The American Non-Dream

Transatlantic fathers, ICE, Trump's demise and Anarchy Now

Jun 29, 2025

Observations from New York, May 2025

“We do not need more judgement. We need more witnessing, more accountability, more imagination for ways of relating to art and each other.”

- María Inés Plaza Lazo

Introduction

Writing this a month after I returned from a trip to the States, it is impossible to whittle what the trip that Bec and I missioned on and into, was and wasn’t into any kind of simple summary.

This was a full throttle adventure; a sleep deprived, over stimulated, friendship centered, coyote, Joshua Tree, guns and waffle, trying to let go of heartache, New York prang intensity, road tripping, venturing into extreme environs, absent father flavoured, art, and political despair filled trip.

Outback Williamsberg under a full moon, Arizona. Our Route. May 2025

In this whatever this is (post, entry, effort, thought train, performance, rant, reflection!?), I’m writing about what brute Trump is, the multiple systemic and political depravities we find ourselves observing, and how this trip linked me back into actively pursuing anarchist friends and community as one method amongst many, to resist the death grip of heteropatriarchal capitalism. The set of day to day living conditions that we are all, in different ways, and to unequal and differing extremes, affected by.

This trip was everything I thought it would not be. I am once again taught how expectations can be a protective veil; a hope for a near future to be what we want it to be, and so often, that is exactly the opposite of how life plays out.

So yeah, this trip gave me many of the things I wanted and a lot more of what I didn’t yet know I wanted.

The things I took. The plane. A clown. Selfie in Bluestockings Book Shop. May 2025.

This post is one of two writerly reflections, as so much happened on this trip, it feels impossible to include the key sensations, observations and experiences that I would like to digest, and park here, as some kind of living archive, and mull over, in terms of how this trip is informing my well-being, and also my creative praxis.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

―Anais Nin

I thought I’d write about Randy, but actually, I want to write about ICE

As I was drafting sections of this post in my head, cycling around the concrete jungle flanking the A10, on my way from Cuff Point to work in Elephant & Castle, I thought I was going to deep dive into the strangeness of coming into proximity with the father for what I think, is the tenth time. But to be honest, I can’t keep track of exact numbers anymore, which I suppose, is a marker of our developing relationship.

“Brief affair. Twins out of wedlock” family tree made by Randy’s brother (wtf!). The fathers taxi driver badge. Selfie on Maddison Avenue. How many times I needed to sleep. May 2025.

Yes, it’s weird. Yes, it hurts. Yes, I’m in a complicated and messy way, fatherless. Yes, his dad was lobotomized. Yes, my father is called Randy. And yes, he’s a psychotherapist – you really can’t make this shit up! And yes, it’s on my increasingly long things I want to make list, to focus a zine / longer piece of writing to explore the connections between absent fathers and fatherless daughters, transatlantic identities, sexuality, the patriarchy and psychology – perhaps in the form of an auto-theoretical memoir. But, that again, is for another time.

Some pictures of Randy’s mother and father. Randy on scary santa’s knee. May 2025.

As I take time to reflect on and write about the America trip, my attention is drawn to the hideous multiple shades of structural, racist and political violence being enacted on innocent and vulnerable people in the States and beyond (with a particular focus on the Israeli occupation of Gaza, and brutal demolition of houses and basic infrastructure as a form of weaponisation and forced displacement of Palestinians). But as this post is about my time in America, for now, I will focus on American political fuck witttery.

When Trump was re-elected in November 2024, immediate threats came into stark view which are currently playing out; these included federal restrictions on abortion rights (prior to the November 2024 election, abortion had been made illegal with no exceptions for rape or incest in 13 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas), mass deportations (as we see right now), a systemic rollback of LGBTQ+ rights, as seen in Trumps first term, where he banned trans people from the military, and from May (2025), the pentagon has been removing trans people from the military. And these are just three concerns from a very long list.

As I, like many of you, watch and read about Trump’s policy decisions, and his utterly apathetic and belligerent behaviour, I’m drawn to conclude; fuck this.

In the last two weeks, Trump has ordered the expansion of detention and deportation of migrants across the country, using violent policing methods including the deployment of California National Guard troops to protest in L.A and the general ramping up of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement actions.

What this ICE enforcement looks like in practice, is the violent policing of protests and plucking people from their jobs, their families, their homes and day to day lives, simply because they are not American.

What it conveys is the ideology of extreme nationalism; centering and privileging the idea that we need to have nationalities, or nationhood to be allowed to live and work, to exist.

Jose Azetcla, a member of the civil rights group the Brown Berets, told the BBC in Los Angeles, that it was immigration that brought him out on to the streets. "It's not harsh, it's evil. You don't separate families.”

Refusing the Status Quo (again, and again, and again)

What we are witnessing, is a hideous and incomprehensible scale of different types of structural violence, weaponisation and total lack of humanity. At times, I feel this is presented as all part of the daily grind of living and breathing in a digital media and information eco-system. But, no, these times are not normal, and nor are such war crimes and political decision making inevitable.

The Israel genocide; the UK Supreme court ruling that gender is defined by biological sex, resulting in increased transphobia (Trans actual provide lots of useful information about why this is such a bad idea); the intersecting pressures of austerity, the racist, sexist, heteronormative Trump administration; Russia’s occupation of the Ukraine. This scale of violence is not new, but it is often completely overwhelming; and disassociation and disengagement can seem unavoidable.

