…posting about Palestine Action?

…hosting the Global Workshop for Palestine Action?

…talking about Palestine Action?

We’re almost one month away from the 3rd anniversary of October 7, 2023. For n…

Read more

Today’s audio includes a clip of US Senate candidate Angie Nixon on NBC News where she proudly proclaims to be a “capitalist” at a time when the wealth inequality, exploitation, and climate degradation fueled by capitalism have never been more blatantly apparent. Further confirming Frantz Fanon’s analysis of nationalist political parties in the chapter titled “Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity” in The Wretched of the Earth.

A recommended watch is Life After Capitalism | Timothée Parrique on Degrowth, Ecology, and the Future by the Better Future podcast with Michael Mezz.

Thank you for listening! If you’ve enjoyed today’s revolutionary educational content, please share this post and consider upgrading your subscription to support my continuation of this work.

Share

Since February 2025, I’ve kept up a steady streak of publishing at least three Substack essays a month. Now we’re well into the second half of August and this is my first written post. For the past three weeks, I’ve been doing an intensive course to get certified to teach English. After unsuccessfully searching for consistent work over the past two years, I decided to go back to school. That means that I’ve been consuming more than I’ve been creating.

The cycle of climate disasters, mass casualty events, and disturbing invasive artificial intelligence being inflicted on humanity by nerdy evil technocrats has been flowing through my brain. I keep thinking to myself: why do we keep accepting the sick, sad state of the world? It’s almost like there’s a cancerous mass eating away at our mind, body, and spirit, but our plan of action is to wait and see if it goes away on its own.

One of my best friends in Tennessee sent me a message about how exhausted she is. Both she and her husband have struggled to find work to pay their mountain of bills and put food on the table. She’s having trouble sleeping because of how hungry she is and feels like a failure because she can’t provide food for her kids. The food banks in the state have had their funding cut; the ones that are available are exclusively for county residents; and most of the places in her county only give out expired food. She tries not to cry when she tells me how hard it is to keep going. It seems like no matter how hard she tries, it’s never enough.

And she’s not the only one who feels this way. There are so many people who no longer want to participate in a system that exploits and abandons them.

Share

After navigating the job search landscape for two years unsuccessfully, I enrolled in an intensive training course in the hopes that a certification to teach English will increase my employment options. Which isn’t a guarantee, since the friend mentioned above and her husband have English teaching certifications, too. But I’ve gotta try something different if I hope to see a different result. So I try not to look too long at the bags that have formed under my eyes and try not to beat myself up about my lack of Substack posts this month as I prepare for another week of school.

The personal and environmental pressures I feel to be a profit-making member of society often weigh me down. Being of an anti-capitalist mind living in a world where the masses still can’t make the connection between capitalism and the climate, human rights, and wealth inequality crises is a maddening experience. I’m expected to play along like we don’t already know the solutions to transition toward more equitable economies that will create more meaningful employment opportunities.

Before we can reach the equitable ustopia that sociologist professor Ruha Benjamin described in her TED Talk or the flourishing solarpunk future we write about in we’ve got to face the here and now. Our bodies aren’t just having a hard time adjusting to the collapse of capitalism and the ecological atmosphere we need to survive; we’re also under a concerted mental and spiritual attack. We’re being taxed from all directions.

From my living room in Málaga, I’ve been watching videos of cries for help from Gary, Indiana. Residents in the area have taken to social media to raise awareness that they’ve been without power for more than ten days. The predominantly black city, and hometown of beleaguered icon Michael Jackson, had been abandoned by the electricity company that monopolizes the region, NIPSCO. Power has been restored in the majority-white areas impacted by the storm, while the residents of Gary are expected to wait until next Tuesday for access to electricity.

For almost two weeks, people without generators have not been able to store food at home or plug in their medical devices. There are also fallen trees still blocking multiple streets that have prevented people from being able to move around. According to testimonies from residents in Gary, the message the black community has received from their electricity provider and their local leadership is that ensuring their access to energy and resources isn’t a priority.

After seeing the cries for help from Gary, I continued scrolling to see multiple posts detailing the number of black people across the US who have been found hanged. Juliana Nzita was discovered outside of a Charlotte, North Carolina church. Tasia Fortune was discovered outside an abandoned building in Mississippi. A man was discovered near the CaribMask Caribbean Festival in North Carolina after being seen asking for water. Their deaths often immediately ruled a suicide, even when the medical examiner’s investigation is still open.

Then there are the cases where there’s evidence that the medical examiner may be corrupt. Like Stacey Turner in Mississippi. The families of Nolan Wells (found dead on an island after last seen with a group of white friends) and Trey Reed (found hanging on his college campus in September 2025) have accused the medical examiner of mishandling the investigation into their causes of death.

Already feeling overwhelmed by seeing so many black people being failed by the systems that are supposed to support them, the news of Jason Arday’s death broke.

On August 14, the former sociology professor Jason Arday’s life was cut short at the age of 41. Just one year older than me. Professor Arday was appointed as the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge in 2023. Before being seen as a symbol of progress at the traditionally conservative UK institution, Professor Arday’s story had already inspired people all over the world.

Throughout his career, Jason openly discussed being nonverbal until age 11 and illiterate until age 18. Parents of children on the autism spectrum shared how Jason Arday inspired their kids to dream big about the things they could accomplish in the future. Unfortunately, he won’t be here to hear about how his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, in which he describes how he overcame life’s challenges, will positively impact people after it’s released on August 27.

Instead, Jason was found dead after weeks of intense public scrutiny by major UK media outlets claiming that the professor plagiarized his work, lied about his philanthropic history, and was no more than a diversity hire at Cambridge. These claims were brought to the media by Nathan Cofnas, a eugenicist who was let go from his job at Emmanuel College in 2024 because of his unsettling views on race. Cofnas spent weeks calling Professor Arday’s appointment at Cambridge a symptom of “DEI Ideology” and insisted that, as a black man, he was inherently unqualified for the position, so his success must be due to plagiarism.

After the announcement of his death, author Kelechi Okafor brought to light that one of his most persistent harassers, The Guardian, was made aware that Jason wasn’t doing well with the public scrutiny. Apparently, on July 31, Katherine Viner, Editor-in-Chief of the publication, and journalist Archie Bland were warned about the decline in the professor’s mental health. They continued to publish smear pieces about him anyway.

After weeks of privately processing all of these atrocities (and more) I broke down crying. I thought about how much pressure Jason Arday must have been under to present himself as perfect in a world that constantly made him feel like he still wasn’t good enough. I thought about how acceptable it’s become for black people to have to fend for themselves. I thought about how many black lives have been cut short and, by design, their families will never receive justice. I thought about how much longer we’re expected to keep living like this.

Then I came across a recent episode of The Grits and Eggs podcast titled YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND BE HAPPY. After reading the title, you may (not) be surprised to read that I felt a flood of relief while listening to this episode. It’s not that I didn’t know what caused me to break down a few nights before, but I had lost sight of the root cause of what was ailing me.

“You start to feel like you are fighting a losing battle. You will start to lose hope. You will stay in a stagnant space of trauma. It’s a constant bombardment of negative news, negative music, and negative social media news, with an influx of negative interactions which feeds into a negative space with a negative outlook, with a negative perception of self and others. And then you’re on a hamster wheel of receiving injustice.

“How do you combat this? Understand the purpose. The purpose is to keep you away from tapping into your true power.” - Deante Kyle

We are all suffering from a multi-pronged attack from the perverse minds of the white supremacist imperialists who are trying to shape the world in their own image. One where they and they alone are superior, they feel entitled to hoard all of the resources, and they’re hell-bent on extracting the Earth to the point of extinction so that they can squeeze out every bit of profit. They’ve made us feel like we’ve got to focus on fighting each other over DEI or the scraps of resources they’ve left behind, or we’ll be left to die.

At least 169 have lost their lives after earthquakes in Colombia; the rising temperatures in Europe have killed thousands of people and are projected to result in food shortages; and millions of people have died across West Asia and Central & Eastern Africa due to genocide and exploitative resource extraction. We’ll never get those lives back, but we can do more to save the people who are alive today. No matter where we are on the planet, we won’t escape the effects of this grotesque ideology and current global system.

We were previously under the assumption that good things happen to good people, but the authoritarian technofascist hellscape presently being implemented by less than 1% of the world’s population has shown us the opposite. The most vile, dishonest, and demented of what humanity has to offer has been calling the shots. While pure, sweet souls like Jason Arday and Hayden Panieterre are no longer with us.

We may currently be living in a world of planned obsolescence, human-accelerated climate collapse, and unmitigated violence against black and brown bodies, but this won’t last forever. No matter how bad things get, the most important thing to remember is that we’re not alone. With as much death and destruction as I witness, it’s vital to balance that out with messages of hope about the future.

Though I haven’t been posting as much, I never stop consuming information. This essay includes some of the channels I follow that are educational in an engaging way and uplifting when I feel like all hope is lost. In a couple of weeks I’ll be done with my English teaching course and will be back on the hunt for the elusive cure to my unemployment streak that fulfills my purpose, isn’t harmful to the environment, and isn’t predicated on increasing shareholder value. This also means I’ll have more time to resume posting more regular content on my Substack.

Let me know what topics you’d like to read about as I prepare my content for next month.

Leave a comment

“When the political leader summons the people to a meeting, there could be said to be blood in the air. Yet very often the leader is mainly preoccupied with a “show” of force—so as not to use it. The excitement that is fostered, however—the comings and goings, the speech making, the crowds, the police presence, the military might, the arrests and the deportation of leaders—all this agitation gives the people the impression the time has come for them to do something. During these times of unrest the political parties multiply the calls for calm to the left, while to the right they search the horizon endeavoring to decipher the liberal intentions of the colonial authorities.” (The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon. p 29-30)

After listening to today’s excerpt from The Wretched of the Earth, I invite you to explain how so-called progressive Democrat from Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed

receiving an endorsement from a corporate-backed war criminal, former Vice President of genocide Kamala Harris,

is going to move us closer to collective liberation.

Leave a comment

Thank you for listening to today’s Revolutionary Reading Corner. If you enjoyed this educational content, please share this post, leave a comment, and consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

p. 21, “On Violence”

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Share

Mentioned in today’s reading:

Video: How to Overcome Capitalism | Jason Hickel on Socialism, China, and the West

Kshama Sawant is the Independent Socialist running for U.S. Congress in Washington state.

Audio of Stephen Miller announcing the criminalization of “leftist violence” followed by commentary from Former FBI special agent Mike German from Democracy Now.

I wish every story I write could be a love story.
If only I could focus on the beauty of being alive.
But not enough people love being alive for me to write this way.
We're drowing in pain,  death, and disconnection.
I wish every story could have a happy ending.
I want Palestinians to return to their homeland.
I want all Native peoples to receive their land back.
I want money not to be the reason why
Anyone on this planet wishes to die.
If only we lived in a world where we were free.
Free to take time to stop and smell the roses.
Free to know what old age is.
I wish that I could tell you things are going to be okay.
But they're not if things keep going this way.
If we can have the world's first trillionaire.
Then we can feed, house, and care for people everywhere.
What I want to know is, how do we get there?

I hope that the subscribers with paid plans enjoyed the Recovered Loveaholic excerpt that I published last month. After wading through the depth of the essays from my autobiographical anthology, Bitter Sweet, returning to the Women’s Fiction story I began in Recovering Loveaholic was an uplifting interlude. I thought about continuing August’s anti-amour adventures to close out July, but given the stalled, sad state of the world, my heart has been called back to writing about real life.

_{If you’re in the mood for something less existential, I’ve recently removed my podcast Voice Notes to My Friends from Spotify, and it’s now hosted on Substack. To learn more and catch up on the voice note series, originally published when I was a baby back in 2022, see the Voice Notes to My Friends tab on Serita’s Corner of the World.}

On a voice note to one of my best friends, I randomly announced that I wished I could walk into the woods, build myself a shack, and make friends with the creatures of the forest. And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. If I only had a euro for every time a friend pitched me the idea of building a matriarchal commune for us and our offspring…

My sudden urge to escape comes after commiserating with many of my friends over the emotional overwhelm we’re currently experiencing. There comes a time when our brains reach their capacity to consume more information, especially when that information is traumatizing or triggering. Attempting to stay chronically informed on what’s happening in the world in tandem with everything that may be going on in your personal life can easily become overwhelming.

This is by design. When you’re exhausted, discouraged, and overstretched emotionally, spiritually, or financially, you have far less time to focus on the systemic conditions that are causing you to feel that way.

Over the last few months, I’ve been chronicling the disheartening job-search conditions that have left many millennials needing to pivot to survive the collapse of capitalism. Many of my friends are starting courses they hope will set them apart in the candidate pool, relocating to countries with the promise of employment potential, sucking it up to work at jobs they say sucks at their soul, and one was even selling her bodily fluids to make ends meet, until her health declined to the point where she can’t donate plasma anymore.

I witnessed the rapid decline of my friend’s well-being after she began working tedious shifts for low pay as a driver for Amazon Flex. After finally finding a doctor who would accept her state health insurance, she recently received some worrying test results.

