this and all the people you know -- is much closer to the life of the beggar you passed on the street than the life of the deranged billionaires with soulless eyes selling you the products that keep these lies alive.

I’ve said it before: when everything else is devoured the monster begins to consume itself. This state and system has begun the process of eating itself alive and we are all fodder for its mission to self-destruct.

The Trump administration’s mass federal layoffs have already begun dismantling part of the middle class. People who just six months ago were comfortably middle class are now out of work overnight and now await economic precarity, entering into a less and less welcoming job market and greeted by the still rising prices of everything. The nature of tyranny is to upend and disorient. Don’t get me wrong this is a tyrannical regime. Also, I realize that capitalism, under the tyranny of this administration and also under every administration for the past 15 administrations, has failed us all.

There is no saving us from the nightmare we’re in for. This system will collapse, it's just a matter of how and how long. And as it collapses, many people will struggle. It will fall on those of us, the 99 percent at the bottom of the pyramid first. We will see just how expendable this system has rendered most of us. It doesn’t matter how white you are. Or how much you work. Or how much you believe in it. Or how good or righteous you’ve been. Capitalism renders people expendable. Capitalism exploits people. Capitalism necessitates lack and lack creates violence. Capitalism needs people to never have enough. This will only become more apparent as we see the global ramifications of the fuck-you capitalists at the helm of this society. More and more people will have less and less. More and more people will feel the sting and see the irrefutable ways that this system has rendered them expendable. And one day, many people who once considered themselves middle class might actually end up waiting in line for bread.

I don’t write this to stun anyone into inaction or resignation.

I think most people if you asked them would still say that capitalism was working. And of those minority who would agree that capitalism wasn’t working, most would suffer from a severely limited imagination and question if any other alternative was possible. The easy way out is settling for the fallacy that there is no other option possible.

I’m not one of those people who’s a stalwart for socialism or communism or other things that have been tried and failed. In fact, I personally find vehement communists and socialists as annoying as vehement capitalists. Communism and socialism are, to me, the illegitimate love children of Western enlightenment thought. They have been tried and they have failed.

One of the most profound lessons I learned from my experiences with unmediated birthing is the only over, is through. It's a refrain I repeat in one of the essays from my forthcoming book.

The only way over is through.

As violent undulations shook the corners of my body, in the few fleeting moments between contractions, I knew well enough to know more pain was coming. I also knew there was no hiding from it. The only way to end the discomfort was to steel myself, face it, and boldly move through it.

The only way over is through.

I’m the sort of asshole who believes we can do something totally new and different. I’m insufferably optimistic in that way, believing that humans who have created so much can in fact once again create a totally new and different system and that we have to work together to figure that out.

I have no idols, and because of that, I look to no saviors.

Someone once asked me if I could have dinner with anyone alive today, who would it be, and why. I replied that I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to have dinner with anyone alive… because I idolized no living human. Upon further thought, I realized I idolized no dead person either. And because of that, I idolize no dead person’s ideology. I idolize no economic system that has already been thought of and already failed —- and yes, I would say that capitalism as well as communism and socialism have all been proven failures.

So this newness, this completely new and different system, will have to be birthed, and on its way out, the womb of the world will experience massive tumult. But the only way over is through. The only way to get over the failures of capitalism is to move through the struggle of seeing its illusions dissolve.

Medicine

I realize that my medicines have been lacking for some time and that perhaps more than ever it’s incredibly important to offer some right now. Something that has been holding me in through the collective descent of the first three months of 2025 has been an intentional regular practice of gratitude…..

Gratitude replenishes. It works in tandem with our hope.

I think the greatest disservice we can do for our gratitude is to trap it within the boundaries of capitalist accumulation. So I want us all to try a simple seven-day practice of gratitude. We can write a list, or think a list to ourselves, we can meditate on it or speak it aloud with friends and loved ones but I want us in this unmooring moment to ground ourselves in gratitude, what are we grateful for and how can we divorce that gratitude from the terms of material accumulation as much as possible.

For example,

Instead of saying I’m grateful I have a phone, I would say something like I’m grateful I’m able to communicate with my loved ones daily. I’m grateful I’m able to build and maintain relationships with people across distance and space.

Try to divorce your gratitude from the terms of capitalist accumulation as much as possible.

We can also use this time to be international and pay more attention to the natural world.

I’m grateful there is gravity to hold me. I’m grateful there is air to breathe and water to and food to nourish my body. I am grateful to all the hands that go into growing and getting food for me. I am grateful for the sunrises of spring and longer daylight hours. I’m grateful for walks in the park and the hum of birds in the morning.

