Fighting ICE's Violence While Preserving Our Gorgeous Soul Power

Thiry-seven-year-old poet and mother of three children Renee Nicole Good was murder by a masked, cursing ICE agent. It was yet another in a series of tragic atrocities perpetrated by Trumps’ gang of thugs.

It's also a clarification: Clearly, the masks ICE agents wear aren't about anonymity but about removing the last vestiges of accountability. They’re the final erasure of the human face from state violence. This is what tyranny looks like when it stops pretending.

So how do we fight the escalating brutality without becoming brutalized ourselves? How do we resist the fascist creep without letting it colonize our inner landscape?

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The Insurrectionary's Paradox

Here's the razor's edge we must walk: We need wrathful compassion, that fierce Buddhist concept where love becomes so intense it manifests as holy rage against those who harm the vulnerable. Not hatred, which damages the hater, but a righteous anger that's an expression of care extended so far it won't tolerate cruelty.

We think of it this way: If someone were beating a child in front of us, our immediate, physical intervention wouldn't come from hatred of the abuser but from love of the child. The force we would use to stop the violence would be an expression of tenderness for the victim.

This is the alchemy we need now. ICE's violence against immigrants demands our intervention because we love what they're destroying: human dignity, sanctuary, the very possibility of refuge.





Practical Insurgency as Self-Care

On our behalf, I’m tempted to ask the question "how do we fight while caring for ourselves?" But that contains a false premise. Done right, the fighting is the self-care. Here's why:

We stay sane by taking action. Helplessness is the real psychological poison. Every practical thing you do is an antidote to the corrosive feeling of complicity through inaction: joining rapid response networks, contributing to immigrant defense funds, participating in ICE office disruptions, providing sanctuary, and documenting abuses.

We preserve joy by defending it collectively. The authoritarian thugs want to steal our capacity for delight, to make us so despairing and exhausted that we forfeit our imagination. But we refuse. We organize potlucks for undocumented neighbors. We hold dance parties outside detention centers. We make beauty while we make trouble. The exuberance isn't separate from the resistance; it's one of the main points of the resistance.

We resist mass hallucination by grounding ourselves in embodied reality. The fascist project depends on abstractions: immigrants as "invaders" and humans as "illegals."

We counter this with fierce particularity. We learn the name of every person ICE detains in our city. We tell their specific stories, as in: Renee Nicole Good was a queer poet. She was an activist and a mother of three children. She was 37 years old. We make the violence concrete and the humanity undeniable. This refusal to let brutality be normalized into abstraction is both activism and meditation.

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Can Our Struggle Be a Form of Play?

The question might ostensibly seem frivolous given the stakes. But consider the possibility that rigid seriousness is just another form of the authoritarian rigidity we're fighting against. What if we approached resistance with the spirit of serious play—not frivolous, but creative, surprising, uncontainable?

For example: street theater that mockingly reenacts ICE raids with agents played as cowardly masked thugs. Paint or chalk murals that celebrate immigrants' contributions, impossible to remove without admitting someone is trying to erase these truths. Flash mobs singing lullabies outside detention centers in multiple languages. Memes that make ICE agents' violence so recognizable as un-American that even moderate citizens recoil.

The playfulness isn't disrespectful to the horror. It's a refusal to let the horror dictate the terms of engagement entirely. It keeps our imaginations wild and hungry and free because the authoritarian mind can't comprehend or predict creative insurgency.





Constructive Anger, Unconsumed

How do we summon a righteous blend of practical love and constructive anger? Here's the recipe:

We root the anger in specific compassion. We don't let it become abstract fury at "the system" or "fascism." We focus it: The ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good and then cursed her.

A Honduran asylum seeker named Mirian was detained in Texas and held in an ICE-run detention center while her 18 month old son was taken to a separate facility 120 miles away, with no chance to comfort him or say goodbye.
 
In Nebraska, an 11 year old autistic child was placed in foster care after her father was taken by ICE.

Specificity like this keeps the anger clean, purposeful, and constructive.

And we channel it into irrevocable action. Because anger that just churns inside becomes acid. Whereas this kind of anger is sacred fuel: anger that builds mutual aid networks, funds legal defense, disrupts deportation operations, creates sanctuary spaces.