“I just had the worst panic attack Serita”

She texted me before following up with a voice note. After detailing her compounding medical concerns, she remained focused on one thing: “I need to find work.” Instead of having the capacity to care for her health, she was preoccupied with ways to make money since gas prices got too high to keep driving for Amazon. With children to feed, monthly bills piling up, and late fees being piled on, there’s little time afforded to anything other than how are we going to survive? This leaves little time for our minds to focus on anything else.

Worse financial well-being in midlife and older age—and declines of the same over time—are associated with lower memory scores and faster cognitive decline, reports a new study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The population experiencing significant financial deterioration showed memory decline equivalent to roughly five additional months of aging per year.

The study is among the first to examine the cognitive consequences of poor financial well-being. The findings are published in the American Journal of Epidemiology(link is external and opens in a new window).

- “For Older Adults, a Drop in Financial Well-Being Takes a Toll on Memory”

Share

A world centered around capitalism is not only causing cognitive decline, it’s rapidly diminishing our quality of life. Our global community is facing food and fuel shortages, increasingly dangerous climate disasters, widespread war and violence, and weakening social safety nets. But you don’t need another person to tell you that.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’re painfully aware of how “the system” is failing us.

Those of us who have remained steadfast in staying informed are grappling with the realization that our individual efforts have (so far) failed to achieve the stated goal of collective liberation. It’s precisely then that we must resist the urge to give up.

That’s what my walking into the woods to leave the world behind would be doing.

Instead of giving in to discouragement, it’s time to pivot to a more sustainable plan of action that we can commit to long-term.

The world no longer works the way we once thought it did, so the ways we sustain ourselves have to evolve.

For me, that looks like going back to school to receive an official certification to teach English. As I covered in the first Revolutionary Reading Corner, my home country has concerningly low literacy rates. According to research done by OECD, average literacy scores among adults “declined by 12 points from 2017 to 2023” and nearly a quarter of those ages 16-74 “are classified as functionally illiterate”. Armed with this information after receiving signs in some recent conversations, I’ve enrolled in a course to obtain a CELTA certificate.

Subscribe now

On a call with matriarchist and midlife rites of passage guide Sarah Durham Wilson, also known as Sarah of Magdalena, to interview her for the upcoming Summer edition of , we connect over both of us being Sagittarius sun signs. Sagittarians are born teachers, she reminded me. We each found a sense of purpose in enlightening others.

Her remark came days after I received an illuminating message from a poet I met at an open mic in Paris. After sharing the link to my Substack, he responded, saying he’d consider including my anthropological essays in the Creative Writing course he teaches. The idea that such a moving wordsmith read my writing and was inspired to introduce it to master’s degree students in Paris affirmed the path I was on.

Included in my offerings for every paid subscription plan, I will be sharing the solutions that already exist and engaging (you) in discussions on how we can replicate them. In the case that one day, I get to design my own course on surviving the collapse of capitalism, here’s where I would start. Let’s reimagine how we redistribute resources in our own communities, starting today.

Please consider reading more about my friend Rahaf, who is caring for 7 children in Gaza, and supporting her fundraising efforts.

If you’d like to access the rest of this article and support my efforts to make educational text, revolutionary theories, and pathways towards collective liberation more attainable, please consider becoming a monthly or yearly paid subscriber.

Read more

But in order to do that, the former metropolises would have to pull out all the stops and commit all their forces to a battle lost in advance.” - p. lxvi

As I continue to take in the text of The Wretched of the Earth, written in 1961, it helps to contextualize the rampant violence we’re witnessing against the “natives” today. We are facing a familiar enemy and the more we understand them, the easier it will be to continue the completion of decolonization.

Thank you for listening to episode 2 of the Revolutionary Reading Corner. If you’d like to support my ability to create educational content, please consider upgrading your subscription.

You can also visit my website seritabraxton.com to add your email and receive updates about my written and audio offerings.

Referenced in today’s audio:

“Police: 17-year-old had water bottle, not gun, in fatal Austin officer shooting”

Corey Ruiz’s 13-year-old daughter, Kah’Liyah Ali Omar speaks at Madison, WI press conference

The Love Island Literacy Crisis via How Is this Better? with Akilah Hughes

Joshua Doss discusses race and socialism on CNN.

“Fossil fuel companies projected to earn almost $3,000 a second in 2026 while families struggle to afford energy bills worldwide”

Sign the Polluters Pay Pact!

I recently came across a video that claimed: If you’re looking to Americans to tap in for the revolution, count us out. If the country hasn’t revolted after public executions of Black and brown people, an attempted stolen election, the botched COVID pandemic response, the blatant cover-up of the Epstein files, etc. Americans aren’t going to respond any differently now.

The rest of the world is wracking their brains, watching from the outside, wondering how it is that Americans have yet to organize to overthrow their government. With public executions happening on a nearly daily basis, antifascism being classified as domestic terrorism, and a cocktail of parasites, viruses, & contamination coming from the food supply, it’s clear the American people are at war with their government.

Yet so few are organizing like it.

(I recently saw another comment under a post about Stephen Miller calling “left-wing terrorism” a “threat to civilization” that read: Gilead loading…)

Could the lack of understanding about the dire situation the world is in as a result of an unchecked imperial American Empire be a result of the fact that “the average American reads at a 7th- to 8th-grade level”? How can we expect the “average American” to contextualize colonization and deconstruct the falsehood of “American exceptionalism” when nearly “45 million U.S. adults are functionally illiterate”?

In an effort to make revolutionary education more accessible, I will be releasing recordings of the books I’m reading and breaking down their contents afterwards. If you are aligned with the path to collective liberation and would like to join my Revolutionary Reading Corner, subscribe to my Substack to be notified when new readings are available.

Hey comrade! Hope you’re well.

How would you like to represent PA at a conference in Barcelona?

Moments later, the following response was sent:

Hey there comrade! Thank you. I hope the same for you.

It would be an honor to represent PA in BCN. Let me know the details.

One of the first things I thought after agreeing to speak on behalf of Palestine Action during the Degrowth Summer School held by Research & Degrowth International at the end of June was: I’ll be in good company.

The 2026 edition of the Degrowth Summer School marked the 12th yearly gathering of “academics, practitioners, artists, activists, community organisers, and concerned citizens to collectively delve into discussions and learning experiences related to degrowth and environmental justice.” This year’s theme was Imperialism and Degrowth: Unravelling the Threads of Empire and Building Post-Extractive Futures.

It was vitalizing to hear from collectives from every corner of the world who were actively increasing their mutual aid capacity and engaged in other acts of resistance. The host of my panel talked about tactics her union has learned from watching the community in Minneapolis band together after ICE began terrorizing the area. A local photographer educated us on the significance of the occupied community space, Àgora Juan Andrés Benítez, named in honor of a queer man killed by police, which is fighting eviction. There were speakers from Zimbabwe, Iran, and Peru with strategy sessions on solidarity with the Global South.

Some of the Summer School attendees who were based in Barcelona but hailed from other countries were there to complete their Master’s Degree in Degrowth: Ecology, Economics and Policy, the first international master’s fully dedicated to research and policy for degrowth. I felt like a Boomer every time I said, Back in my day, there weren’t programs on degrowth available when I was choosing a major.

The topic of my panel was Internationalism at a Local Level, and I sat between a leader of Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), an anti-imperial labour union federation from the Philippines, and a lead organizer from Boicot ICL, a Catulyna-based advocacy group advocating for the closure of Israel Chemical Limited facilities in Spain.

I, on the other hand, am not one of the creators of PalAct, nor am I involved in the network at a leadership level. In all honesty, it seems like just yesterday that I attended the Global Workshop that I now lead online. And yet there I was, in the middle of two women who spoke with such ease, power, and conviction about their organization’s anti-imperial efforts. Before I was called on to speak, I kept willing the ground to swallow me whole.

Then the host of the panel began to quote Assata Shakur. I took a deep breath and began to focus solely on her words. To follow the invocation of a woman whose autobiography played such a significant role in my own anti-imperial radicalization was enough to calm my nerves. I was exactly where I was meant to be.

The calm that came over me came from knowing that the ancestors were proud of me.

Once I successfully silenced any semblance of imposter syndrome, I began to look around the room at the faces of the people that I had the pleasure of getting to know over the two days I was in Barcelona. We were all just human beings. Everyday people trying to figure out what each of us could do to get the collective closer to a post-extractive future. We may have come from different corners of our shared planet, but we shared a deep desire to foster internationalism in our solutions.

Because of the bizarre and backwards timeline we’re living in, there are grave security concerns that come with being someone who wants to stop genocide, improve the climate conditions of the planet, or put an end to extractive imperial systems. The representative of KMU matter-of-factly spoke about the death threats she’s received and reflected on the friends who have been murdered or gone missing for the offense of protecting workers’ rights in the Philippines. Given the highly surveilled societies we exist in, the meeting space was preserved as a safe place for Summer School participants and panelists to speak freely—which is why I have no videos or photos to share from my panel.

But I do have the sheets of my handwritten speech.

I was called on as the final speaker of the last panel of the Degrowth Summer School, and up until we took our seats, I was unsure about what to say. After sitting in on other panels (especially the ones with speakers from the Global South), talking to some of the attendees (a surprising number of whom were from my home state of Maryland), and absorbing firsthand accounts of the history of Barcelona’s resistance movement (a place I lived in for two months back in 2018), the text below is an optimized version of my portion of the panel (with an extended version of my Palestine Action origin story).

I’ve come a long way to be with you all today. Not the travel from Málaga, which is not nearly as far as the Philippines, but how I came to sit in front of you on this panel today representing Palestine Action.

My first job out of college was at Lockheed Martin. If you were here for the Earth’s Greatest Enemy screening with Abby Martin, then you’ll be familiar with the name. Lockheed Martin is one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers. They boasted in their 2025 investors report that their sales increased by 6% to $75 billion. The company headquarters, where I used to work, is located in Maryland — which is also where a surprising number of you are from.

When I was there, I didn’t know the company I worked for was one of Earth’s greatest enemies. We never discussed the weapons manufacturing faction of the company in my department. I worked on the team that fielded calls for many of the main federal government agencies. If someone called the Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Prisons, or Office of Victims Services in Washington, DC, they ended up speaking with a Lockheed Martin employee in Bethesda, MD. It didn’t take me long to understand that the US government has no interest in offering justice or victim services to any of its citizens, which is why it outsourced its contact with the public to a weapons manufacturer.

Fast forward to October 2023, when videos of the genocide in Gaza began flooding my feed. I was already aware of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from the apartheid conditions enforced by the Zionist entity of Israel. Since the start of the ongoing Nakba, when over 750,000 Palestinians were violently displaced from their land and over 13,000 were killed, Israel has nearly annexed all of historic Palestine. With the full backing of Western states like the US and UK, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) continue to besiege, displace, and kill Palestinians remaining steadfast in the open-air prison of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

Before continuing on about Palestine Action, I’d like to read for you an excerpt of a zine that was gifted to me by a comrade I met through PA. I got to the end and was amazed to discover that it was originally published in June 2002 by firestarter press in Maryland. This is Part II: The New Offer from International Intifada:

If you’ve seen How to Kill a War Machine, you’ll know that Palestine Action was founded in 2020 when Palestinian Huda Amori and her UK comrade Richard Barnard rushed into the London headquarters of Elbit Systems with spray paint and homemade stencils. Next, they escalated to occupying an Israeli weapons factory for 3 days.

PalAction was founded on 5 principles*…

1. Focus

2. Disrupt

3. Sustained

4. Sacrifice

5. Dilemna

*The details of these principles were excluded from this text.

…which has led to several Elbit sites being shut down, including the London headquarters targeted in 2020, and millions in contracts being canceled.

Palestine Action is proscribed as a terrorist organization in the UK right now because they are effective. That’s also why that man in Texas got 30 years for moving a box of revolutionary educational zines. The judge said this outrageous sentence was to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”

I’ve attended some of the panels and had conversations with many of you over the past two days that have reminded me of a comment my comrade in Málaga recently made:

“The left is moving as if they’re not going to win.”

We speak about “allyship” and “solidarity” with the oppressed who live way over there, but it’s time to internalize that we are the oppressed. Unless you are a part of the capital-owning class or among the 200 people in Peter Thiel’s Dialog group chat, you are not free until Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Hawai’i, and the subjugated people in your own communities are free.

We can start by getting on the same page about who our enemy is. This is a battle we’ve been engaged in for generations. Nazis took inspiration from slavery and Jim Crow apartheid in the US. What the Nazis did to the Jews led to the Zionist creation of the Israeli state on top of Palestine. Over 80 years later, we’re still trying to stop the erasure of Palestine.

In my observations from one of yesterday’s presentations, we also don’t have a common understanding of what our problems are. This could be because many within the liberation movement still don’t fully grasp that they, too, are the working class that’s getting crushed under the boot of imperialism. This lack of understanding and hesitation to act by the Global North is leading to more deaths daily in the Global South.

What we allow will continue to happen until we escalate our efforts in a focused, sustained, and coordinated way to confront the imperial war machine, from within the imperial core. It’s within the imperial core that the war machines are manufactured. It’s up to those of us within reach to continuously disrupt the supply chain of death.

