America, America
Fridays in Trumpland: June 26, 2025
Today, what I wanted to write about was hope.
I was all set to go on an essay about the harbinger of Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary, and what it signals, and what rage it is likely to engender in everyone from centrist Democrats to the far right, and how much we have to learn from his win if we want to remake this nation into something better.
And then this morning, bright and early, the Supreme Court ended the capacity of lower courts to issue universal injunctions to Trump’s Executive Orders, essentially giving Trump a carte blanche to break the law, as only single individuals, or class actions through a tight procedural juggernaut, will now be able to get relief from his violent injustices.
It is a strange day in America, a bad day in America, as the cracks at the root of our foundation bring us to perhaps what was our inevitable conclusion.
White supremacy has done us in, again and always, it seems.
Because if you can’t stop deportations on the claim that people born here have citizenship, the only demarcator of who goes and who stays from here on in will be how well someone has inculcated into whiteness. And we all know that some of us can’t inculcate at all.
Meanwhile, a Republican congressman called just yesterday for Zohran Mamdani— who is a American citizen— to be denaturalized and deported.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled that religious parents who hate LGBTQ people have the right to object and opt out of public school curricula that tries to teach a better, more inclusive world.
Meanwhile, ICE detained a six year old boy being treated for leukemia, along with his mother and sibling, and denied him medical care.
And so it continues, without end.
This nation was founded on indigenous genocide and the transatlantic slave trade. It refused Reconstruction, in the end, when given the chance to become a healed nation after the Civil War. It refuses still to join the International Criminal Court for fear of prosecution, so deep and so wide are our crimes.
It was ever thus: America the brutal, the vicious, the violent, the rage-filled. America the unjust. America the power-hungry, the greedy, the domineering, the abusive. America, laying the gaslighting claim to being a shining beacon on a hill, while crushing the bodies of so many underneath its feet and trying to hide the screams.
Home of the Free?
Who are we kidding?
America, America, why would God ever shed his grace on thee?
Today, the words of Rebecca Solnit pulled me back into my body as I filtered through all this.
In her incredible work, Hope in the Dark, she writes of how hope is demanded of us when it feels like all hope should be lost.
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.”
And then, she says this:
“You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center.”
It is always, always the case that revolution begins in the imagination, then travels through the body, out into words and action and collective connection that changes nations and the world.
We, the people, are the storehouses of power and the armories of change.
There are keys to unlock those storehouses and those armories, and they are contained in the action of hope.
And these are dangerous times, because if we lose our hope, we lose our imagination, and we thereby lose the future.
And as I sit here tonight, I know I cannot lose hope.
The future– some of the most important of my reasons to fight for that future– is sitting fifteen feet away from me right now, asking for a chocolate chip cookie as I write.
My children, and all our children, are worthy of so much more than this.
We cannot fail. Though the way out remains unknown, revolutionary change is in the offing now, and we cannot fail.
About six years ago, I first saw a scene on the show Outlander that has never left me. The brutality of it left me speechless and weeping.
In it, a woman– an immigrant to the early United States– is attacked by a marauding rapist. He takes her by surprise in a place where she has sought refuge, beats her, and refuses her escape. Her belongings stolen and her dignity taken, she is forced in the final instance— in an effort to save the one thing left that matters to her—to try to swallow her wedding ring, before he chokes her into spitting it out so he can steal that too, leaving her bleeding on the floor.
There is no noise from the actors in that scene in the final cut. Not a word spoken. Not a sound as so much violence descends.
Instead, there is only a lone, haunting audio track, a single verse from Ray Charles’ version of America the Beautiful.
It goes like this:
Oh beautiful, for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than selves
Their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America, America
May God thy gold refine
Til all success
Be nobleness
And ev’ry gain divine
I have thought about these words thousands of times since then— so many times that they have been tacked up next to my desk for the last six years.
As our nation has descended into fascism, these words have never left me. As so many have normalized it, while others, floundering and desperate, have tried to fight back, for heroes proved, as protestors are gassed in the streets, in liberating strife, immigrants beaten to bloody pulp just for trying to make a better life, who more than selves their country loved, as everything has slid down the slope to madness—
—where is our mercy? And mercy more than life.
Here, at the end of the Republic, Jeff Bezos spends $25 million and rents out Venice for a wedding where the uber rich fly ninety private jets to Italy to celebrate the hoarding revolting excess of his wealth, SNAP benefits and Medicaid are being cut, detainees die in custody, people in wheelchairs are arrested in the Capitol building trying to save their healthcare as our greed and the violence of capitalism is laid bare, May God thy gold refine.
Here is what, in the end, I would have said about Zohran Mamdani’s win and what it signals: we can be better, we deserve to be better, the people who live here deserve so much more than this, and we can have it, if only we stay in the space of hope, and imagination, and revolution.
We could have everything we want, and everything we know to be good and just and right.
Our success could be measured in nobleness, every gain we make could be divine, if only we dare to demand better, refuse to capitulate, believe in what is possible, and fight to stay in the place of hope.
If only we dare to shake off the shackles of our indoctrination, and fight for what America could be.
Just imagine what we could be.
We carry on, we carry on,
til all success be nobleness
and ev’ry gain divine.
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We did not win independence and freedom from King George through peaceful protests - it took a revolution. We did not end slavery through peaceful protests - it took a civil war. Sadly, it is becoming ever so clear that we will not save our democracy through peaceful protests - will it take a revolution and reformation?
The decisions by the SC today felt like physical body blows. I won’t lie that the thought “it’s over” entered my mind more than once. But then I remember the people who found the strength to live here for hundreds of years and fight for justice and equality as their own government and many of their fellow citizens were against them and blocking them at every turn.