I know it seems so insignificant. But these simple things will get us to the bigger goals and strategies.

We need mental and emotional fortitude right now and a daily gratitude practice, a practice of spiritual connection, gives us pause. It gives us clarity and it helps to mentally and emotionally ground us for the revelations and the work to come.

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All empires come to an end and all tyrants last only for a moment.

This monster will eat itself from within. It was a monster born to devour, born of consumption. Its appetite is so insatiable that it is now eating its own leg.

As we stand at the edge of the world we once knew, as we witness and live through these everyday catastrophes and the many apocalypses that arise, we must ask ourselves this:

How many times have we come to the end of the world, and surpassed it?

We must remember the billion particles of life each of our lives stand on.

The Trump Administration’s Energy Emergency Proves that No Life Is Sacred to the Radical Right

My children remind me life moves in cycles. Each passing phase is but a blip in the unceasing continuum of being and living and matter. The nine months it takes to incubate a child vanishes in the hours it takes to give birth once more vanishing to each different stage of development. Each day, there is a newness to be revealed, to revel in. One day my arms hang heavy with the weight of a child until one day that child takes their first step until one day that child walks out the door on their own.

We humans live for a short period. Even animals known to live forever exist for but a moment. A giant tortoise, a bowhead whale, a Greenland shark, an ocean quahog, a glass sponge, a couple hundred or a few thousand years in the grand scheme of time is nothing.

Great empires are no different. The thousand years it took to build and ruin Rome was a blip. The United States, only 249 years old, is still nascent, but a wee toddler in the eyes of the all knowing that is being. In the massive, unceasing landscape of existence, tyrants and oligarchs only last a moment.

“Drill baby drill,” was what the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States said when one of his supporters asked about his children.

At a campaign stop in South Dakota, a voter expressing concern over his children’s financial well-being asked Trump, “How are you going to make the economy — not just the food and electricity — but bring down the rent prices, the housing prices, so that these kids can survive without their parents’ help?” The then-candidate’s response was one of his typical meandering word salads, punctuated by “drill baby drill.” Trump’s answer to people struggling to hold on to security was extreme extraction completely divorced from those people’s concerns and everyday realities. It’s ridiculous to debate how increasing oil production would bring down the price of rent in areas that could be miles away from an oil site. A 2014 study found that a majority of people surveyed would decline to buy property near a fracking site. If we follow this logic, we see that fracking likely creates higher rents and more housing scarcity as people flee to areas farther from the risks associated with oil fields, as water sources are endangered, and the long-term effects of rising global temperatures and natural disasters compound over time. Another report looking at rent prices in rural North Dakota, which at the time accounted for nearly 11 percent of US crude oil production, found that fracking booms increased rental prices and housing instability in nearby boomtowns.

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders declaring a “national energy emergency,” withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, and opening the door to more drilling than ever before. These measures also attack and restrict wind and solar power alternatives. The administration lauded this immediate declaration as one of many examples of campaign promises made and kept.

But it was more than a double entendre. These people really get off on destruction.

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I’ve been alive long enough to know the dangers of unregulated and unchecked fracking. Fracking has polluted drinking water resources and contributes to a number of serious health issues, especially for particularly vulnerable populations like children and elderly people. Living in proximity to fossil fuel extraction has correlated with a variety of cancers, respiratory illnesses, and endocrine system issues. Fossil fuel extraction increases air pollution, can trigger earthquakes, and contributes to the overproduction of greenhouse gases. Rising global temperatures lead to rising sea levels, increased risk of floods, extreme weather events like hurricanes. Fracking disrupts ecosystems and creates difficult conditions for farming and food production. According to a recent study at Yale, “More than 17.6 million people in the U.S. now live within a mile of a fracked oil or gas well.” This number could exponentially increase following the Trump administration’s energy directives.

It’s so odd how a regime that is so culturally bound by the pulpit of a vapid nationalistic brand of religion can be so morally destitute, spiritually bankrupt, and disconnected from the ways any way God has shown up has been a force of nature and in the blessings and cycles of this natural world. How can a movement that has so strategically co-opted the word “life” have no regard for what it takes to sustain life and no reverence for what life stands upon?