After attending anti-genocide demonstrations and manifestations in multiple countries, writing emails to politicians and international bodies, and flooding social media with updates about Palestine for over a year after October 7, the genocide didn’t stop. Feeling helpless and infuriated that the country I came from was funding and providing weapons for nonstop, indiscriminate death, I signed up for the weekly Palestine Action Global Workshop.

Less than a year later, I began volunteering as one of the hosts for these workshops. On these calls, we contextualize the occupation of Palestine, explain the effectiveness of direct action, and share how to get involved with Palestine Action. PA now has active chapters in Eire, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and nearly a dozen other countries, including Turtle Island.

The weaponry used in the ongoing extermination campaign against Palestinians, primarily manufactured by Elbit Systems, the Israeli edition of Lockheed Martin, is then marketed to countries around the world as “battle-tested”. Which is why Elbit Systems is the primary target of Palestine Action.

Share Serita’s Corner of the World

[To the panel host] I’m so grateful that you brought up Assata Shakur. Her autobiography was one of the books that helped radicalize me. She was a member of the Black Panther Party who saw the similarities between the conditions of Black people in America and the state of Palestinians under occupation.

Internationalism has been a longstanding tradition of historically marginalized groups. In 1970, Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton preached “Revolutionary Intercommunalism”. This came after the Panthers united with the Palestine Liberation Organization—of which Huda’s uncle, Jihad Amori, was a member—and a group of Arab Jews in Israel in response to the 1967 creation of the colonial Israeli state.

Now that more people are aware of the interconnectedness of our international struggles, it has propelled them to take action. It has been really important to see conversations happening between collectives in the Global North and South so that we can strengthen and coordinate our efforts.

The state-sanctioned surveillance and suppression aren’t working. People from all over the world continue to sign up to join Palestine Action and engage in direct action to advance our cause. To free the world from imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.

We have to start acting like we’re on the winning team because we are the only ones who will set us free.

Take inspiration from Albania’s Flamingo Revolution, currently taking place in Southeast Europe. What started as the public’s rejection of a multi-billion-dollar luxury resort for the pedophile class proposed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in an ecologically sensitive area for migrating birds has evolved into demands that the entire government step down.

After over a month of civil disobedience, Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama (who has approved a disturbing number of development contracts associated with money laundering) defiantly says that “It has never been a question if this will go ahead or not.”

To which labor organizer and founder of Albania’s left-wing party Lëvizja Bashkë Bora Mema responded, “Of course the Prime Minister Edi Rama will say this, not just because he still wants to be in power… I believe that Edi Rama is going to say this due to the fact that he’s actually in his worst political position he has ever been in the last three decades that he’s actually in power in Albania in different positions.

I believe that the protest will go on, and the people are very determined. So whatever he’s saying, if not tomorrow, but quite soon, this is going to be the end of Edi Rama’s political career, but [also] of a whole political system, which is actually serving to the oligarchy.”

Leave a comment

Ever since writing about how “finding love proved to be nothing like it was in the movies” in my women’s fiction novel published in 2020, Recovering Loveaholic, I’ve been weaning myself off romcoms in real life.

Sitting through a featured film about anything related to romance used to be one of my not-so-guilty pleasures. I even thought the critically crucified Gigli — described as “bizarre and clumsily plotted” with a 6% Rotten Tomatoes score — wasn’t that bad because I was that committed to the genre.

In the six years since, I’ve developed an even sharper anti-patriarchal lens, so it makes sitting through quite a few of my former favorite flicks like Love & Basketball or Clueless an unenjoyable experience. The way women (and girls) were often shown having to fight for the attention of some man for an entire 90+ minutes no longer sits right with me. The tropes and tribulations that permeated “love stories” depicted on-screen during my formative years of the 99s and the 2000s distorted my view of what real love looked like.

Without the rose-colored propaganda glasses that came with consuming decades of Disney fairytales and Hollywood fables, I’ve stopped rushing to watch whatever star-studded romantic comedy that’s recently been released. On the rare occasion I make an exception, it’s because there’s a diverse lead, like Kendrick Sampson in Something from Tiffany’s or Halle Bailey in You, Me, & Tuscany, who I hope will offer a less conventional take on fictionally falling in love.

On a recent evening, I was searching for something other than world news to watch when I remembered scrolling past the title Office Romance a few weeks ago on the free streaming site I use. Such a typical name, I thought, yet still I was intrigued.

I went back to find the film and saw the preview image of Jennifer Lopez lying on a desk, on top of a man I didn’t recognize. But still I didn’t click away. I figured one well-known name plus an unfamiliar face might make for an interesting dynamic. Plus (as evidenced by my earlier Gigli comment), I figured I’d be sufficiently entertained by any romcom that featured JLo.

Okay, well, after reading the Rotten Tomatoes scores for Monster-in-Law, The Back-Up Plan, and The Wedding Planner, maybe I should feel a little more guilty.

So a few nights ago, I gave in and watched another romantic comedy featuring Lopez, co-starring Brett Goldstein, who also co-wrote this new Netflix release. During the moments when I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the awkwardness between the two leads at the start of the movie and the delightfully inappropriate scenes that ensued, I had to admit, I kinda missed romcoms.

Not some one-dimensional chase for some elusive love of your life, but the more true-to-real-life tales about how messy, unpredictable, and sometimes painful falling in love can be. As much as I laughed throughout Office Romance, I also appreciate the deception that comes with dating a coworker, the boundaries that men can seem to let down when it’s time for them to get vulnerable, and the way that hyper-independent women shut shit down when they feel unappreciated or abandoned.

Feeling a spark rekindled to write about romance after watching this film, and feeling inspired by a new friend who’s currently speed-reading through Recovering Loveaholic in anticipation of the follow-up, I’m excited to share with you the early pages of Recovered Loveaholic.

Even if you haven’t already read Recovering Loveaholic, I invite you to pick up where our main character left off. In Recovered Loveaholic, we meet August at an English-language Recovering Loveaholic meeting in Berlin, nearly three years after her first encounter with the < 3 step program. Just when it looks like she’s found her stride being single, several sudden changes to her summer plans are set to sweep (or knock) her off her feet.

Thank you for reading the continuation of my story about the Struggles of a Single Millennial. I’d love to read your thoughts about where August’s adventure might lead her in the comments.

Previews and first looks at my upcoming novels are included in each paid subscription. To continue reading, please consider supporting this publication by upgrading to a paid plan.

Read more

When I first moved to mainland Spain from the island of Tenerife, I was looking forward to having more opportunities to meet people since I had settled in the center of the city. Instead, the only English-speaking meetups I could find were language exchanges, friend-finding apps like Bumble led to mostly out-of-towner matches, and anyone else I attempted to befriend remained at a superficial level. For years, I struggled to find a space in my local Spanish society where I felt like I fit in.

In the fall of 2023, that lingering sense of isolation was compounded by the grief I felt after witnessing the first weeks of the genocide in Gaza. After leaving a comment under an Instagram post searching for any mobilizations in Málaga someone responded with the details of an upcoming vigil. I still remember walking up to the candlelit demonstration marked by Palestinian flags waving defiantly throughout Plaza de la Marina.

That November evening was the first time I felt that sense of solidarity with the people around me. Deciding to attend that demonstration not only connected me to a continuously growing global movement, but it also led me to some of the most incredible people from and in Palestine, who remain some of my closest friends to this day.

But still, that sense of being in communion was missing.

Zooming in on a pointy leaf plant overflowing from a plastic pot, wellness studio founder Carmen Veal began describing to the camera how the property she and her husband bought two years ago came with this unidentified greenery that never grew. They watched as it survived the tough Connecticut winters with no tending while the same green leaves returned each spring, but no flowers ever bloomed and the plant hadn’t grown. Finally, the couple decided to move the plant from its above-ground pot and transferred it to the Earth to see how it would respond.

Before panning over to the plant, Carmen shared that the following spring “beautiful blooms opened up” and shifted her head to the left to reveal how the bushel of leaves had expanded outward into the soil and gave way to rows of sunkissed purple Iris flowers.

“I think a lot of people move through life exactly like that plant,” Carmen said returning the focus to her face on the screen, “alive but sitting in environments too small for them, surviving seasons, they were never meant to stay in permanently. Carrying potential no one around them fully recognized because there’s no label explaining what they are capable of becoming. And sometimes what changes everything isn’t becoming someone new but finally being placed somewhere you can properly take root.”

My lock screen is stacked with Substack notifications of notes and newsletters that I leave to accumulate until I can carefully take the time to read them. But as soon as the notification popped up on my screen that published a post titled, “The Entire Human Species Has Been Turned Into A Profit-Generating Machine”, I clicked to open the app.

“The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant machine to generate profit for corporations.

Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.

That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.

It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.”

When I read something so soul-affirming, I think, maybe I’ve just created an echo chamber of like-minded individuals that reflect what I already think back to me. Like how you click on a video about pigeons, and now the algorithm is feeding you a bunch of videos about pigeons. As I’ve trauma dumped about in past posts, I was propagandized to believe that life goals should include striving for a promotion at work or exceeding performance metrics in exchange for material incentives.

Now, more of us are reflecting on the meaning of life on a deeper level. And how our constant quest for success in the West propels the problems that are plaguing society.

Many of us have spent years, if not decades, grappling with the culmination of economic, environmental, technological, and political crises threatening the sustainability of life on our shared planet. We’ve been awakened to the fact that we’ve sold a lie and that we’ve been living in a world that rewards lying, cheating, manipulation, and exploitation. Arrogant and amoral behavior no longer disqualifies people from positions of power; instead, those traits are what propel them.

Facing this reality has led a lot of people to want to flee instead of having to grapple with the facts.

It seems like every time I turn around, someone new is saying to me, “I just want to have a house on a plot of land where I can grow food and escape all of this madness.”

Whenever I hear about how this person plans to escape the workforce, or how that person is preparing to live off the Earth they escape to, my first response is to say, How can we escape together?

But the more I think about it, sending the most engaged and empathic factions of society (who can clearly tell that things are wrong but don’t yet know how to change them) out into isolation while the war and climate collapse rage on may not be the best course of action at this stage.

Share Serita’s Substack

Unfortunately, a majority of people are still under the spell that there’s some corporate ladder they can climb, or cryptocurrency they can invest in that will land them in the same circles as the current capital-owning class. But at this late stage of capitalism collapsing onto itself, the closest they can get is to protect property as cops or undersell their labor to increase shareholder value as employees. Either way, given the current cost of living, the workers will likely never get a chance to accumulate any of the capital they generate for themselves.

It’s a wonder why nobody wants to work these days.

Given that we can’t all be viral social media stars who live off of sponsored posts or make it into Peter Thiel’s not-so-secret ‘Dialog’ society that runs the world, where does the rest of the workforce go when they’re seeking an alternative to the capital class?

We can’t all run away to the woods.

Unable to escape the effects of centuries of exploitative systems and extractive industries, we are forced to face them. After decades of commercialized agriculture and fast fashion consumerism, data centers threaten to drain our remaining freshwater supply. Fuel and fertilizer shortages, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, threaten our access to food in the upcoming months, just in time for El Niño to bring extreme weather to the Northern Hemisphere in November.

The conditions we’ve created have led to habitat loss and threats of extinction not just for humans, but for all the other plant, animal, and oceanic species we share this planet with as well.

And the worst part of all?

We already have the solutions to solve so many of these problems.

“Venus is in Leo right now. Leo’s a very loud sign…it’s here to wake us up. It’s here to shake us and say, What is it that you want? Not, What is it that you’re being fed? Turn it off. Turn all the distractions off for a moment and think about what is it that you actually want, and how you can radically, fully, totally align yourself with that thing? And then watch what happens.” - Chani Nicholas in The Week of June 15th, 2026: A new season of growth with Chiron and the June Solstice

Conservative political parties have recently made gains in the United Kingdom, Spain, Costa Rica, Colombia, and beyond by offering the same empty promises and hateful propaganda that resulted in the austerity policies causing economic decline in neoliberal-led countries like the United States, Bolivia, and Argentina. Many of those who are disillusioned by the current state of the world are drawn to the simplistic slogans of the right because, as it stands, “the left” has yet to offer a tangible alternative.

In a recent conversation with one of my dear comrades, whom I met through the Palestine movement in Málaga, she shared with me her observations of the so-called liberation movement in the area. Many of the faults and fragmentation happening here in Spain mirrored many of the concerns Polemics of the Proletariat raised in their public letter about why they withdrew from the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Turtle Island.

The fragmentation of the “left” remains on full display as I’m constantly seeing purity politics discourse about no one is left enough instead of organizing a proper resistance to the rise of right-wing parties. Liberal leaders look more like controlled opposition than orchestrators of collective liberation. And alarmingly, there are too many accounts of a culture of silence that has allowed sexual predators to linger in so-called liberatory spaces.

If people can see these issues, yet internal feedback is ignored, how is anyone going to address the issues that are keeping the anti-imperial movement impotent?

This can’t possibly be how the path to freedom is supposed to look, feel, or function.

We, the people, can be the solution we seek, but maybe not necessarily in our current state. Too many people who claim to want liberation from imperialism are really just replicating the systems they’re supposed to be organizing against because they have yet to do the internal work to free themselves from egotistic metrics of success. One of the biggest mistakes I see repeated over and over again is that in the end, leftist leaders end up becoming disconnected from the working class their liberation is attached to.

