I don’t know what is going to happen, in terms of us, the people, holding to solidarity, visionary actions, and sustaining our coalition and ourselves in the face of this brutal rising dictatorship in the U.S., but I do know this–those who are grabbing power are not waiting for the ballot. They are using bullets. So we must mourn the martyrs–which did not start with Renee Good–but not be surprised, shocked. We should stop saying, “This is not America,” and be honest: “This is the America we now live in.” If we are fighting, with peace and people power, but fighting nevertheless, some will die. I say this with no irony or lightness, with no hyperbole. Tyranny requires seriousness to legitimate it (perhaps less so in this era, when “owning” and trolling somehow legitimates even public executions), so yes, we will mock them and laugh at them. The laughter is a deadly serious tactic. I am not mad at you bro. Get yourself some lunch, big boy.

Now we will say these things, all the things, and we will be terrified.

The puppy-killing Secretary Noem said our opposition, this resistance, is “a coordinated campaign of violence against our law enforcement.” Everything but the violence, Kristi Lynn. And the “our”–whose law enforcement? And perhaps the coordination–it is coordinated only in the sense that the ocean is coordinated, horizontally connected, loose, a network that learns from and encourages each wave, but like the sea each wave does its own thing, is slightly unpredictable.

I am a White, professional class, native-born U.S. citizen, a middle-aged queer mother and writer too. I think folks like us started stepping up, in part thinking we were safer from assault, imprisonment or death than our Brown and Black and immigrant neighbors and comrades, even our partners and children. And I still think we are, even though Those Terrified of the Unknown World to Come and Grabbing All the Power They Can Now are starting to shoot a few of us to demonstrate that they have no obligation to keep us safe.

Those on our spectrum of allies who are still saying but we need “the state” in some recognizable form as it is now to keep order, to keep us safe–how is that working out for us? We live in a failed state. It is assuredly not keeping us safe. As my Black Studies scholar colleague and friend likes to say, of us White folks, “Welcome to the party.”

We are peaceful, but we are soldiers, nevertheless.

Rest in power, martyrs.