We also tend the opposite pole equally. For every hour of wrathful organizing, we spend time cultivating beauty. This isn't escapism, it's strategic self-care. These aren't separate from activism: our loved ones, our creative practices, our moments of sensory pleasure, the very act of imagining better worlds. They're what we're defending. They're also what keeps us from becoming a hollow, burned-out husk who's won some battles but lost our soul.

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Cheerful Buoyancy as Revolutionary Technology

The authoritarian thugs are counting on our despair. Our cheerful buoyancy, which isn’t the same as naive optimism, can disrupt their plans.

So we hold the full weight of what's happening (the terror, the cruelty, the fascist acceleration) AND also simultaneously experience joy, pleasure, and fun. Because joy, pleasure, and fun aren’t contingent on circumstances being good. They’re a choice to remain alive to beauty even amidst dire situations.

This is embodied spirituality in action. Disembodied spirituality would tell us to transcend the political horror and not let it disturb our inner peace. But a path of embodied spirituality says: No. Feel it all. The rage, the grief, the fear . . . AND the delight, the sensory pleasure, the connection, the hope.

Practical applications:
- Start meetings with something genuinely delightful (a poem, a song, good news)
- Build regular sabbath time into our activism (one day a week, no news, no organizing, just pleasure)
- Practice what adrienne maree brown calls "pleasure activism"—the insistence that what we're fighting for should be present in how we fight
- Cultivate absurdist humor about the situation (not dismissive, but the kind that recognizes how cartoonishly evil masked federal agents are)





How Do We Refrain From Being Consumed by Hatred?

Even as we fight against the hatred and danger unleashed by masked thugs perpetrating harm under the aegis of ICE, we remember: Hatred corrodes the hater. It's a toxin that poisons from within.

The answer isn't to suppress the rage or pretend we don't feel it. Instead, we transform rage by grounding it in love: love for the victims, love for the possibility of justice, love for the world we're trying to build.

Here's a practice: When we feel hatred rising toward an ICE agent, a collaborating judge, or a politician enabling this violence, pause, we can ask ourselves: What am I really feeling?

Beneath the hatred is often grief. That’s the even deeper feeling: grief for immigrants’ stolen, wounded, damaged lives.

We let ourselves feel that grief all the way down to the bottom of the grief. It connects us to life’s deep sources. And from the grief comes the fierce determination that can sustain long struggle without consuming us.

This doesn't mean being soft on perpetrators. It means staying human while fighting inhumane systems.

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Building While Burning

How do we remain dedicated to building beauty and truth and justice and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free?

The key insight: We don't build these things AFTER we have defeated fascism. We build them as one of the methods of defeating it.

Every one of our mutual aid networks is doing prefigurative politics. We are showing what a caring society looks like. Every sanctuary space is a liberated zone. Every community defense training is both practical skill-building and a demonstration that we protect each other, not the state.

Our art, our writing, our music, our poetry aren’t separate from the fight. They comprise our consciousness-building infrastructure. They give people the philosophical and imaginative resources to resist authoritarian simplicity with complex, embodied alternatives.

When we write a poem, we're not escaping the struggle. We’re modeling the attention and beauty and truth-telling the world needs. When we make music, we're creating the soundtrack for resistance and joy. When we build community, we're establishing the networks that will sustain us through the fight ahead.

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The Unruly Mood Manifesto

How do we stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the mass hallucinations perpetrated by the evermore-demented and deceitful Trumpocalypse?

The unruliness IS the good mood. The mass hallucination tries to say that we should be orderly, civil, reasonable while they murder poets in their cars. The unruly mood says: No. We will be disruptive, creative, ungovernable, and surprising. We will show up in ways they can't predict because we're not constrained by their script.

The good mood isn't naivete. It's a recognition that despair is exactly what they want from us, so we'll refuse it. We'll be stubbornly, irrepressibly alive. We'll sing loudly outside detention centers. We'll make art that refuses the narrative of inevitable fascist victory. We'll love each other flagrantly, across all the borders they're trying to fortify.