Those who are being crushed by capitalism the most have the least amount of leeway when it comes to fighting against it. We can’t fight this imperial mammoth alone; we need each other.

We know that economic boycotts are one of the most impactful ways for the working class to wield its power. But how can we expect financially strapped households to go on a labor or rent strike without the support of a strike fund?

Given that the cost of food has already gone up and shortages are to be expected this upcoming fall, what solutions for sustenance are we coming up with to make sure that no one goes hungry?

If we see that our Black, immigrant, queer, and trans community members are the targets of hateful rhetoric, are we providing them with safe spaces where they feel seen and supported?

Something that my friend from within the movement astutely observed was that the left never thought they would win. And up until now, we’ve been acting accordingly.

It took some time to let go of the illusion of things like “democracy” or “international law” but now that we see things like money (where is Elon Musk actually going to get a trillion dollars?) justice (who can justify one year Kohen Wiley being shot and killed by police over diapers?), and the rule of law (which Western leader isn’t an insider trading war criminal?) are all fake, what alternatives do we have?

“At the end of the day, you can’t reform your way out of this. There is no capitalism without the enrichment of the elite at our expense by its very definition. So, either you negotiate for more crumbs on their terms, or we finally get smart and say, ‘No, I think we’re done now.’ And we break the wheel that keeps this system crushing 99% of humanity.”

The End of Capitalism Is Here. by Second Thought

A lack of connectivity within left-leaning spaces may be why our movement has failed to galvanize enough momentum for forward progress. As the country of Cuba has been sanctioned and internationally isolated by the Amerikan Empire since 1960, leading to blackouts, food shortages, and rising infant mortality rates, President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced economic reforms to open the country's economy up to private investment. Since January, the socialist political government has faced increased energy and financial embargoes, with only a few countries like Russia, China, and Mexico daring to break the blockade to supply the island with food and fuel.

Where was the rest of the world while Cubans faced rolling blackouts of up to 20 hours a day for six months? We say that our of our struggles are interwined, then how are we coming together to provide each other with alternative systems and solutions?

Coming off a high after spending time in the States introducing my boyfriend to my family and friends earlier this year, I returned to Málaga determined to maintain that feeling of familiarity from being in a place where I belonged. Since I had yet to find a space I wanted to gravitate towards, I came up with a concept that could draw others in. In March, I held my first Creative Community Circle at the collective event space casa azul.

On that first day, only three people showed. Two of them were my friends, but one new person had just spotted one of the flyers I posted around the city and decided to join at the last minute. It was one new person, but that person was searching for the same sort of community space as I was.

Ever since that first Community Circle, I’ve held these creative gatherings every few weeks on Friday evenings to a rotating attendance of new and familiar faces. Each person entering with an appreciation for a supportive space to create, with no cost associated with attending, and where they can communicate in a language that’s comfortable for them, English. Hosting this event over the past few months has brought so many incredibly kind, talented, and altruistic people into my life. This is what it feels like to be in community.

In every conversation we have about what we’re creating, I hear all of the unique ways each person is doing their part to make the world a more sociable, sustainable place. Whether it’s through the work they do, the way they share their resources, or the kind of content they put out into the digital world. As we continue to creatively converge our anti-capitalist ideas, I can’t wait to see what happens once those of us who actually believe collective liberation is possible combine forces to structurally scale our community care.

I will continue to livestream the incredible conversations we’re having during these Community Circles on my Substack, so make sure you’re subscribed to be notified of the next one in case you’d like to join, but you’re not based in Málaga.

If you would like to increase your impact, it’s time to join forces. Not to vote for a more palitable politicians that still represents the capital class, but to build with the people in your area to develop the alternative systems future generations will rely on post this current capitalistic hellscape. The caption above by has some impactful steps that every individual can take to combat the fallout of the old world collapsing in their communities.

Since then, the case for reparations has been made by formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants. Generations of kidnapped Africans were sold into forced labor, prevented from reading, writing, or fleeing and barred from access to wealth, education, and land. That unpaid labor built the wealth that resulted in “The United States” becoming a world leader and enriched the white slave owners whose wealth and power have been passed down to the people in power today.

160 years since the first Juneteenth celebration Afro-Americans still face state violence, indentured servitude through incarceration, political disenfranchisement, and disproportionate deaths... they will do all of this to avoid paying Black people #reparations or giving them equal standing in society.

In Newance Volume 2, set in Spring 2066, my co-creator and I envision a world where the global majority reclaims their power and reappropriates public funds, which includes rebuilding Black community through reparations.

Share

In the essay “Look Who’s Coming to Gullah Village,” I’ve written a meet-the-family story that takes place in a fictional place called Gullah Village. The name was inspired by the research I did about early Black settlements in South Carolina after discovering genealogical ties to the area. This piece was finished before I came across a video of the descendants of enslaved people in the Gullah Geechee community advocating for over 7,000 acres of CHS plantation land be transformed into a permanent Gullah Geechee Land Reservation. In the future of Newance, this land reservation already exists.

To read the full edition and receive future quarterly issues, subscribe to .

Even though I grew up less than an hour from the capital city of the United States, it wasn’t until after I graduated from college that I began to spend more time in the district. Once I started working in Washington DC I quickly became accustomed to “What do you do?” being one of the first questions that followed whenever I met someone new. It also didn’t take long to realize that my response determined how much longer the conversation would continue.

As a Training Technician for a government contractor based at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms headquarters, people would excitedly ask me to explain exactly what my role was. Their eyes would light up as I described how I traveled to agency offices across the country to facilitate asset forfeiture trainings for federal agents.

They were so impressed with what I did for work that I left out the part about how my federally employed Black woman boss was blatantly sabotaging my work while simultaneously body-shaming me in an effort to edge me, the only other Black woman, off the team, and how that led to crippling anxiety.

Seeing the soul-sucking, self-serving nature that was needed to thrive or survive within the federal government was enough to make me walk away from the field altogether. It’s not lost upon me that if I had stayed the course and continued chasing the American Dream of a government job that was said to offer more job security, I likely would’ve been one of the nearly 300,000 Black women who exited the labor force last year, including almost 100,000 federal employees.

Seeking out a workplace that felt less carceral and more carefree, I took a job as Hostess at a trendy hotel rooftop bar in a central Washington DC location. After switching roles to become a server, I worked my way up to making over six figures yearly at my secure union job, working only four days a week. Even though I went on to buy my own home and my dream car, a Mercedes C-250, by my mid-20s, I rarely held a stranger’s attention longer than a few seconds once I informed them that I was a “waitress”.

As a member of the workforce since I got my first work permit at the age of 15, job searching has gone from entering a location to fill out an application, often getting an interview with a manager on the spot, to completing online forms where applicants are filtered through an automated hiring system. Each role requiring a curated cover letter and resume, along with several word-count-capped open-ended questions and a skill assessment that can take hours to complete. One does all of this, application after application, only to refresh their email inbox for weeks, waiting for a follow-up, wondering how many of those postings were for ghost jobs.

If Albert Einstein came to the conclusion that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” how am I to reconcile spending hours on online applications that are highly likely going to get rejected automatically by some AI-powered human resource platform because I opted to identify as “Black” and “woman” or because I didn’t include the exact right keywords to get tagged as a viable canditate.

There must be a better way. And like hundreds of thousands of other job seekers trying to avoid AI-related work in a global labor market with declining demand, I’m still searching for it.

“When analyzed position by position, 10.62% of jobs in the dataset showed an adverse impact on Black applicants, meaning the algorithm recommended Black candidates at a rate below the federal threshold relative to the most-selected racial group. Thirty percent of Black applicants applied to at least one such position. And 25.87% of all applications submitted by Black applicants — nearly 40,000 submissions — were for positions where the algorithm produced what federal guidelines define as discriminatory outcomes.”

“Largest study of AI hiring algorithms to date finds ‘clear racial disparities’ — over 25% of Black applicants tainted by bias” - Fortune

When your role is no longer tied to a job title, how else do you define yourself and your contributions to society?

Leave a comment

Heightened anxiety about the future and feelings of helplessness that there’s nothing we can do to change it are not “individual issues”. At this stage in human history, there are no bootstraps long enough for any one of us to pull ourselves up out of the mess we find ourselves in. Workers’ wages have remained stagnant for years while corporations continue to report record profits at the same time that wage theft is the largest form of theft in the United States. See “The $50 Billion Crime Against Workers.”

Many, especially millennials and Gen-Zers, have done the things they were told to do to achieve success and a sense of security. Get an education, which will get you access to a well-paying job, and one day you too will reap the benefits of your labor. However, as the top 10% in America amassed over $113 trillion last year, the trickle-down economics we’ve been sold is no more than a Ponzi scheme.

Though I previously pursued career paths that I believed would provide more financial stability or societal respect, I’ve always dreamt of being a writer. As a pre-teen, I would independently submit my writing to calls for submission I’d find in the newspaper, and as an adult, I self-published my first book while working at the hotel in DC. But it still wasn’t until years later, when I moved to Berlin and got my first full-time job as a copywriter, that I considered myself a writer.

For too long, the permission to be who I always believed myself to be came from external validation. I was made to feel like my worth was attached to a title, and how much money I made determined my value. It took me years to internalize that our purpose as human beings isn’t to pour our life force into propping up the billionaire class with our un/underpaid labor.

Each of us has a higher purpose. And I’m not the only one who has come to that conclusion.

It is not happenstance that several hemispheres are simultaneously erupting in civil disobedience. Since the Serbian students’ sustained anti-corruption protest after a railway collapse in the fall of 2024 and Gen-Z overthrowing their government via Discord then electing the nation’s youngest leader the following year, there have been sustained international efforts to eradicate exploitative establishment politicians.

Across South America, several countries are seeing civilian uprisings. The student-led strike in Chile is calling for a national strike triggered by far-right president Jose Antonio Kast’s proposed cuts to education, public healthcare, and social rights. In México, the teachers’ union CNTE is calling for a labor strike days before the country hosts the World Cup in demand for dignified pensions, fair wages, and job security. The masses in Peru have mobilized to openly reject presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori. Unrest across Bolivia is entering its fifth week over rising living costs, fuel shortages, and austerity measures proposed by neoliberal President Rodrigo Paz.

Days of demonstrations erupted across Albania after Ivanka Trump arrogantly announced that she and husband Jared Kushner planned to build a “luxury resort” on an island they “discovered while on a friend’s boat.” How very Christopher Columbus of them. Sazan Island, previously occupied by Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and more, is a strategically placed wildlife sanctuary at the Strait of Otranawo. It comes already fitted with nuclear bomb bunkers and underground tunnels. Only to be used for luxury resort stuff storage, I’m sure.

Nearly all of these justified displays of civil disobedience were met with unprovoked violence from private security forces or militarized capital defenders.

The people presently in power are showing us what they think of citizens’ demands to address the cost-of-living crisis, stop genocide, release migrants from concentration camps, or mitigate the climate crisis. Violence, repression, prison, and sometimes even death.

Regretably, this response is nothing new.

It’s been years since Indigenous land defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Terán was shot protecting Atlanta’s South River/Weelaunee Forest from being destroyed to build a police militarization facility referred to as “Cop City” and decades since peace activist Rachel Corrie was bulldozed to death by an Israeli Occupation Officer as she attempted to stop the destruction of a Palestinian’s home. No one has been held accountable for their murders.

We have been programmed to tolerate the levels of violence we see regularly, but none of this is normal. And yet it’s permitted to persist. Until enough of us mobilize to put a stop to it.

Share Serita’s Substack

Collective liberation is not only being sabotaged by the stronghold of white supremacy, but forward progress is also being hindered by the limited mindset of those unable to think outside of the confines of imperialist ideology.

That’s where the free thinkers, educators, Indigenous, and artists come in. The ones who do the thing while scared. The ones who are frequently at the forefront of creating alternative paths forward. Like the Indigenous people of Bolivia, constructing barriers made of boulders across state roadways in an attempt to oust their neoliberal president.

While liberal organizers inside the Empire chant “we won’t wait for justice,” but plan weekend protests months in advance, the working classes in other countries are already seeing the results of their immediate direct action.

As a result of sustained public demonstrations and supposed property damage in Albania, the country’s anti-corruption prosecutors have halted development of the Kusher-Trump resort, announced a property fraud and corruption investigation, and frozen the bank account of a company tied to Kushner’s company Affinity Partners. This comes alongside calls from the public for their corrupt president to resign.

All power to the people, the ones who take it.

Even though the two main political parties inside America continue to collude to suppress independent political parties, dismantle civil liberties, and syphon public funds from taxpayers, signs of hope that the country isn’t cooked continue to emerge.

In the mayoral race for Los Angeles, a city with a $15 billion budget in a state with the fifth biggest economy in the world. As results trickled in, early results showed that only about 30% of registered voters had cast their ballots in this election. Pro-cop corporate incumbent Karon Bass currently remains the frontrunner, while former reality star and cryptocurrency billionaire-backed Republican Spencer Pratt was recently bumped to third place by activist and urban planner Councilmember Nithya Raman. The top two candidates will advance to the primary for a November 3rd general election.