The anxiety, pain, and overwhelm is real; caused by both the world out there, and the intricacies and demands of day-to-day life. I have had months and years where I have felt totally flattened and overcome by the conditions of my own small, at times, crisis infused family, the demands of full time work, ill-health, and running my life as a single economic unit – sometimes overwhelm and disassociation is all we have; but what a grave set of physical and psychic conditions to be affected by and subdued into.

Such a quivering state of sensory and emotional excess is scary, lonely and brutal; and yet lived experiences such as these, are reasons to organise our lives around principles of care and mutual aid, especially along anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, queer, trans, class, race and crip lines.

Social change, and the action at individual and collective level it requires exertion, hard work, care, connection, mutuality and the ability to step into and enact dissent.

It is not an easy path, nor is it easy work. As Musa al-Gharbi notes “most successful social movements are deeply unpopular until after their victory is apparent. Insofar as they notch successes, it is often in defiance of public opinion.”

So, what is the alternative? Where do we go from here?

In thinking through answers to this question, I want to stress that there are many modes and tactics of resistance, mutual aid, rest, and political organising.

As Audre Lorde so well articulated, we do not live single issues lives. Nor will single issue campaign messages and tactics save us, or blow life into alternative and new ways of living and surviving.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

-Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, p.138

We can organise and share tactics of resistance running alongside each other in many lanes, using many modes of dreaming; of transportation; of change; of building mutual, radically loving, supportive forms of living and caring with and for each other.

We live amongst a rich history of radical social justice movements. For example, we might turn our heads to the Black Panther party. To To the Chipko movement originating in Uttarakhand India, to the feminist activists including Kimberlé Crenshaw who found language to define the multiple and intersecting structural burdens that weight down certain bodies more than others. To writer, feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde’s lucid thinking. There are too many to name in a short list here, but we are not alone, nor at sea, in the effort to understand and resist the intersecting and multiple structural and systemic inequities that abound.

Looking back, and learning from this history of social justice, mutual aid, radical forms of organising, provides an emerging knowledge of many different tools and processes of social justice organising and resistance.

In my own questioning and questing for values, projects and collective spaces that might work, to at once build alternative worlds and critique the violent genocides, deportations, late austerity, racist, classist and ableist systems we find ourselves living with day to day, are the principles and practices of anarchy.

Leslie, Emma, Bec & Anarchy

I will take a briefly circuitous route here, and tie in some of the lived experiences that shaped my thinking-feeling on anarchist philosophy, that surfaced and were activated during my America trip.

Bec and I en route. I can’t remember where this was. A massive solar energy tower in the Mojave desert. May 2025.

On day five of our road trip from Albuquerque to San Francisco, or at least, I think it was day five or six of our bonkers road trip – the one where we drove 250 miles a day through the high desert, we stopped at my mum’s friends Leslie and Gary’s house, which is in the University town of Redlands, just outside L.A.

Bec and I rocked up absolutely wired. We had driven long and far through the Mojave desert that day, got properly and scarily lost in the outback of the Mojave, and then winded our way through 7 lane highways skirting the edge of L.A. The pictures taken at our arrival should never, ever be shared.

Hot springs. Drying socks and knickers on the road. Concrete dogs and big skies. May 2025.

Leslie is an avid, dissenting, funny, caring and sharp troublemaker. Her house was a true oasis, offering riposte and rest from the endless passing of American roadsides and landscapes. The house is all on one level and sits within a dead-end America suburban road. It has two red plastic chairs on the drive, one of which is cracked and on its last legs. It’s an imperfect house, containing denizens disinterested in perfection and neatness.

As you step inside, a deep quiet atmosphere envelopes. It feels like a place of deep sensation, thought and creative practice. Most of the rooms are filled with books, soft surfaces, beds, A4 print outs with weird yet effective maxims like “no fixating allowed” and “think all is well, just for the fun of it”.

Snippets of the Redlands oasies. May 2025.

While we were staying in their calm, quiet, book laden house, which really was, one of the most serene and deep feeling-thinking atmospheres I’ve inhabited, Leslie was telling Bec and I about her new book proposal, which is a biography of Emma Goldman.

Through reading the proposal and then spending some hours listening to podcasts about Goldman, you could say I was reintroduced and re-enchanted by the ideas and work of Goldman; an influential and early anarchist. Her work needs more unpacking and discussing, but again, I will save that for a later date.

Snippets of the Redlands oasies. Me, Leslie, Bec May 2025.

We Do Anarchy Now

So, conversations with Leslie and Bec about Goldman, and a close reading of her book proposal, ignited in me a leaning that was already in flow. What was ignited was a re-orientation, a turning towards anarchy.

Anarchy comes from the Greek and literally means “no rulers.” Anarchists are anti-authoritarians who seek to abolish domination.

There are many shitty and shallow myths about anarchists; they advocate chaos, they believe in mindless violence and are opposed to organisation. These are myths, and don’t accurately convey the guiding principles which most simply put, is that anarchists are opposed to domination.

As listed on the Anarchist Library website, the basic principles of anarchism include:

Anti-Authoritarianism
Free Association.
Mutual Aid
Freedom
Self-Management
Radical Egalitarianism
Feminism

Body Matters

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