The exterminating force of Project 2025 is plowing through the culture, the government and people’s hearts and bodies like a drunk on a violent tear. We wake each morning, holding our breath to bear witness to the new devastation: PBS and NPR defunded, cuts to the fight against human trafficking, Medicaid gone for millions, Ice working to surveil critics, tons of food for the poor ordered burned and wasted.
The momentum of cruelty always feels inevitable. Cruelty is by definition “a callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain”. For those of us who have suffered physical, political, racial and emotional abuse, it feels like a familiar steamroller of violence. We only have to witness the cries of parents being separated from their children, men screaming out for “libertad” from cages in Everglades detention center (AKA Alligator Alcatraz), non-violent protesters beaten for trying to stop a genocide, to be frozen in that same incapacitating dread and fear.
What is the antidote to this destructive environment of mendacity possessing us now with fear, ennui and self-mutilating rage?
Ash-lee Woodard Henderson, a powerhouse activist and brilliant organizer, told me: “It’s not decided where we go yet. Which is why it feels tense. What we know is that there’s no going back to an old normal because our economic system has failed us and our governmental structure is being destroyed. They’re trying to replace what was with this minority rule of disgustingly wealthy humans dictating what can happen not only in this country, but globally.
“We’ve gotta block and build at the same time. That means confronting both elected officials and the corporations that are lifting them up. We need to make sure that we are gumming up their ability to successfully implement any sort of action, whether it’s policy or otherwise, that takes more power and rights and access to life-saving resources away from our communities.”
So how do we gum up their momentum; how do we become refusers, artists of disruption, interrupters of their hateful and life-destroying trajectory? How do we clear the noise and fear in our heads so that we are able to hear the call of our inner morality?
“The thing that I love about being non-cooperative and non-compliant with the Trump administration,” Ash-Lee told me, “is its accessibility: people have all sorts of abilities, all sorts of means, regardless of class, regardless of identity, to find a tactic that fits for them. What keeps you up at night enough to make you active? Trump says we shouldn’t ask people for warrants. We demand warrants. When a business puts a ‘No Kings’ sign up or a ‘No Ice’ sign in their window, they’re not complying. And we need more people to do that wherever they are,” she said, “whether it’s a general saying, ‘I’m not gonna command my troops to do this,’ whether it’s troops becoming conscientious objectors, whether it’s us boycotting Target and T-Mobile.”
This tyrannical white supremacist landscape is erasing our sense of existence and meaning. Daily forms of rebellion birth us back into our bodies and our purpose. Non-compliance is art, as art is meant to defy the status quo, question the givens, expand the boundaries of knowing and freedom. And as you courageously make your mark of refusal, you carve a path for others to be brave. Non-compliance is praxis, stretching and transforming the muscles of our discontent into impactful and embodied action.
There are a multitude of ways that we can make their lives miserable by taking small risks and huge ones. Like folks in California sitting in their cars outside the hotels where the Ice agents are and just lying on their horn for hours. Or people towing Ice vans away that are parked illegally. Or the Harlem baseball coach who knew all his kids were American-born. When Ice invaded the field, he told his kids to get inside the batting cage and stay silent. He said he was willing to die for his kids to get home.
“And non-complying is also filling in the gaps of resources and care that they are taking away. They’re already closing rural hospitals where we live because our governor didn’t expand Medicaid,” Ash-Lee told me. “So residents must build an alternative like country people and black folks across the country have been doing on their own accord for decades, if not centuries, creating community spaces where we can both line dance, do some boots-on-the-ground organizing, get your blood pressure checked, get your mammogram in the mobile unit, get your teeth cleaned, whatever. All of those things are not complying.”
I think of the man who suggested we all dress in Ice suits with masks and Oakley sunglasses and enter detention centers and free immigrants. Or my white British friend who was in a store in Nevada when Ice invaded and they started harassing Latinos for their identification. He stepped up and calmly asked why they weren’t asking for his ID. He asked simply without hostility. He asked it three times. Even though they continued, he momentarily disrupted the trajectory of cruelty and forced them to bring consciousness to what they were doing. Or the Rev Mariann Budde’s staring down Trump and his billionaire cronies in the first row of a Washington church in January, calmly and fearlessly demanding compassion for immigrants, refugees and LGBTQ+ communities.
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And this is the time for artists to speak out, to disembed themselves from a fascist system, to place principles over profit and self-advancement. To be what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “disagreeable”. Yes, of course there are risks. But at this moment, with the jackboots in the streets and at our door, when each hour another liberty is being erased, and those who speak truth to power are being removed from TV, from universities, from cultural centers, when the cultural platforms are being removed themselves, speaking out is not just an obligation, it’s survival.
And there are artists beginning to organize. The poet Michael Klein is creating a new podcast calling writers “to take our language back in writing a way through the various veils of deceit–an act, which in itself, has always been a form of resistance”. Meena Jagannath, a movement lawyer, is gathering artists and activists in salons to deepen our collective investigation and imaginative co-creation. She told me: “Our charge in these times is to support each other in building protagonism – a sense that we have agency to contest fascist narratives about how the world is and should be. It needs to be a collective, creative and responsive process that takes in what’s going out there and alchemizes it into a more expansive imagination of what could and should be.”
So in a nod to the late great Mary Oliver, I ask you, what is the one precious, wild creative act you are doing to impede this nightmare?
