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solidarity
When Flotillas Fight for Life, Not Empire
Instead of instruments of war, flotillas have become symbols of peace—acts of humanitarian direct action, civil resistance, and cross-border solidarity.
Apr 12, 2026
Flotillas have historically been fleets of military vessels—tools of empire designed for swift offensive or defensive operations at sea. The images they evoke are ones of imperial power and looming violence. Just look at the massive US naval buildup that surrounded Iran as part of the recent US attacks.
But peace activists have also developed a new kind of flotilla.
Instead of instruments of war, flotillas have become symbols of peace—acts of humanitarian direct action, civil resistance, and cross-border solidarity. Take the flotillas that have tried to reach Gaza, like the Global Sumud Flotilla. Even though they have been illegally intercepted by the Israeli military, they have educated millions of people worldwide about Israel’s atrocities, activated entire cities to shut down, and offered a beacon of hope to the beleaguered people of Gaza.
As US policy continues to sanction and blockade Cuba—causing immense hardship for the Cuban people—I, along with many others, felt compelled to escalate our own tactics of solidarity by joining the recent flotilla to Cuba as part of the Nuestra América Convoy. Our boat carried 15 tons of aid, part of the more than 40 tons delivered by the convoy.
The US empire is indeed dying, and it is up to us to not just reimagine the better world we need and want, but to actually put that world into practice.
The United States is currently imposing some of the harshest sanctions on Cuba in recent history, compounding a 67-year blockade that has restricted access to medicine, fuel, and food. But in recent months, the US added another dimension: a naval blockade to severely limit fuel imports, leading to a humanitarian crisis.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need fossil fuels—we would already have made a just transition to renewable energy. And while Cuba is working at lightning speed to expand solar power, the current reality is stark: People still need fuel to cook, to transport food, to operate ambulances, to power hospitals, and to keep ventilators running.
The international community has responded to this escalation in US economic warfare with intensified solidarity. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have been mobilizing to send aid and condemn the US blockade. In March, Progressive International, CODEPINK, and The People’s Forum launched the Nuestra América Convoy, bringing together over 600 people from 33 countries. We came with millions of dollars’ worth of aid—from urgently needed medical supplies to longer-term solutions like solar panels.
While many of my friends boarded planes to Havana, packing every inch of their luggage with medicine, hygiene products, vitamins, and art supplies, I traveled to Mexico to meet the flotilla crew. We spent four days at sea together—activists, journalists, organizers. Some had helped organize the Gaza Sumud Flotilla; others had taken part in mass protests in solidarity with Palestine.
Our goal was to deliver much-needed aid to the people of Cuba. But just as important was challenging the dominant narrative—that Cuba’s suffering is the result of its own government, rather than decades of cruel US policy.
Even though the boat was full of journalists documenting the trip, their cameras could not fully capture the sense of community among strangers united by a shared mission. I remember being nervous about the cold and the possibility of seasickness, but within minutes, people were offering ginger chews, acupressure bracelets, and rain gear.
Our departure was delayed due to weather, boat repairs, and the logistics of loading the aid. In the meantime, we stayed with supporters in Mexico who couldn’t join the voyage but found other ways to contribute. We shared a send-off dinner at an Egyptian restaurant whose owner had followed the Gaza flotillas. He told us how proud he was to see a flotilla to Cuba leaving from his small town.
On the boat, we shared cooking, dishwashing, and night watch shifts—standard practice in occupations, encampments, and direct actions where resources are limited but creativity and collaboration are abundant. At sea, a simple breakfast of rice, beans, eggs, guacamole, and toast tastes like a feast. We slept under galaxies of stars, woke to sunrises on the horizon, and at sunset made music with whatever we had—a guitar, a bucket drum, water bottles filled with dry beans.
Meanwhile, I stayed connected to those traveling by plane, watching group chats fill with photos of carefully packed bags and urgent questions: Who can fit more supplies? How many solar batteries can we carry on? The coordination was constant, collective, and inspiring.
The blockade severely limits what goods can reach Cuba. While US citizens can still travel there under certain categories, they face restrictions and often risk questioning upon return. But solidarity is not tourism. It is not about swooping in, taking photos, and leaving. It is about building relationships, listening, and committing to ongoing struggle from our home countries.
We had a beautiful reception from the Cuban people when we landed, and then had the opportunity to speak directly with community groups about current conditions.I learned how they overcome so much by placing value in community over the individual.
The US empire is indeed dying, and it is up to us to not just reimagine the better world we need and want, but to actually put that world into practice. Reflecting on my experience, I started thinking—if we can turn flotillas from a force of evil into vessels of hope and solidarity, then what else can we change? What if we built schools around the world instead of sending bombs? What if, like the Cubans, we funded healthcare over warfare and sent doctors to cure people instead of soldiers to kill them?
You don’t have to board a boat with humanitarian supplies to show solidarity. Flotillas are one tactic, but we need a variety and diversity of tactics right now, and always. You can move forward by showing solidarity to your neighbors at home, as well as to our neighbors 90 miles off our shores. Because what we build together, in community—whether through a peace flotilla or local mutual aid—is stronger than anything built through force.