While waiting for an election will not halt the fast-moving federal fascism of the Trump administration, having progressive leaders in two of the country’s biggest cities on both coasts would do wonders to advance the cause of the working class. Not just on Turtle Island, but across the world.

Now that a swelling number of the masses have awakened to the realization that this invasive imperial force, (soon to be formerly known as) The United States of America, is self-destructing after decades of decline, a new framework for the future is emerging. What a time to be alive during a time when collective consciousness is rising at such a rapid rate.

I wish I could have been in town to attend the recent grand opening of the DC Liberation Center. The “independent community space and organizing hub” located on 337 H Street NE will host a range of cultural events, resident forums, along with other educational and entertainment offerings for the working class of the DMV metro area. At a time when Trump has announced plans to occupy the nation’s capital with up to 5,000 National Guard troops, it’s vital to establish safe, community-sustained meeting places where acts of resistance can be organized.

Instead of looking for ways to salvage or survive exploitative systems centered around capitalism, individuals are collectivizing to create safe spaces to support and sustain their communities. Accessible alternatives are being built by the contributions of individual citizens committed to working towards more equitable economies and societies. There’s no title required to be the change you wish to see in the world.

At the end of the month, I’ll be attending sessions and participating in a roundtable on “Internationalism from Below” at Research & Degrowth International’s 12th Anti-Imperialism Summer School in Barcelona, Catalunya. This year’s theme is: Unravelling the Threads of Empire and Building Post-Extractive Futures. On my Substack, I’ll be sharing an analysis of what I learn about how we can “actively map pathways for building post-extractive futures”.

Upcoming content for paid subscribers will include an audio and essays analysis from the Degrowth Summer School, and an excerpt from the follow-up to my most recent book, Recovering Loveaholic, in addition to my regular monthly essays. If you’ve found my writing educational, engaging, or entertaining, please consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription.

If witches are going to use their power for anything these days, I hope that it’s centered around improving the conditions of the greater good. Though, as a recovered loveaholic but ever the hopeless romantic, I can understand the desire to conjure up a compatible partner given the supposed global dating crisis.

My second book, Recovering Loveaholic, was about a woman reclaiming her time from the perils of modern-day dating for millennials and finding solace in being solo. In my third book, Bitter Sweet, I’ll be sharing my documented journey from rising from the depths of loneliness I felt in the years after losing my mother to elevating to levels of love I didn’t know possible in my relationship with L.K. The (sort of) start of our story begins in the essay “Remember the Time Part II”.

Subscribe now

My boyfriend, L.K. wishes to minimize having his photo and name on the internet, and as a narrative nonfiction writer, I must admit this does make describing him a challenge. To help paint a more detailed picture, instead of photos, I’m including a selection of songs from the playlist referenced in today’s essay with lyrics that illustrate who L.K. is and what our relationship is like.

After I started compiling this playlist back in 2022, I heard the following song on a friend’s story and immediately added it to the list. “Apocolyse” sets the tone for what it’s like to fall in love as “an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life.”

When people ask how we got together, L.K. likes to say that we met in Málaga (which is technically true), but that isn’t exactly where our story began. Allow me to elaborate in this essay from Bitter Sweet:

You remind me of…

...a memory.

It was the morning after the first ayahuasca ceremony and I was on the way up the hill from my lodge to the community kitchen. A breakfast buffet was served every day of the 10-day retreat until 10 AM. If you missed it, the only thing left until lunch time was dried foods and fresh fruit in the storage pantry. Having gone to bed less than four hours earlier, I mentally coaxed myself to make it up the pathway before all of the gluten-free foods were taken away. As I rounded the bend where buildings started to appear, I saw the ceremonial singer from the night before appear at the top of the hill.

She turned right towards the footpath I was on and I pleaded with my drained glands to salivate my dry mouth so that I could speak by the time the singer reached me. Her long, straight black hair flowed around her petite frame as she glided in an all-white outfit similar to the one she sang in during the ceremony the night before. Her presence was so ethereal that it felt as if she were emitting a warm light.

After spending several hours plunged into the deepest, darkest parts of my inner world following several doses of ayahuasca, I felt completely overwhelmed having to face her. If only there was someplace to hide among the trees until she passed, but given that we were on a narrow, unpaved pathway on the side of a hill, I mustered my facial muscles into a smile once she spotted me.

As soon as our eyes met, her entire body shifted when she smiled. When we reached each other, the Colombian woman, the color of toffee, asked me how my time at the retreat had been so far. Almost as if I had found a long-lost friend after wandering for days alone in the woods, I shared with her the depths of loneliness that I faced the night before. With a gentle smile, the ceremonial singer assured me that I was in good hands at the retreat and encouraged me to stay the course and work through whatever it was the plant medicine was trying to show me.

The young woman stayed for a moment to caringly stare up at me, carrying so much history and wisdom in her eyes. Before walking away, it seemed rude not to ask her a question, but I couldn’t follow that up with, What about you? With a voice that was effortlessly powerful yet soothing, I wanted to know what led her to become a ceremonial singer. In the only way my emotionally exhausted Western mind knew how to pose the question, I asked, “So, how long have you been doing this?” as if we were standing across from each other at a networking event.

Without pause and with her face beaming, the ceremonial singer replied, “Every lifetime.”

Stunned, as my mind had yet to conceptualize that level of knowing before, I made an exclamation, then an awkward comment about how I’d better get going before they put the breakfast buffet away. Without replying, she smiled and lowered her head before opening her arms for a hug. For a brief moment, we embraced before continuing on in opposite directions as her words replayed in my head.

She was so sure of what her purpose had been every lifetime. What that must feel like, I wondered as I picked over what was left of the fruit and oatmeal before pouring a cup of lukewarm coffee.

There were different shamans and singers for each ayahuasca ceremony so I never saw the woman I crossed paths with again, but the volunteers who assisted us throughout the retreat remained the same. During the ceremonies, the helpers attentively made their rounds around the wooden rotunda to check on anyone who appeared to be having a challenging time and change out the buckets for purging. During the downtime, the caregivers made their own connections with the plant medicine participants as they blended together in the common areas.

A friendly earth-toned pair with graying hair drew my attention whenever I saw them. Since they weren’t particularly affectionate, at first I wasn’t even sure if they were together, but it was clear that they knew each other very well. Each of them held my gaze with a comforting glance whenever I met their eyes. One day, while lounging around the outdoor picnic tables in between activities, I discovered that Naz and Lorenzo were from New Mexico, and after experiencing Gaia Sagrada themselves, they returned a few months later to help guide others through the process.

The couple told me that they had been married for almost thirty years and that they had two adult children who had left the home long ago. Given the newfound freedom they earned in their older age after building businesses and raising a family, they had decided to spend a few months living in Ecuador. Like most of the other Americans at the retreat, they were looking for any reason to extend their stay outside of the States.

Mesmerized by the loving ease with which Lorenzo and Naz appeared to communicate after so many years together, especially in some of the more tense and tender moments when everyone is tired during the ceremonies, I wished for a partnership like that, too. Curious about their love story, I again attempted to small-talk.

“So, how long have the two of you been together?”

Lorenzo proudly replied, “We’ve found each other every lifetime. When I met Nazare I knew we had been together before and I did everything I could to work on myself to make sure I didn’t fuck it up.”

“We were young when we met,” Naz added.

“We were young, but we knew.”

There it was again. The certainty asserted of knowing something, or someone, every lifetime.

In that moment, somewhere inside me, I felt a sense of relief. Look, I said to myself, it is possible to feel soul-affirming signals.

Having witnessed what that looked like, I was willing to settle for nothing less.

Read more

It was a mildly warm Sunday afternoon in the middle of May. Three women arrive at the outdoor patio of a corner restaurant and take their seats in a U-shape around a black brass table. Suddenly, a sheet of clouds rolled in at the same time as their drinks. One bundles up in a borrowed sweater while another breaks for the bathroom before the trio finally settles into their conversation.

The twenty-something-year-old began to share her concerns over whether her current partner was really the right fit for her. They were already dealing with the tensions of being in a long-distance relationship when cultural and ideological differences began to arise that were in direct conflict with some of her personal beliefs. She had already made concessions to conform to how he wanted her to be, which made her uncomfortable. The guy was set to relocate so that they could continue their relationship in the same city. But was it the right decision for him to uproot his life to be with her when distance seemed to be the least of their problems?

If I don’t stay with him, I’m afraid that I’m going to end up single forever.

A laugh dared to escape the mouth of the forty-something-year-old, but she caught herself. Her initial instinct was to say that’s ridiculous but she waited for the young woman to finish her thoughts.

I’m afraid that men aren’t going to want me when I’m older. You know, because they prefer younger women.

If I end this relationship and have to face the dating market again, it feels like my life is over.

Then it became clear that this was no laughing matter.

The chill that seized my shoulders wasn’t just the breeze that preceded the smattering of water drops on the table, it was twenty-something-year-old me sharply tapping me on the shoulder. Does this young woman remind you of anyone?

Forty-year-old me sank back in my seat as I listened to the young woman seated next to me feed herself many of the same li(n)es I did at her age. Actually, me at her age was a topic of conversation just before she began making these bleak statements about dating. She was in the middle of reading my second book, Recovering Loveaholic, which “tells the tale of how [August] started out addicted to finding the one and ended up searching for a way to recover from dating as a millennial.”

This fictional account of a woman raised on fairytales detailed the harsh realities of dating, from perpetually getting ghosted to being strung along by emotionally immature men and/or narcissists who made gaslighting their preferred form of communication.

With her face in her hands, the twenty-something-year-old sitting next to me said, I had to stop reading because I thought, my god, is it going to be that bad if I have to go back to dating?

I held back the exasperated “Yes!” that was ready to dart out in response. Instead, I sighed with the compassion of remembering what it’s like to be in her shoes and offered some of the hopeful lessons I’ve learned in the six years since writing a book about a woman trying to keep herself from drowning in disappointment in the dating pool.

I’ve recently been revisiting some of the shows and movies that were favorites in my formative years. Viewing them from the vantage point of my forties has helped pinpoint where many of my patriarchal, ageist, and inaccurate ideas about what it meant to be a woman came from.

At the start of my last YouTube vlog, I shared a clip from one of the early episodes of Sister, Sister, which I happened to be watching while doing my hair. In true elder millennial fashion, I’m suffering from nostalgia. In the teen comedy series, twins Tia and Tamera were sulking because neither of them had been on a date yet. At thirteen, one sister turned to the other to ask, “Do you think we’re like mutants or something?”

To which the other vehemently replied, “No!” before continuing, “If we’re 35 and still having this conversation then we’re mutants.”

When this episode was first released in 1994, and I presumably watched it as it aired at nine years old, a seed had been sown. As a girl who saw herself in the characters portrayed by Tia and Tamera, I internalized that there was an expiration date before it would be considered an abnormality if I were still single.

That wasn’t the first time I heard the age of 35 used in dialogue from that era as a woman’s supposed must marry by date. I would watch as beautiful, smart, lively young women in their early 30s end up as the punchline of some joke that made them out to be asexual and undatable if they didn’t already have a mate.

Leave a comment

In the most recent issue of our solarpunk speculative fiction magazine set in 2066 , I interviewed about how she envisions the state of those who menstruate in the future. One of the questions I had for her was: What’s something about menstrual health you wished your younger self had learned sooner? The part of her answer that didn’t make the issue was that “pain isn’t normal. It may be common, but it’s not normal.”

Her absolute apt response applied to more than menstrual health for me. Though we may have become accustomed to it, it isn’t normal for us to regularly experience or endure pain.

Especially when it comes to anything associated with love.

As bell hooks wrote in All About Love: New Visions, “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care….”

Today’s twentysomething-year-olds may not have received their programming from teen sitcoms like Sister, Sister, but clearly Gen Z girlies have consumed the same tall tales told to the generations before them. Sadly, I see that women are still convinced that they have to contort themselves into someone else’s ideal in order to couple up, before it’s too late.

As miladies navigate a social media landscape lined with misogynistic takes on what it means to be a woman, below are a few of the lines I wish someone had told me when I was in my twenties, which I believe are helpful to internalize at any age.

“You are not a tree.”

You may read this and think, well, duh. But allow me to elaborate.

This is a sentence that someone said to me when I was nearly having a nervous breakdown about the unstable living situation I was in at my ex-partner’s place, days after moving to a new country. I was venting to someone over voice note about how severely this situation was affecting my mental health. Whenever I was in the house, the energy was so tense I found myself shrinking so I could stop feeling like my existence annoyed him.

I spent several minutes rationalizing all the reasons I should stay. I hadn’t budgeted for a long-term hotel stay and the flat search on the island of Tenerife was already so hard, hence the predicament I found myself in. Then there was the matter of desperately not wanting to dive back into the dating pool, even if I was extremely anxious and unable to eat. I tried to tell myself that the devil I knew seemed like a better option than the fear of the unknown.

During one of the many times I used walking my dog as an excuse to get out of the house, I spent several minutes working through ways to hold myself hostage in a situation that was making me miserable because starting over with someone else didn’t seem that much better. If I don’t stay with him, I’m afraid that I’m going to end up single forever.

In the message I received back, she said, “You are not a tree. You can get up and move at any time.”

