I want to say what I believe. Normally I’d do that by writing an essay. But I feel like much of what I believe now is simple—so simple it’s crude. So I’m typing this here in order for anyone else feeling and thinking similarly to know it’s okay to admit these feelings.
I believe it is not only possible but necessary to do these things. And that if we don’t, fascism will continue to repeat and loop through human history, killing every time the promise of civilization (which is for people to live with each other without hurting each other).
Abolish ICE. Then abolish the DHS. Then abolish the Presidency and the Executive Branch.
Rewrite the US Constitution. Decentralize power as much as possible—at all levels of government.
Release everyone in prisons and jails and welcome them, help them, love them. Blow up the buildings used only to torture and condemn.
Rethink educational systems entirely. They’re all built on the premises of factories and prisons, and feed an imaginary standard “professional” that is killing the planet.
Stop policing, meaning stop telling some people they can use force while everyone else can’t. Reject force, and train against it with every bit of discipline formerly devoted to weapons and death. This of course means demilitarizing our nation at all scales.
Respect indigenous people for the first time, meaning give them the freedom to live where and how they want, and give them the material resources they want. If they ask for more than can be given, give it anyway.
Make local governance direct and democratic.
Rewrite our legal code from the ground up, democratically, such that experts are not needed to understand an area’s laws. (Political parties then will cease to be relevant.)
End capitalism. Collectively provide everyone with what they need without the arbiter of money—housing, food, water, medicine, care. Let all else be the work of free, self-expressive labor.
Face violence not with violence, but with care and solidarity. Reject the idea of a cruel human nature, because Hobbes was full of shit.
Finally: reclaim our language—reclaim our imaginations and desires and dreams—from the tyranny of profit, euphemism, and distraction.
I deeply believe we can and must act in such ways. We’ve got to strive for a world of care and empiricism. And that abolishing ICE—abolishing our most explicitly fascist agency—could serve as the first step towards freedom.
When I read or listen to people’s political horizons, when I recognize the limits of their imagination and how they don’t understand these limits as products only of the oppression they themselves think they’ll lessen by tinkering here and there—I feel abysmally sad. Like there’s no way we’ll get anywhere worth inhabiting.
But when I see people disobey, risk themselves, advocate for the previously unstated or recently unimaginable, then I hope.
I wanted to say things plainly so that you could too. I hope this helps.
