Epic Battles and the Liberation of Love

An AI generated epic toy battle!

Every so often, when I drive down 13th Street heading toward downtown Salem, Oregon, a neighboring city, I pass a house with a fenced yard that faces the street. Inside the yard are large Transformers, action figures, and dolls. Every time I pass by, they’re in different positions—locked in new poses, new standoffs, new imagined clashes. It’s clear the children who live there are staging an epic battle. Good versus evil. Heroes and villains. The fate of the world hanging in the balance.

It makes me smile, because it reminds me of the epic battles my own kids used to create—Star Wars characters and Marvel superheroes teaming up against Barbies and Disney princesses. Entire universes colliding. High drama. Absolute certainty that this battle mattered.

What strikes me now is how much of what we are seeing in the United States feels exactly like that: an epic battle taking place largely in the imagination—except that the harm is very real.

The current president continually vilifies black and brown people and tells white folks that they are responsible for white people’s struggles, frustrations, and fears. He echoes the language of Jim Crow segregationists who opposed civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. He is amplifying great replacement conspiracy theories that insist equality for others must mean loss for white people.

This is the lie at the center of it all: that the equality and equity of others diminishes the equality and equity of your life.

It does not.

But while this “battle” rages—while White Americans are told they are under siege—Brown neighbors are experiencing something terrifyingly real. Across this country, families are living in fear of an increasingly militarized ICE force: agents in unmarked vehicles, masked faces, aggressive tactics, sudden disappearances. People are detained at work, outside schools, in their neighborhoods. Parents are afraid to drive their kids to appointments. Many are US citizens or legal immigrants. Workers are afraid to show up to jobs they’ve held for years.

This is not symbolic. This is not exaggerated. This is harm.

And yet, instead of outrage at this cruelty, many are encouraged to fixate on a fantasy—that White Americans are the true victims, that they are being replaced, punished, or erased simply because others are finally being treated as fully human.

Distraction is one of the central functions of the "great replacement" theory. If White Americans are busy fighting an imaginary enemy, they are less likely to notice who is actually doing them harm. They are less likely to ask why wages stagnate, why healthcare remains inaccessible, why housing slips further out of reach, or why wealth continues to funnel upward while fear is directed sideways.

Black and Brown people did not cause these realities. Immigrants did not engineer them. Antiracist laws did not create them.

But blaming them is useful to the narrative Trump and his cronies have put forward.

Layered into all of this is another deeply American fixation: our love affair with retributive violence.

We are formed by stories that tell us justice looks like punishment, domination, and force. We are taught that safety comes from harsher laws, bigger weapons, and visible suffering inflicted on those labeled “bad.” Violence becomes proof that the threat is being handled. Cruelty is reframed as strength. Fear is baptized as protection.

This is why militarized policing and gestapo-like immigration enforcement are not only tolerated, but celebrated by some. Once you believe you are under attack, anything done in the name of defense becomes justified. Masked agents. Unmarked vans. Families torn apart. The harm is excused because the story says it must happen for order to be restored.

But retribution is not justice. It never has been.

Retributive violence does not heal communities, repair harm, or address the root causes of suffering. It only feeds the illusion that pain inflicted on others will somehow make us whole.

And here is where this truth turns inward—especially for White Americans who are already doing the work of decolonizing and becoming antiracist. We are not finished. We are not evolved. We are not exempt.

That includes me.

A few days ago, I posted something on Facebook to my “homesteading-curious friends.” My intent was simple and joyful—I was excited about making yogurt from scratch again. But a friend reminded me of the Homestead Act of 1862, a policy designed to transfer stolen Indigenous land into the hands of White settlers. “Homesteading” is not a neutral word. It carries the weight of displacement and erasure.

She shared that she is committing to using terms like crofting or smallholding instead—language without the same anti–Indigenous connotations. I listened. I learned. I'll change my language.

Not because I am “good,” but because I am not done.

This is what real antiracism looks like—not perfection, but interruption. Not defensiveness, but humility. Not clinging to intent, but taking responsibility for impact. White supremacy is not just a system “out there.” It lives in our language, our nostalgia, our assumptions—things we were handed and didn’t choose, but are still responsible to unlearn.

This is precisely what Trumpism resists. Because once White Americans admit we are unfinished—still being unlearned, still being called into accountability—the imaginary epic battle collapses. There is no heroic war to win. There is only the harder, quieter work of truth-telling, repair, and transformation.

At some point—if that day ever comes—it will be a devastating reckoning when White Americans commonly realize this: the battle we were told to fight was never real. The enemy was never our neighbors. And while some were busy fighting a make-believe war, others were being detained, terrorized, and torn from their communities.

Children eventually grow up. They put the action figures back in the toy box. They learn the difference between imagination and reality.

The truth we must tell—for good, to right the wrongs, to piece ourselves together again—is this: liberation is not found in fear, retribution, or violence. It is found in courage, humility, and love.