There I was, ready to lock myself into a life of misery just so I didn’t have to say I was single, with someone who didn’t even appreciate having me around. Why would I want to root myself in a living situation where I could never be myself?

No matter the ties that bind you to someone or some place, you are not a tree. You can take the steps to pick yourself up and move away from anyone or anything that proves to be detrimental to your well-being. Lean on your friends, community, and local network to ground you as you settle into a new space where you’re free to bloom.

“Approach change from a place of acceptance rather than resistance.”

In my state of stupor on the last day of the ayahuasca retreat I did in March 2023, I listened as everyone under the wooden canopy with me in Cuenca, Ecuador, did their last round on the magic carpet. One of the volunteers who had cared for us during the ten-day retreat volunteered to go next. He gave a long, heartfelt, insightful account of what he learned while bearing witness to our plant medicine journeys, and this was his biggest takeaway:

Approach change from a place of acceptance rather than resistance.

The only constant is change. If you’re hoping for it, the waiting period until something happens can feel like torture. If you’re not ready for it, then facing it can feel unsettling. Either way, no matter how stressful, wonderful, or uneventful any given day may seem, it only takes one moment for something in your life to change. Acceptance helps make those unpredictable, transitional phases that much easier to endure.

Every single day, I learn something new about the world, which causes me to reflect on myself and that informs the next step I take. I am in a constant state of change, and so is the world around me.

The way I thought my life would pan out when I was in my twenties looks absolutely nothing like my life now, and looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. When I was in my 20s, I had no idea that the city of Málaga even existed, but this month I celebrated four years of taking refuge from the States in southern Spain.

Be open to the many ways your life can unexpectedly change for the better when you’re ready to accept them.

“Be the best you can be.”

While packing up my mom’s things after her passing, I found a notebook she had noted as “her Bible”. She had only written on the first page, but in that passage, she wrote, “Be the best you can be.” When I read this expression of her inner ethos, I felt like she was speaking to me.

I strive to be the loving, caring, and compassionate person I am today because of the example that my mom set. Monita was seen as such an exceptional human being by her family, coworkers, classmates, and community, and she also struggled with disappointing dating experiences well into her 40s.

But in her Bible, she wrote about turning her focus inward. As exceptional as my mom already was, she continued striving to be the best version of herself. Now that I’m navigating my 40s, I can appreciate that much more the inner motivation it took for her to remain the hopeful romantic woman that she was. It will never not warm my heart that mom’s bright light finally drew in the man she was in love with at the time of her passing.

Know that whether or not you are in a partnership with another person, you will always be a work in progress. As is now tattooed on my left forearm in mom’s handwriting, make it your greater goal to “be the best you can be”.

As we move towards a more matriarchal way of life, may we all glean the lessons of the wise, wonderful women who have walked this path before us to nurture a more compassionate way of seeking companionship.

Subscribe now

No matter our age, we will all wrestle with the human condition of wanting to give and receive love. For too long, that desire has been played upon in patriarchal ways to sell products and push patriarchal societal norms. Even though people of all ages are increasingly asking themselves, “At what point do you accept being single forever?”, trying to turn yourself into someone else’s idea of “the perfect partner” is not the answer.

Whether your relationship status is single or not, be yourself so that the person, or people, who will love you for exactly who you are can find you. Instead of focusing on “finding your person” as a destination, enjoy the journey you’re on, and believe that the path of the person you’re meant to be will align with yours.

As I reassure myself regularly, what is meant for me will not miss me. That applies to you, too. You’ll stress less about what lies ahead when you trust your own path.

And as August was advised in the ending of Recovering Loveaholic, “Hold out for someone who truly sees you, not a curated profile you created, and don’t stop until you find someone who makes you happy, not because you both chose to swipe right, but because you choose to build a relationship on fundamentals you both share.”

If I had believed the lies I told to myself when I was younger, I would’ve expired before meeting my partner, L.K., in the final chapter of my thirties.

I’ve got 30 minutes to leave the house but the headline news is bumming me out. Another day on Earth. A gift and a curse. Witnessing a world between death and rebirth.

Famine, floods, war, blood, rising costs, species loss. How high the cost. Mother Nature is in grave danger. Where are the superheroes coming to save her?

Black figures moving more like Blankman than Boseman. Revolution is more than a halftime performance. Black billionaires abandon the masses after they’ve amassed their assets to hold up the heaven of the Epstein class.

Posing with Kapital King Kushner at the Gala their hosting. At an award show telling us to never stop working. Okay, we get it, yep, yeah, you too. Thinking that money will save you from getting your due.

Numbers on a screen don’t mean a thing during a blackout. Or survival of the sellouts. Throw your coins into a wishing well, pray for a way to wipe the slate clean. When the class war breaks out it still won’t save you from the guillotine.

The “Let Them Eat Cake” coverage of The Met Gala fundraiser first went viral in 2024.

Two years later, Beyoncé was the co-chair there.

Somehow, our “sis” Sza ended up there.

IDK Y LGBTQ+ Sarah Paulson was there.

Qué mal, Bad Bunny was there.

Broligarch billionaire Marc Zuckerberg bought his way there.

So, of course, the Kardashian-Jenner Klan had to be there.

It feels like I’m watching The Hunger Games spread across the world like the Real Housewives franchise. Even though I’ve never seen any of the movies, the viral videos and memes alongside images of the wreckage in Palestine and homelessness in Los Angeles are enough for me to get the point.

If this is what representation looks like, I don’t want it.

At a time when wealth disparity has become an everyday issue for most people, the who’s who of the so-called elite class, which has marketed itself as the embodiment of success, showcased just how out of touch they are with everyday people. Will this egregious display of exorbitant wealth at an event sponsored by the same man who funded Trump’s campaign and continues to profit off of I.C.E. terror in a country where child poverty has tripled to 13% finally bring an end to celebrity worship?

Leave a comment

“Undramatized, all this might sound a bit extreme, yet historically most of this nation’s conflicts of arms have been—at least for Afro-Americans—wars-within-wars. Such was true of the Civil War, the last of the Indian Wars, of the Spanish American War, and of World Wars I and II. And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight.”

xii, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Even though it’s hard for me to understand how black billionaires can rub elbows with the profiteers of our people’s exploitation, I can grasp that the so-called elite class of hoarders are so out of touch with the other 99% of humans they share the planet with, so that they don’t have to look at us while they attempt to erase us. They don’t want to know us. They don’t care about our stories, histories, needs, or wants. They prefer not to even know that we exist. Which is why they send their working-class traitors dressed up as police, military, or other militarized forces to beat, chase, and arrest those who dare to resist their reign.

But what about the masses? Particularly, the Afro-Americans. Are they still committed to being Beyhive stans, or are they startled by how rapidly they’ve been rolled back to the status quo of Jim Crow?

In Virginia, after a two-year-long legislative process, citizens of the state democratically voted to redistrict their voting map. Then, in a 4-3 decision, their right-wing Supreme Court judges struck down the will of the voters. In Tennessee, law enforcement blocked Democract Representative Justin Pearson from being present while state lawmakers eliminated the only majority-black district in Memphis, which he represents. I reposted a video of a black woman in Alabama being tackled to the ground for peacefully protesting the voter disenfranchisement plans being rushed through in the state house. Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis released a state map redrawn to dilute the voting power of non-caucasian counties with the caption, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”.

As if this was the plan all along. Because this was the plan all along. Before eliminating the last predominantly black district in Tennessee, Republicans showcased “a masterclass in election-rigging” by rewriting the map to disenfranchise black voters in Nashville back in 2022. One of the anti-human rights orchestrators of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, has a PhD in Black studies. Self-proclaimed conservatives have been studying history and perfecting their plans while wiping out the education system so that the masses are misled into thinking they aren’t under attack.

These plans aren’t just playing out in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, and Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi. This blueprint isn’t even exclusive to the regime in the United States. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing government Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been accused of purging millions from the polls, with 3 million Muslim voters reportedly not allowed to cast their ballot. Comments coming out of Costa Rica, where a right-wing leader was just sworn in, highlighted that she won with only 25% of the vote.

Voter disenfranchisement comes second to voter disillusionment.

Today’s politics appear to be less about electing civil servants to protect the needs of the people as opposed to the system proping up sponsored stooges to uphold the Capitol holding class.

As I watch a woman on the train in Málaga stare at a video of Sza’s dress at The Met Gala, I’m frustrated with the black representation that’s being exported to the rest of the world. Beyoncé wearing that beyond tone deaf “skeleton” dress. Interviews with Obama blustering through a response on why he’s been silent about the genocide in Palestine. All of them mute on matters of the recent attacks on voting rights.

Black people, we’re under attack, but who’s out there fighting back?

As he addressed Tennessee lawmakers, Rep. Pearson reminded them that the right for black people to vote had already been “paid in blood”. “It’s been paid in blood year over year, time after time, assassination after assassination, lynching after lynching, so that more people might be able to ascertain access to this constitutional democratic republic experiment that is currently being gutted.”

Later in his speech, Pearson questions the lawmakers, having already consulted the Bible for the answers. “Why again does it seem like the pillars of pain that we have felt and experienced for over 400 years in this country continue to rise again? It whispered in the words of this Bible and in the words of those ancestors that have gone before us just these simple words, We’re still here.”

It feels like I’m watching history repeat itself.

Damn, we are still here. Over 60 years after the Civil Rights Act was first signed. Over 60 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. Over 60 years since Malcolm X became the first Afro-American leader to meet with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Well over 60 years of fighting the same fight. Against, as Rep. Pearson referred to them in his speech, the same Klancestors generation after generation.

The ones that gave us their best representation in men like Donald J. Trump, a German descendant of Amerikan Klancestors, and Elon Musk, a Dutch descendant of South African Klancestors.

Then I look around at what our ancestors have left us with. No, not those bourgeois black billionaires. True gems of black excellence.

While scrolling on my feed, I stopped to watch a video of a 16-year-old as he began speaking to the Louisiana State Senate Committee meeting. Josiah Hardy passionately spoke out against further disenfranchisement of the area’s black voters. “As an African American myself, I want to hold political office in the future, but I cannot do so if my voice is diluted in a community that does not like me and does not want to see my people thrive.”

After introducing the initiative he founded, Project 2028 Louisiana, which promotes youth civic engagement, leadership, and action among teens, Josiah continued, “I am in favor of Senate Bill 407 because it allows my people to have the voice we haven’t had in many years. The fact that we are still having to sit here in 2026 and fight for our right to vote and our right to have voices in Congress is a problem. It’s a problem that we all face and that we all need to wake up to in Louisiana. If you want to plan for the future, then you need to allow the future to be a part of your planning.”

I think about the generations who have seen civil rights achieved and revoked within their lifetime. Our elders and ancestors, we hope, did their part to enact change so that they could leave a better place for future generations. As a collective, we’ve seemed to have lost sight of that shared responsibility.

Humanity has always faced a faction of society with grand plans to send some other civilization back to the Stone Age or sentence certain factions of society into forced servitude. And yet we’re still here.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of watching history repeat itself.

In my discussion with Danielle Keiser for the upcoming issue of , set in Spring 2066, we looked back on how humans arrived at a post-capitalist, pro-matriarchal future. Her take was that the key to collective change starts within the individual.

The way we see the world is reflected back to us. If we say that everything is trash, then when we look around, what else do we expect to see?

It’s not to say that we don’t look around and see basic rights being stripped away, families in tents being bombed, unhoused people living on our streets, harrowing signs from our environment that we’re heading for catastrophic collapse, and a general sense that things are very much not okay when we talk to the people in our lives.

For now, what’s the one thing that everyone can do differently to invoke different results? As voter disenfranchisement is built into the system and the rise of the right continues, it’s not counting on electoral politics to save us. It’s time to take the future into our own hands.

Things aren’t going to get better in a day. We may not even see signs of recovery in our lifetime. But the least we can do is stop the bleeding before we die out. That requires action.

What’s an action that you feel capable of committing to? Here are some starting points: Boycott targeted brands and services and don’t go back. Cancel your streaming subscriptions and sign up for your local library. Have conversations with the people in your inner circle about the state of the world and how everything is connected.

Instead of handing over your monetary capital to an impotent political candidate, regularly redistribute your funds to individuals in need and grassroots mutual aid initiatives. Though I make only modest means through my Substack and other freelance work, I’ve committed myself to sending funds to my friends in the States and Palestine as often as is sustainable.

One of the most challenging parts of living through a transition period is the instability. Our political systems were designed to fail, the social safety nets we pay into with our taxes are being defunded, and many people are unable to move forward because they’re purposefully deprived of resources and representation.

As the saying goes, be the change you seek. Offer the stability you don’t see. I’m sure that’s what young Josiah told himself as he pushed through his evident nerves to speak up on behalf of his community. Once we stop looking at capitalist, colonial measures of progress, we can clearly see the spark lit by our generation’s true changemakers. And it’s not coming from inside The Met Gala. Every time we free our inner worlds from the limiting beliefs of colonial systems, we will continue to see their influence disappear in the real world.