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The Duty to Grieve: On Dehumanization, War, and the Cost of Witnessing
Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows.
Apr 07, 2026
More than a month into a war with Iran, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation (perhaps appropriately) on April Fool's Day. It was his first televised speech to justify a war to the American people that he had promised would never happen. During that brief 19-minute speech, which mostly repeated his arguably unstable and unverified posts on social media, he said nothing new, closing with: "We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong."
Where they belong. To the stone age. Where THEY belong. While speaking to the nation in an effort to help us see the reason for the costs we are incurring, Trump placed an entire people outside of modernity, outside of civilization, outside of the category of the fully human. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, rhymes about ignoring basic moral obligations to our fellow humans every chance he gets: "Maximum lethality, not tepid legality"; "Violent effect, not politically correct." While Iranian neighborhoods burned and children in schools were bombed by US weapons, Trump was having this exchange on Fox News:
"Do you have any insight as to how they are doing? Do they have drinking water? Do they have food? It's upsetting," Dana Perino asked.
"I do, but first, do you remember when we had lunch years ago in the base of Trump Tower when it was a brand new building?" Trump continued… "You have not changed," he told the Fox News host before turning his attention to her looks: "Now, I'm not allowed to say this—it's the end of my political career—but you may be even better looking, okay?"
When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief.
The performance was grotesque in its banality. We are no longer surprised. The ridiculous rhymes, the dangerous dehumanizing language, the slimy sexism—all of it has become the grammar of power and the grammar of war under Trump 2.0.
No clarity was offered about why we are at war with Iran. Not to Dana Perino, not to the American people who tuned in during prime time to watch the president talk. No articulation of what the goal is. No naming of the dead. Instead, our daily content about the war is a cacophonous chatter of stock-market updates, defense-contractor earnings, and abstract references to "success." The human beings on the other end of our weapons have been evacuated from the language entirely.
I know we are all feeling this on some level. Because as Dana Perino rightly noted, the starvation of people is upsetting—but also because of what this dehumanization is doing to all of us.
What we are witnessing is not thoughtless language. It is the operation of a very old logic—one that critical psychologist Thomas Teo calls subhumanism: a way of thinking, feeling, and being that makes certain people disposable. The philosopher Achille Mbembe gives this logic its political name: necropolitics, which is the power to decide who may live, who must die, and the creation of what he calls "death-worlds," where entire populations are reduced to a kind of living dead. When Trump threatens to bomb a country "back to the stone ages," he is exercising necropolitical power in its most obvious form on prime time television. He is not merely threatening destruction but declaring that the people who live there already belong to a time before civilization, and therefore their annihilation is not a devastating event. It is not even, really, an event at all.
This is how dehumanization works. Steadily, without blinking an eye, looking straight into the cameras, evacuating humanity from the people we intend to harm.
And this has become the norm, not an aberration. We might even be experiencing numbness in the face of its routine relentlessness. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas "bloodthirsty monsters," he was laying the groundwork for the immoral destruction of Gaza and the families within it—a destruction that has, at the time of this writing, caused unspeakable harm to entire communities, and that the United Nations has unequivocally identified as genocide. As David Livingstone Smith has documented in On Inhumanity, the language of monstrosity has a horrific lineage. For centuries, European Christians represented Jews as monstrous beings, a trajectory that culminated in the Holocaust. During Jim Crow, Black men were cast as subhuman predators enabling the horrors of lynchings—and then the same language is used to justify our inhuman incarceration policies. First the language changes. Then the unquestioned permissions to eliminate communities follow.
The language used around the war in Iran follows this same pattern. And it is not separate from what has happened—and continues to happen—in Gaza. The pattern enacts the same story over and over again: that some lives are disposable, that some deaths do not count, and that the proper response to their destruction is not grief—not the acknowledgment of our shared humanity and brokenhearted-ness—but a market update.
There is a concept in psychology called moral injury: the harm that comes from witnessing, participating in, or being forced to live inside systems that violate one's deepest commitments. It describes what happens to us—educators, clinicians, organizers, parents, ordinary citizens—as we watch atrocity become normalized. It names what we feel when the excruciating recognition of lives lost to senseless violence gets replaced by financial indicators, and we are expected to go on as though nothing has happened. This is the crisis many of us are living through right now. Not the crisis of war alone, but the crisis of witnessing. The demand is not simply that we tolerate violence. The demand is that we stop feeling it.
And yet, feeling persists. It persists because we know that we belong to each other, we are responsible for each other. And this is what motivates acts of incredibly courageous resistance.
The people of Iran have been resisting—through art, through protest, through organizing—often at devastating personal cost. The Women, Life, Freedom movement is among the most courageous uprisings of our time. Women refused to be silent even when the consequences included imprisonment and death. It was not Trump who advanced liberation in Iran. It was Iranian women, students, workers, artists. What the current war has done is undermine those very movements and murder the very people who have been fighting for their own freedom.
