We insist on beauty and truth and love
| Rob Brezsny Jan 13, 2026 |
Fighting ICE’s Violence While Preserving Our Gorgeous Soul Power
Thirty-seven-year-old poet and mother of three children Renee Nicole Good was murdered by a masked, cursing ICE agent. It was yet another in a series of tragic atrocities perpetrated by Trumps’ gang of thugs.
It was also a clarification: 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.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s the sad and shocking truth.
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 challenging practice: 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 can think of it this way: If someone were beating a child in front of us, our immediate 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 our care.
This is the alchemy we need now. ICE’s violence against immigrants (and even non-immgrants) demands our intervention because we love what they’re destroying: human dignity, sanctuary, and refuge.
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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 vigorous action. Helplessness is the real psychological poison. Every practical thing we 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 gangsters 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 atrocity 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. We tell their specific stories, as in: Renee Nicole Good was an award-winning queer poet who was renowned for her kindness. Her last words on earth, uttered to her killer, were, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
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 approach resistance with the spirit of serious play—not frivolous, but creative, surprising, and 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 some fascist 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.
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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 in the face at pointblank range and then cursed her as she died.
Honduran asylum seeker Mirian G. 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.
A farmworker in Ventura County, California, Jaime Alanís García / Alanís, died after falling 30 feet from a greenhouse roof while fleeing an ICE raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo on July 10, 2025.
Specificity like this keeps the anger clean, purposeful, and constructive.
And we channel it into action that empower us. Because anger that just churns inside us becomes acid. Whereas we can turn our anger into sacred fuel: Use it to build mutual aid networks, fund legal defense, disrupt deportation operations, create sanctuary spaces.
We also tend the opposite pole equally. For every hour of wrathful organizing, we spend time cultivating beauty. We register the power and glory of our loved ones, our creative practices, our moments of sensory pleasure, and our moments of imagining better worlds.
They’re what we’re defending. They keep us from becoming burned-out husks who’ve won some battles but lost our souls.
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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 evil plans. (And yes, they are EVIL.)
So we hold the full weight of the terror, cruelty, and fascist acceleration . . . AND we ALSO experience joy, pleasure, and fun. Because joy, pleasure, and fun aren’t contingent on circumstances being good. They’re our 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. We feel it all. The rage, the grief, the fear . . . AND the delight, the sensory pleasure, the connection, the hope.
Practical applications:
– Start meetings with a genuinely delightful burst like a poem, a song, or 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. It’s not dismissive, but recognizes how cartoonishly evil masked federal agents are.
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How Do We Refrain From Being Consumed by Hatred?
Even as we fight against the hatred and danger unleashed by masked bullies 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, and 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 ask ourselves: What am I really feeling?
Beneath the hatred is often grief. That’s the deeper feeling.
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 a 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 fascism.
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 corrupt state.
Our art, writing, music, and 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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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 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 and community are the medicine.
Be creative, surprising, and 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.
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 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.
This is a shorter version of a longer essay. To read the whole thing, go here: tinyurl.com/OurAlivenessIsThreatening
To read a companion essay, “The Demise of MAGA,” go here: tinyurl.com/DemiseOfMAGA