If you are someone who is able to redistribute your funds, I have a friend in Tennessee who is now in urgent need of financial support to buy medicine and food in a state with very few social safety nets. Her Cash App is $klatorre2016 (you can also message me for other options). There are also links for families in Palestine who are in need of our continuous support to pay rent, buy food, and other basic necessities. Visit my Linktree and scroll down to Palestine Fundraisers.

Elder goes on to talk about the children he encounters in the war zones he’s in, “I see girls and boys who learn to distinguish between different types of drones before they learn to read. That is not surviving war. That is being shaped by war… Chronic exposure to extreme trauma rewires a child’s developing brain.”

I believe that the collective trauma of witnessing the past 6+ years from the COVID pandemic, where millions across the world died, to the increasing severity of severe weather events causing climate devastation and loss of life due to floods, wildfires, and droughts, to the active and unfolding genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, to the uncovering of how disturbed, deeply connected, and devoid of morals the Epstein class is, to everything in between.

It has been heavy on my mind for the last two and a half years, in particular, how can the world keep going this way?

Not just witnessing the horrors, but being told to keep on keeping on as they continue, unchecked and with little to no consequences. A collective healing is already happening, but that will only come through a proper reckoning.

In the days after my mom died, I was already being encouraged to move on. “She wouldn’t want you to be sad,” someone would say whenever I expressed an ounce of the grief that felt so overwhelming, I was drowning in it. Instead of talking about how deeply despondent my inner world was, I locked everything inside. In silence, the sadness began to eat away at me.

In my third book, Bitter Sweet, I attempt to make sense of how I pulled myself out of such a dark place as an example to those who may feel like that’s impossible for them to do. As you will read in this excerpt, there were days when I didn’t see the point in continuing on. My foundation was already shaky when my mother died. It felt like my entire world had shattered, and nothing made sense anymore. Each day after I woke up thinking, how am I going to make it through this?

Nine years later, I’m more grateful than ever that I found it within me to stick around. Through a series of fortunate events, the good fortune of incredible friends, a (different) black woman therapist, a life-changing ayahuasca retreat, and more, I’m the most mentally sound and personally at peace I’ve ever been. Knowing where I started, making it here is a miraculous feat.

We, as a collective, are living through some of the most deeply disturbing times in history while also dealing with the personal battles that we don’t tell anyone else about. It’s understandable to feel hopeless, lost, confused, angry, sad, and full of grief. As you will read in Bitter Sweet, I’ve been there. But if I could not only survive but find a way to recover after such a devastating loss, I believe it’s possible for us to not only survive but thrive in these times.

There’s so much I wanted to include after the journal entry that closes out today’s excerpt, but I decided to leave something for the book. Most of the previous excerpts that I’ve published on my Substack are from the Sweet side of the book. Today, I’m sharing a section of my autobiographical anthology from Bitter.

Read more

We’re in the year 2066.

Please join us in the future. It is forty years from now. The planet, though still severely affected by climate change is in steady recovery. Humanity, though still struggling at different corners of its collective past, has shifted from a stakeholder-centered existence to human-centered societal systems.

We are free. We managed to collectivize and end the diseased hoarders’ stronghold on our lives, time, bodies, labor, strength, emotional health, and mindscape. Once called “billionaires” or “the elite,” in 2066 they are embarrassed to even come out of their huts. What’s more, they are taxed fairly for excessive hoarding. These funds have helped restore that same planet and myriad communities they sought to destroy for profit under capitalism.

Newance is shaping our collective future by shaping our collective consciousness. Through a futuristic lens set in 2066, creators Anneliese Kappey and Serita Braxton tell tales of a past that is part revisionist, mostly speculative fiction. Join us. See what’s possible if we reclaim our power.

Share

The complete first issue of Newance is now available to read in anticipation of Volume 2, Spring 2066. Our paid subscribers make it possible for us to financially compensate contributors, market the magazine, and print physical copies of upcoming issues. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to our quarterly journal .

Newance

Full access to the first issue of Newance

Before joining us in the rejuvenating energy of Spring 2066 in Newance Volume 2, catch up on the stories that started the year in Winter 2066. Below is a link to access the full first issue of our solarpunk quarterly journal…

Read more

4 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Newance

Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents.

Without prisons, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves.

When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it as a gift.

We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property.

We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth.

We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another.

We were in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

This statement by John (Fire) Lame Deer of the Lakota Sioux hangs in the Turtle Island Tribal Council Community Hall, which stands on the land where The White House used to be. Having John’s words visible serves as a reminder of the so-called civilized societies of the West that we are aiming to eradicate. Since the Land Back Revolution began, hundreds of previously democratic countries and recently, autonomous communities have joined the Confederacy of Stateless Societies.

If you’re with us here today, you and your community are curious about how to join the Confederacy. You might be here on behalf of a nation, a former colony, an established village, or maybe you’re just representing yourself. We welcome you to explore the ways that everyone can take part in and benefit from becoming a Stateless Society.

I promise not to bore you with the details about how we got here, since we all remember what happened forty years ago, but I do want to cover some key points before you start the week here with us in Kerala. The Confederacy of Stateless Societies thanks you all for joining, and for using the shared transportation options we provided or suggested. We can’t imagine that any of the billionaire refugees who still have private jets would come here anyway, but crazier things have happened.

Speaking of which, I’ll get started and ask you to hold questions until the end. My name is Ama and I’m here for questions or if you want to sign up for the trip to Eravikulam National Park. Buses are scheduled every day of the conference, and the park is accessible.

For decades, many asked how the human species could let things get so dire. Survival is the most basic instinct a living creature has. Yet day after day, year after year, generation after generation we saw record increases in poverty, preventable deaths, habitat degradation, war, enslavement, femicide, gun violence, and on and on. Journalists, scientists, and ordinary citizens risked their lives to warn the world about how bad things were, and how bad things would get if we didn’t change course. And what did humans do?

They kept consuming, kept getting diseases, getting displaced. They kept dying, and kept expecting their democratically elected leaders to do something about it. I don’t have to tell you about the deplorable and deeply inhumane global mafia of pedophiles and war criminals that were uncovered to be running these so-called “civilized” societies. This global mafia spent centuries traveling Mama Gaia to pillage, steal, enslave, and exterminate.

If you’re here now, I also don’t need to tell you about The Great Awakening that some say began in 2020, while others believe that collective consciousness began to rise well before. For today’s purposes we will begin with the year 2025.

It was written in the stars. On November 19, 2024, Pluto entered Aquarius and remained there until 2043, an astrological event that happens once every 218 years. The previous time period of this particular planetary alignment, from 1778 to 1798, included the French, American, and Industrial Revolutions. Pluto transforms and Aquarius collectivizes, so by the time 2025 arrived, the revolution had already begun.

Societal norms unraveled during the COVID-19 pandemic, wealth disparities shot up shortly after, and so did climate disasters. Western-backed atrocities in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo were then uncovered through social media. These atrocities continued, despite global public outrage.

It was around that time that more people began to understand that no one was coming to save them from the world that capitalism had created. All of this and more, occurring in a short period of time, shocked the collective consciousness. For decades prior, humans had been made to believe that they existed in complete isolation from each other, other species, and the nature around them. Humans had lost their connection to Mama Gaia.

At the same time, scientists had released reports that children born in 2025 would see thousands of animals disappear in their lifetime. Scientists also warned that continued inaction to mitigate the climate crisis would lead to environmental collapse by 2100. On Christmas Day, 2025, the now Stateless Society of Iceland recorded record high heat, at night. In what had been previously one of the coldest areas on Earth, summer temperatures were experienced on a winter night.

That same Christmas marked the third year in a row when the birthplace of Jesus was under occupation and bombardment. It was also the same year that Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem lit a Christmas Tree for the first time since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. There were glimmers of hope that the world was beginning to heal.

Uprisings sprouted in 2025, largely led by Gen Z, on the motherland in Tanzania, Cameroon, and Kenya. In West Asia, government overthrows started on Discord, in Nepal and Indonesia. When authoritarian governments shut down the means for the collective to communicate digitally, Millennials and Gen Zers were notorious for finding alternatives.

Those inside the imperial core had to get creative to collaborate across coasts and countries after digital communications began being monitored.

When the revolution in Nepal happened, citizens of the former United States of America saw exactly how a people-led revolution could unfold. Pan-African and Indigenous inhabitants across the world had been severed from their histories of resistance, but they could then watch videos and read open source text about the generations’ old fight against imperialism. They were reminded of how many generations had continued the fight for freedom. So could they.

It was either fight to reclaim the future or allow the world to devolve into World War III. European leaders were readying for war, pulling money from social services to fund weapons. After funding the genocidal expansion of its colony Israel, the lawless leader of the American colony on Turtle Island waged war on its neighbors in the Caribbean — Mexico and Venezuela. The rest of the world was forced to respond.

The power of the people kicked into full force in 2026.

The Great Depression that followed the AI bubble burst, in addition to trillions in debt, left few Western countries with the capital to continue waging wars. This was compounded by the fact that many of the countries in Africa formerly exploited had reclaimed their natural resources and local labor. Despite the shock to the global system after technological and economic collapse, steadfast communities from all over organized recovery efforts and social services.

People had been abandoned by their governments. Many of the initiatives implemented by the Tribal Council and the values included in the Planetary Bill of Responsibilities stems from the grassroots efforts of local communities.

As old structures collapsed, new pathways were revealed. Local grassroots efforts served as the global blueprint for building post-capitalist systems that served communities, not shareholders. By the end of the twenties, what would go on to become the Confederacy of Stateless Societies had emerged. BRICS, and the Alliance of the Sahel States were examples of a shift towards a truly liberated, indigenous-led, and community-centered global governance.

Our parents, grandparents, and maybe even some of you in this room fought to restore balance, to build a just world for all living beings, and to eradicate the Earth of the moral failings that had fueled imperialism and capitalism.

What had previously been referred to as “human rights” and “international law” had been proven unenforceable. The right to self-determination was denied to most humans. Most avenues to receive justice were corrupt. For many years humans were made to believe that this was just the way things were. That they existed in complete isolation, and were powerless to change a thing.

One community, country, and former colony at a time we recovered our humanity and returned to a way of life that was just, equitable, and aligned with nature. What we’ve been able to do in a couple of decades had been deemed by the former colonial ruling class as impossible to implement, even in one country. You can only imagine how unhinged the billionaires and millionaires were when the SWIFT Fund passed as part of the Bill of Responsibilities.

The policies put into practice by small, autonomous communities grew into regional councils, then nationwide systems that would go on to be overseen, evaluated, replicated, and enforced by the Confederacy. Eventually, borders were abandoned. Nomadic hunter-gatherers or families looking to relocate for work were free to roam. Reciprocal resource sharing so that anyone in need who could be reached would have everything they needed to sustain themselves became a way life.

Following the Land Back Revolution, our elders consulted Indigenous ancient wisdom keepers and studied examples of what could be achieved once sovereignty was reclaimed. Using the Kerala Model of redistribution of expropriated private land to landless workers led to near-universal literacy, low infant mortality, and high life expectancy. Coupled with the implementation of time banking in place of exchanging currency, a sharp decline in poverty has been sustained until this day.

At a time when large swaths of land were returned to responsible stewards, only three countries enacted tax policies for top earners and asset holders. Spain’s Solidarity Wealth Tax became the basis for the Solidarity With Income From Taxation Fund in the Bill of Responsibilities. Since implementation of the SWIFT Fund — where any individual with net assets over $3.25 million, or €3 million, are taxed 1.7 to 3.5% — billions have been allocated to local municipalities to improve infrastructure and expand the coverage of public transit.

SWIFT funds are also used to greenify public spaces and maintain communal gardens in urban centers. Industrial heat pumps continue to replace fossil fuel boilers. This has significantly decreased air pollution, linked to heart and lung diseases.

Places like California and Chile began to cut methane emissions from waste, farming, and energy, leading the way for other cities and countries. Coastal countries like the Philippines introduced policies to protect thousands of hectares of coral reefs on their coastline. After a coal-powered plant in New England closed, a community-owned solar farm in Scotland opened on a closed landfill, turning waste into sources of clean energy.

The expansion of these policies throughout the Confederation of Stateless Societies have been covered by the SWIFT Fund.

The Bill of Responsibilities ensures that any renewable energy funded by Land Trusts is freely accessible to everyone in its coverage area. Though internet usage never returned to 2020 levels, even the most remote communities can stay connected. This also makes sure that students from across communities have access to electricity, needed to exchange information with their classmates around the globe. It’s this collective wealth of knowledge that informs the methods we use to educate our youth.

In the Academy of Life, which replaced the obliterated education system of the fallen United States, world history is taught to students every step of their learning journey. As they learn about local water sources, they also learn about days when access to clean water was threatened. Students learn about how the British privatized India’s waters in 1860s, forcing them to pay for what Mama Gaia offered free of charge.

A century later, Nestlé began draining public springs in California, not only continuing the practice of privatizing public resources, but did so to the point of overextraction, especially in areas of drought. Our students are also asked to reflect on how such an inhumane way of life could’ve continued.

One of the first things the Turtle Island Tribal Council did was allocate a portion of the SWIFT Fund to invest in the infrastructure that would make tap water drinkable again for many communities. Some water sources were so tainted with pollution that nearly fifty years later some natural water sources are still not free of toxins, like in West Virginia and Texas. Overall, access to drinking water has vastly improved, thanks to resources reallocated from policing budgets.