We must hold both of these realities at once: the machinery of dehumanization, and the stubborn, courageous insistence on humanity by those targeted by it. The moral injury is real. And so is the resistance. Both require us to refuse numbness and keep feeling.
Poet and scholar Audre Lorde wrote that to resist, to survive, requires feeling. To grieve is to insist that a life mattered. When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief. To insist that what has been done to them is a wound in the fabric of all of our humanity. You cannot organize on behalf of people whose deaths you have not allowed yourself to feel. You cannot resist a logic of disposability if you have internalized the numbness it requires.
And we owe each other the right to feel. In a culture that rewards numbness and calls it professionalism, that treats emotional response as naivety, that measures the success of a war by the Dow Jones—the most radical thing we can do is refuse to stop feeling. To insist that the people being bombed are people. To feel our hearts shatter when we think about the kids in the school who were annihilated by a bomb paid for by us, as taxpayers. To let that shatter us. To not move on.
And, importantly, this grief must be a shared grief. Isolation is a tool of the authoritarian. Our grief points us toward the injustices that we can no longer tolerate and enable. It allows us to trace the wounds—to feel where our humanity is being carved away by the witnessing of this brutality. So grieve in community. Grieve alongside the Iranian people. Grieve with our neighbors who are being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Grieve with our trans siblings. And let that shared grief become the foundation for what we do next, because grief that is felt together demands action.
Yes, we must march and allow for spaces where resistance can be joyful and defiant and absurd, because joy in the face of a regime that demands despair is its own form of refusal. And we must show up for our communities, organize alongside them, and hold the pain in our souls together as we feel the immeasurable loss of human lives. Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows and is the place where we refuse to let the necropolitical grammar of war, of subhumanism, become the grammar of our souls.
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No Kings: After the Splash, the Ripples Spread
From equality, to humor, to nonviolence, the values expressed at the protests will continue to energize resistance efforts in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Mar 31, 2026
The numbers from No Kings protests made a big splash. Roughly 8 million people declared their opposition to the present administration this past weekend in over 3100 cities and towns across the nation. But in the long run the impact of quality will be greater than quantity. Beyond the splash, the values expressed in the protests will continue to ripple through our collective consciousness.
Here are some of those ripples that will spread out and energize resistance efforts in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Harmony and Equality: Those who showed up on the streets joined as one, all equal, no person better or more entitled than the other. Their participation loudly reaffirmed cherished democratic values as expressed in the First Amendment and human values anchored in the world’s religions.
Mutual Respect and Common Purpose: Different views flourished among protesters, yet they shared a common purpose—a counter to the tide of divisiveness presently plaguing the nation. No Kings points the way to a community of diverse viewpoints that rejects demeaning attribution.
The message of No Kings could be deflected or demeaned by those in power, but its solidarity was indisputable.
The Power of Humor: Humor illuminated and emblazoned No Kings messages and lightened the despair associated with what many see happening in this country. Humor “unclothes the emperor,” revealing shallowness and frailty behind a façade of impregnability and bravado. Portraying wannabe authoritarians as buffoons added impact to the protesters’ messages, unmasking savagery and cowardice.
Clear-eyed Resilience: Enduring resistance springs from a grasp of the facts and rejects the temptation to deny or repress the severity of one’s current circumstances. Protesters did not mince words, rather offered direct, full-hearted, and cogent expression that accurately characterized the malignancy of the forces oppressing people.
Local Capacity: The protests had nationwide impact. Yet inherently they built local capacity. Participants garnered valuable lessons in cooperative action on a doable scale. Working together in this way becomes increasingly critical as large-scale institutions, spanning diverse functions, break down—the signs of which are already apparent.
Dignifying the Opposition: Peacefully and without rancor, protesters absorbed the jibes of those who see the world differently. Their overarching commitment was to honor the dignity of all humans, even amid a belief that others’ mindsets are flawed, their actions harmful. The message of No Kings could be deflected or demeaned by those in power, but its solidarity was indisputable.
Appreciating Ancient Wisdom: Free exercise of religion is not only central to the cause represented by No Kings, it was generative of ideas that motivated the protests. The messages conveyed are founded in Jesus’ unyielding embrace of human dignity and opposition to systems of domination, Jews’ commitment to the word and to social justice, Islam’s emphasis on charity and the reverence of pilgrimage, and the Dalai Lama’s expressions of compassion and loving kindness.
Nonviolent Direct Action: No Kings defies the inhumanity and injustice of systems of domination through nonviolent direct action. It serves as a “pilgrimage” for goodness of heart, reverence, compassion, and humor. It illuminates a different way of being and doing with one’s fellow human beings. The way the Minneapolis community reacted to the invasion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a case in point. People from all classes and backgrounds demonstrated mutual regard, materially supported each other, and salved each other’s pain and suffering—an ennobling of what it means to be a citizen of the world.
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