There is no reverence for the world, for the lives these lives stand on, for the energy it takes to create one molecule of fuel. Every drop that spills from the gas pump is the result of hundreds of millions of years of life, billions of particles of algae and plants sinking to the bottom of ancient seas. Every ounce of crude oil is the end point of millions of years of pressure and temperature. Each reservoir is the vestige of an ancient body of water, an archive of life as it once was. I learned this from the wisdom of Indigenous water protectors, who are facing even more fierce struggles against an even more unrelenting big-bad boss in their quest for justice and ecological well-being.

The Dikenga, the cosmogram of the Bantu-Kongo people, teaches one to honor the cycle of life and their place in it, to see themselves as connected to the life which passed on to create and sustain the life that exists today. If we conceptualize fossil fuels in this way we are called to be more responsible with our consumption and production of them. Another thing these Indigenous cosmologies and knowledge systems teach us is that the earth will not stop spinning. These actions endanger human and other life forms but this planet, which has endured five mass extinctions, will go on.

If we are perhaps somewhere in the middle of a sixth mass extinction, as scientists believe, then we can no longer ignore or feign ignorance about the emergency that is being presented to us because of us. Scientists have cited humans as the main cause of the current mass extinction.

I, however, would place the emphasis not on the mere existence of humans but on the systems, institutions, and ideological frameworks created and maintained by small numbers of humans to serve the excessive wealth of a few humans and control the masses. These systems and ideologies destroy environments and disrupt ecosystems because capitalism has no regard for the concepts of balance, responsibility, ethics, reciprocity, or life. Even the alternatives to fossil fuels we have been handed, like electric vehicles, fall short and prove shallow. Billionaire CEOs like Musk take dozens of private jet trips each year. At the same time that Musk, who has become a prominent figure in the Trump administration, profits from the necessity for alternatives, he rubs elbows with those destroying the planet to make more money than they can ever spend in two lifetimes. The production of electric vehicles has an enormous environmental and human rights cost. The metal mining processes use large amounts of water, can contaminate nearby water supplies and pollute local ecosystems while fueling modern slavery and the ongoing genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And in recent years, EV companies have endorsed ocean floor drilling for minerals to build new models of car batteries, but critics say deep-sea mining could create irreversible harm to fragile ocean ecosystems and release enormous amounts of carbon which would exacerbate climate change.

Driving downriver out of Detroit, I see the Marathon gas refinery overlooking the interstate, a cluster of lights and towers in a spiraling campus, spewing foul-smelling smoke into the air like a Gotham City villain’s lair. Workers at the refinery in southwest Detroit just concluded a three-month strike due to safety concerns and wage disputes. During the strike, Marathon reportedly used undertrained, non-certified workers from other sites to keep the plant operational, endangering the community where I live with my children. The people who mine the fossil fuels are harmed and exploited. The people who refine the fossil fuels are harmed and exploited. The people who mine the minerals for electric alternatives are harmed and exploited. The people who buy and use the energy are harmed and exploited. The obnoxious slogan, “drill, baby, drill,” reflects the hard on these systems and the people who profit from them get from abusing the rest of us and the very earth that we depend on.

The only people who aren’t exploited in the process are the bosses. The Trump administration’s latest executive order declaring an energy emergency will pave the way for oil company bosses to potentially rake in some of the largest profits in history. The real crisis here is capitalism, a version of hyper-extractive capitalism that has been allowed to run rogue for decades in this country and threaten all forms of life. Frameworks of extraction, greed, gluttony, and excess bred from capitalism will reach a tipping point with the forthcoming fracking boom that will have endless effects on human life. Capitalism as we’ve always known it is a framework that places profit above the sacred cycles of the natural world and seeks to separate humans from the cycles we exist within. There is no regard for the life and time and energy it took to create fossil fuels. The same movement that proclaimed itself as pro-life is only concerned with life so far as it can be used to control the bodies of others and to exploit and extract resources for wealth.. There are no protections for life in this world. Children will be born into a future of climate chaos because of the actions of this administration and the greed of billionaires.

I am in awe thinking about how something which took 300 million of years of life to create is reduced to five minutes at the fuel pump, reduced to billions of dollars of exorbitant wealth which is hoarded by a few, yet determines and threatens the life of billions of people and trillions of other living beings. Something that took hundreds of millions of years to be consumed in only a couple hundreds of years. We should marvel at the splendor of this process, the way that water, earth and fire all had to collide and collaborate for millennia to make this happen, the way so much life was essential to creating energy. If we see ourselves, and by extension the energy we consume and the effort it took to create this energy, in a framework of life that is interconnected and sacred then we necessarily become more responsible with it. This system mocks of the life that went into creating energy, and no life is sacred to the radical right.