In addition to the reactivation of community defense efforts, such as Neighborhood Watch and the Black Liberation Army throughout Turtle Island, the town of Baltimore, Maryland, inspired the blueprint for crime prevention and community response across the world. Safe Streets employed formerly incarcerated community members as a violence intervention to call instead of the police. When many police departments were defunded in the 2030s, locally adapted Safe Streets groups patrolled neighborhoods instead.

Societal reeducation included the devaluation of consumerism, which was easy to do after the energy collapse caused by AI data centers. When the monopoly of big businesses was forced offline after betting their wealth on widespread adaptation of artificial intelligence, an alternative way of life emerged.

Local economies saw a revival of small businesses while second-hand and swapping grew in practice. The reframing of exchanging items or services not having to include money revolutionized the way communities operated. Moneyless societies started popping up.

In less than fifty years, humanity has successfully reclaimed our societies from Western Civilization and drastically reduced the number of people without food, shelter, and health care. Fetal and maternal death rates have dropped, as well as the number of species facing extinction. Though the recovery process of our planet will continue, with the rapid expansion of renewable energy we’ve already seen above and below sea temperatures drop, food production increase, and the number of people displaced due to disaster, decline.

You see images of community solar panel parks — from Nigeria, Haiti, to North Dakota. You see moneyless, stateless societies across every continent. All of the homes, education centers, and communal spaces are powered by energy ethically sourced from nature. Instead of excessive extraction we’ve spent the last half century regenerating what was lost. Indigenous traditions predicted a shift from one world age to one where humans return to right relationship with their true nature. The planet is much better for it.

Colonialist settlers spent centuries infecting much of the world with their civilization. For the last few decades we that the Indigenous, the Pan-Africanist, the communist, the socialist, the humanist have dedicated ourselves to healing and recovering. If everything I’ve said so far has given you hope for your own future, you’re in the right place.

If you’re thinking about joining the classless, moneyless, stateless, borderless nations of the Confederacy that continue to enjoy housing and food abundance and improved habitat health, with community sourced and publicly funded care that have freed humans to enjoy their lives, why not start today?

If you’d like to learn the tangible steps you can take towards becoming a Stateless Society, I’ll be in the exhibition hall at the Turtle Island Tribal Council booth every afternoon until the end of the 29th Socialist Convention for the Future. We’d love to have you join the Confederacy as we soon celebrate thirty years of liberation.

Leave a comment

This essay, “The Confederacy of Stateless Societies Conference” by Serita Braxton, was originally published in the Newance quarterly journal published in February 2026.

“My first taste of political activism came not long before I was first introduced to witchcraft. When I was sixteen years old, a couple other students and I refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance during high school homeroom. Sent to the vice principal’s office by our math teacher (who was also a former air force officer) for disciplinary action, we asserted our court-established right to remain seated* and—other than a long and uselessly cliché lecture about patriotism and obedience—we didn’t get punished.” p 16

Utopian Witch by Justine Norton-Kertson

*West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public school students can’t be forced to salute, or stand and recite, the pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag.

Upon reading the lines above in the Introduction to Utopian Witch, my mind transported me back in time to a day from my childhood. Seated in a neighbor’s garage surrounded by four or five other kids my age. I was usually the youngest in my group since my birth was in December, but since this memory was before middle school, I was around 9 or 10.

Someone found an American flag among the cluttered one-car garage, and the boy who lived there asked if anyone knew how to fold it properly. Everyone else stood to huddle around the two who dared to pick up either end of the flag, ready to fold it like a beach towel. I remained propped on the boxes that lined the side of the garage.

“You’ve got to stand up,” someone said.

I assumed they were speaking to me as I was the only one still seated, leaning against the plywood nailed to the wall. I looked at no one in particular and said, “No, I don’t.”

“YES you do!” The white boy, whose house it was, told me. “Everyone has to stand when the American flag is being folded.”

Since I entered the education system in pre-kindergarten, my classmates and I had been coerced into standing for the Pledge of Allegiance as part of our daily morning ritual at every stage of schooling. Most of us were made to hold our hands over our hearts as we pledged, in unison, an allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands… Any student not standing or chanting to the teacher’s liking was usually sent out of the classroom for being disobedient.

When in school, I appeased my educators and stood for this nationalist charade to avoid being admonished. In my free time, I refused to adhere to this way of being. At the time, I didn’t feel like explaining that to the white boy who accused me of being disrespectful by not standing.

His young mind had absorbed the indoctrination that it was obligatory to pay your respects and stand at attention every time an American flag was folded. I, on the other hand, saw no pride in patriotism—especially not for the United States of Amerika.

“We’re in a garage, not a military ceremony. I do not have to stand.” I retorted and remained seated. No one else in the garage objected, so the rest of the kids finally turned their attention to watch the two pre-teens fumble their way through the thirteen folds.

Back then, I didn’t see my refusal to stand as an act of political activism. I only wanted to exercise my Liberty, a word that was one of the terms of my allegiance. If I were truly free, I wouldn’t be obligated to do something just because someone else told me to. Before I even knew what bodily autonomy was, it’s something I’ve been protective of—especially in a country where melanated and feminine-presenting bodies are regularly regulated, politicized, and criminalized.

There are a plethora of forced rituals to honor the cultural constructs that the empire of Amerika has made up. For generations, the indoctrination Americans have been inundated with has amounted to blind patriotism. Despite evidence to the contrary, believers in the concept of American exceptionalism and superiority cling to the values it claims to uphold.

…one nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.

As someone who was placed in a church pew with a children’s edition of the King James Bible before I could walk, I was brought up to believe I lived in a Christian nation. Every school day, I recited the words one nation under God. Every single U.S. president has proclaimed themselves to be a God-fearing Christian. Every award winner starts their acceptance speech by thanking God. Every patriotic speech ends with God Bless America. Every single piece of currency has the words “In God We Trust” printed on it.

Much like with compulsive patriotism, I never internalized colonized Christianity. The more I learned about the history of the country, the less I believed in the God they claimed to follow.

What God would call on its followers to ethnically cleanse millions of Native people and wildlife for land to build its colonial empire? What God would guide its believers to kidnap and enslave millions of Africans to grow the wealth of its empire? What God would impart ideas of pedophilia, gender-based violence, or genocide to its disciples for them to spread that ideology around the world?

What kind of God-fearing country would elect someone like Donald J. Trump as its leader, twice?

Leave a comment

His infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” interview didn’t repulse enough voters to disqualify him from becoming president. Nor did his two impeachments, attempt to steal the 2020 election, conviction for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, or a court upholding his sexual assault penalty stop him from being reelected. Then, when he brought in a South African immigrant to cut the government workforce and pilfer taxpayer dollars through the now disbanded DOGE, this was said to be good for the economy.

Throughout the shit show that has been forced upon the rest of the world during Trump’s ten-year grift into politics, his followers have doubled down on their support. The 30% or so of the U.S. population who will vote for Trump even if he shoots somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and the financial backers who have made it so they’re the only ones who can currently afford to live on Fifth Avenue, have faithfully supported Trump’s actions despite their harm. As recently as March 6, a group of pastors posed with their hands placed on Trump’s shoulders as if he were some sort of messiah.

But only now that Donald Trump has posted an AI image of himself looking a heck of a lot like Jesus, his base is suddenly shocked and appalled by the morally bankrupt politician’s actions. Calling the Truth Social post blasphemy as if his being the antichrist is a revelation after he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

This culmination of unchecked white privilege resulting in a god-complex comes as no surprise to anyone who has any understanding of the nearly 250-year history of the United States. A place hellbent on being divided despite its name. The word of God has been used to excuse the ills of Amerika since its inception. How else could they justify the depravity of their actions if they didn’t claim to be anointed by a higher power? A God-like power who deemed white nationalists the only ones worthy enough to execute their will.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has awakened from the American Dream, which has revealed itself to be a nightmare that can lead to psychosis if you stay in it too long.

Every so often throughout my time in Europe, I’ve had people tell me, “You’re not like most Americans.” Even after a short exchange, someone would offer this one-line observation. At first, I didn’t fully understand what they meant. They usually offer no further details, but assured me they meant it in a good way.

Now, looking at what Amerika has become, they couldn’t have been more right. I’m not like most Americans. The redpilled, red heat-wearing MAGA cultists who are currently running the country are the antithesis of every fiber of my being. They’ve made it their life’s purpose to face off against immigrants, DEI, wokeness, antifascism (ANTIFA), and communism. As a personification of their supposed enemy, my existence is resistance.

When faced with white men who are manifestations of the American Dream, like Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Eric Swallwell, etc., personifications of unadulterated, unchecked white male privilege, it’s an obligation to be an opposing force. For the sake of our shared humanity.

Serita’s Substack

On Ann Altman and my first #MeToo moment

Voice recording from April 5, 2026, on Ann Altman’s recent sexual abuse criminal complaint against her brother, Sam Altman, and how her account resurfaced my first #MeToo moment…

Listen now

5 months ago · Serita Braxton

Lancet Planetary Health recently surveyed 10,000 children and young people (aged 16–25 years) from ten countries, and their outlook on the future should serve as a wake-up call. In every single location, over 50% of respondents feel that “the future is frightening”. In the Philippines, only 8% of youth appeared to disagree with that statement.

A speciest, ableist, sexist society, manipulated into indentured servitude for the benefit of a few capital owners, induces feelings of hopelessness for the masses. Who could’ve seen that coming? Instead of providing the proletariat with the self-determination to create a post-patriarchal/imperialist/capitalist framework that benefits everyone in society, our generation’s Epstein class has opted to engage in a money-grabbing extermination campaign to accelerate our extinction.

The historically marginalized have been trying to steer the collective away from colonizing thinking towards restorative balance, in right relationship with each other and our environment, for centuries now. The empire labels them as conspiracy theorists, terrorists, or extremists. But what’s more extreme than threatening to exterminate an entire civilization? And if that’s not terrorism, then what is?

The final throes of a dying empire are some of the most violent and depraved. Their back is against the wall, they’ve run out of gas, and the only move they have left is to lash out blindly. The death rattle of the United States of Amerika should inspire radical hope in anyone seeking liberation. This seemingly insurmountable entity, a clear enemy of humanity, is in its ending era. And if you’re reading this that means you’re alive to witness history.

What a time to believe alive will no longer just be used to refer to the onslaught of unprecedented events that keep us up at night; it will also signify the miraculous opportunity to reclaim our lives, enshrine our liberty, and build a world based on justice. Restorative justice. More than a meaningless pledge, a way of life inspired by the laws of nature. Not human nature, but Mother Nature.

Seeing the world beyond where I was born has been the most liberating experience. It took living outside the confines of the Amerikan empire for me to decolonize my mind. Never one inclined to conform to external pressure, I’ve spent almost a decade trying to figure out who I am outside of my identity as an American. Never one to identify with the principles of the United States of Amerika, I’ve had to develop my own ethos. Based on the same values that Amerika claimed to champion, yet could never deliver for its people: the right to life, liberty, and justice for all.

Though a class of malevolent pedophilic billionaires may be in the process of destroying the planet, syphoning wealth and power from the proletariat, and waging war against all living beings, there are signs of hope. It appears that a rise in class consciousness across Amerika has resulted in several arson attacks on capital, its hoarders, and their enablers. (Could those two attacks on Sam Altman’s San Francisco home be the reason why the AI overlord is now advocating for Universal Basic Income?)

The people of Hungary recently mobilized to ensure the end of a 16-year reign of Trump and Netanyahu’s authoritarian ally Viktor Orban. Iran has outmaneuvered Amerika in its illegal war by retaining control of the Strait of Hormuz, expediting the regime’s decline. What a time to be alive when the 99% are waking up to the reality that there are more of us than there are of them.

The death of an empire doesn’t happen in one day. Every single act of defiance chipped away at its dominance. Every single refusal to stand. Every single big business boycotted. Every act of targeted direct action. Every single refusal to normalize the empire’s bloodlust. They all whittled away at what once was seen as “just the way things are”.

We are the architects of the future that we want to live in. There’s no better time than the present to move forward with more courage, creativity, and radical hope than we ever thought possible. We have nothing left to lose but our chains.

Share Serita’s Substack

If you are a fellow writer, has a call for submissions open until May 1st.

Who are we?

Newance is a solar punk quarterly journal set in 2066 that actualizes the next forty years. In the process of imagining the future, we invite readers to expand their range of possibilities and envision a workable future. Not utopian, not dystopian, but equitable. No longer living under the lies and whims of the few hoarders that control governments and power in 2026, humanity is set to create new systems and processes that center the wellness of the planet and all human and non-human animals.

What we are looking for

Newance is seeking fiction that fits our magazine. We are looking for a story set in Spring 2066 that is imaginative and in retrospect shows readers how some of our current problems were/are being addressed successfully, despite challenges.

Word count between 3,000 - 5,000 (shorter or longer will still be read, but please keep it under 7,000). Please refer to our first issue to understand what we publish: https://tinyurl.com/yjxc7djt

Pay is 50 euros. Submit your work here.

TW: Details of sexual abuse are included in this audio.

Read more