Being in a good mood while fighting fascism is itself a revolutionary act. It says: You haven't broken us. You won't break us. We know something you don't: that life can be joyful even in resistance. Struggle can be life-affirming. We're not just fighting against your cruelty but fighting for something beautiful.

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The Marriage of Wrath and Exuberance

How can we be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life?

The answer is that these aren't opposites to be balanced. They're the same energy expressed in different directions. The wrath flows from the exuberant love. We rage against ICE's violence precisely because we're so in love with the lives they're destroying. The insurrection is in service of the exuberance.

The immigrant being terrorized by ICE needs both our righteous anger that will help disrupt the deportation machinery AND our exuberant love that will help create the sanctuary that makes a life possible. They need our practical resistance AND our wild imagination of alternatives.

We survey the great movements for liberation: They were always both fierce and joyful. The Civil Rights movement had both the confrontational power of the Freedom Riders and the exuberant community of the freedom songs. The AIDS activists of ACT UP had both the righteous fury of Die-Ins and the campy, life-affirming creativity of their art and slogans.

We need both. The wrath without the exuberance becomes bitter and unsustainable. The exuberance without the wrath becomes frivolous and ineffective. Together, they create the kind of movement that can endure for the long haul—because people want to be part of it. It feeds the soul even as it fights the power.

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Cultivating Cheerful Buoyancy While Neutralizing Poison

How do we cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we neutralize the bigoted, autocratic poisons on the loose?

First, we recognize that cheerful buoyancy isn't a personality trait. It's a practice and a discipline.

We connect with what we love regularly, not as a reward after activism, but as fuel for it. These aren't self-indulgent distractions: time in nature, creative expression, physical pleasure, deep conversation, and laughter with friends. They're what remind us what we're fighting for. They keep us tethered to life's goodness so we don't lose sight of it in the struggle.

We build resilience through community. Isolation is where despair breeds. We gather with others who are also fighting, not just for strategy sessions, but for meals, celebration, grief, and joy. The buoyancy becomes easier when it's shared and reinforced by others who understand both the weight and the necessity of staying alive to beauty.

We practice small acts of defiance against numbness. We notice a sunset. Really taste our food. Dance in our kitchen. Laugh at absurdities. These aren't distractions from the fight. They're ways of refusing to let the fight make us less human.

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Our Aliveness Is a Threat to Them

Remember: our aliveness is a threat to them. The autocrats want to turn everyone into fearful, passive, joyless subjects. Every moment we choose vitality, creativity, connection, we are already winning a small battle. We're proving that their project of domination is incomplete, that something in us remains untamed and unbowed.

So here's the practice, the working, the way forward:

We wake each morning and feel the full weight of what's happening. Don't numb ourselves to Renee Nicole Good's murder or the ongoing terror.

Then we choose, deliberately, to also feel joy. Make breakfast with sensuous attention. Notice beauty. Connect with our beloveds.

Let both feelings be true simultaneously. This is embodied spirituality: not transcending the difficulty but fully inhabiting our life within it.

Take action, any action, toward protecting immigrants, disrupting ICE, building sanctuary. Even small actions break the paralysis and feed the soul.

Do it with others. Isolation is the enemy; connection is the medicine.

Be creative, surprising, playful in our methods. The autocrats expect grimness and despair. Give them something they can't predict or control.

Tend our own beauty and truth and joy as fiercely as we fight for others'. We are what we're defending.

Remember: The fight is long. We must pace ourselves. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

And finally: Our art, our relationships, our pleasures, and our wild imagination aren't separate from the resistance. They're the point of it. They're what makes us dangerous to authoritarianism. We know that life can be beautiful, strange, free, and we won't forget it, won't let them take it, won't let their brutality have the final word.

The masked ICE agents think the masks make them powerful. But we see through them to the cowardice, the complicity, and the abandonment of humanity. And we will fight them with everything we have: rage and love, seriousness and play, practical solidarity and wild imagination.

Because the fight itself is how we stay human while they choose to be monsters.





First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me

And there was no one left
To speak out for me


This was written by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). It condemns complicity of German intellectuals and clergy following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets.