There Is No Pleasure in Being Right

When it all comes tumbling down

I don’t remember when I started dreaming about leaving America. Maybe fifteen years ago, or twenty. A long time.

At first it was just a fragment of a thought, too daring to lay out completely. In the early days of dreaming, the leaving was temporary with an implied return, like: maybe Marido or I could land a job with a company that had an office in Amsterdam, or Dublin. Live there for a year or three.

But neither of our jobs were ever the kind that backed that kind of venture. And without a job, we couldn’t make the exodus work. Didn’t have enough money.

Somewhere after I became a mother and began to open up my eyes to the actuality of the empire I called my country, the idea of leaving became a steady pulse in the back of my head. The longer it thrummed there, the less I thought about return. The more I thought about just getting out.

The pulse turned into panic attacks around 2016. We need a real exit strategy, I began to badger, we need to make a plan. During the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 I said, This is gonna keep getting worse. I pointed to our daughter and said, I don’t want her to be here for the worse days.

It wasn’t that Marido disagreed, necessarily. He just didn’t feel the same urgency, in the beginning. Didn’t hear the same drumbeat that I did. So I swallowed the panic as best I could. No one wants to be a prophet.

Within the confines of our small world in San Francisco, life was beautiful. Comfortable. Friends on all sides, if you kept your gaze lowered from the fires on the horizon.

So I wrote postcards to voters. I called my representatives. I stenciled resistance signs and hoisted them high at protests. I tried to believe there was some dream of America worth clinging to, worth fighting for. Some version of my country worth saving.

On Valencia Street in San Francisco, December 2019

Then, 2020.

Locked in the house with a pandemic beating down the door, nothing to do but think. I reckoned with my illusions and found them wanting. Found myself wanting.

The pulse became a roar; sent me scrambling for the door.

I left the USA for a thousand reasons, the biggest of which was this: I was no longer a believer.

I didn’t come to Portugal for tax breaks and beaches, I left America because I no longer believed. And much like the church of my youth, once I had seen the rot at the core, once I understood the systems that made possible all the ills, I could no longer abide.

Six years later, I watch from across the great water as an empire crumbles.
They all do, eventually. But this one used to be mine.

“This isn’t America!” I hear people cry. “We can fix this! We can… vote! Or reform! Or impeach!”

But this IS America. Is and always was.

(White) People are only acknowledging the ugly truth of it now that white bodies hit the ground. Now that the people paying the price match their own reflection.

What we are witnessing in the US these days is nothing new. It’s been happening for 250 years. Longer.

The shock that so many white Americans are feeling now is privilege. Privilege that it took this long for empire to put you in its crosshairs. That it took this long to feel this close.

Black folks, brown folks, indigenous folks, everyone the American empire has ever come after, at home and around the globe — they never had the luxury of denial. They always knew what evils the USA was capable of perpetrating against anyone who got in the way of its Manifest Destiny, both literal and ideological.

“When it was us, it was never enough to move ya’ll,” said organizer and author Hope Giselle-Godsey. “We’ve been begging ya’ll to look. We’ve been screaming. We’ve been warning. We’ve been organizing with no money, no coverage, no safety, no sympathy. We’ve been saying This Machine Eats People and nobody cared until it started chewing on whiteness. And the part that nobody wants to say out loud is that some of ya’ll are not activated, you’re just scared, and that fear made you loud in a way that justice never could. …Some of us never had the option to wait until it felt close. We were born close.”

It’s far past time to skip over the hand wringing and acknowledge the ugly truth. This system is not worth saving.

Chiara Do’wal Sehi Enriquez, indigenous resistance artist, educator, and language keeper of the Karankawa Hawk Clan, said it like this: “I don’t want your apologies. I don’t want your accountability for what your ancestors did. I want you to engage in critical thinking. …The systems that your ancestors set up in place are still inherently violent, and because you still participate in them, because you still uphold them and claim them, and aren’t doing any work to either undo or ‘reform’ or dismantle them, you bear responsibility.”

Collage art by Chiara Do’wal Sehi Enriquez

My critical thinking led me to leave the USA. I don’t plan on ever returning. But removing my body from America doesn’t mean I am absolved of responsibility. And this is where I am often struggling.

I am not interested in putting any energy into “saving” America. It is not the land of free, not the home of the brave, not one nation under God, it is a settler colonial state rigged up on a scaffolding of bones. Perpetrator of genocides: multiple. The murder and displacement of indigenous people to facilitate theft of their land. The murder and displacement of black people to facilitate the building of these United States. The murder and displacement of countless peoples for countless years in a bald-faced bid for resources papered over with platitudes about “freedom” and “democracy.” The violence of these acts reverberates through us all. The injustice is active and ongoing.

“I do not want to be a settler, but I am one,” writes my friend Fariha Róisín. “So what does this mean? What does true accountability look like, for me?”

Fariha writes of Australia, the country they grew up in. Another land hijacked by the greed of an empire. Though Fariha also removed themselves bodily from that land, the settler identity is not one that can be so easily shrugged away. For them, the reckoning with accountability involves Land Back and mutual aid and decolonization of the mind and learning how to be with the land. It means breaking the cycle of trauma and envisioning and building new futures that hold every people.

“This is the world I’m working towards,” Fariha writes. “This means, primarily, I must start applying this work to myself.”

I, too, am applying this work to myself. I don’t always get it right. I have learned (and unlearned) so much, but I have so much further to go.

I always will be an American, no matter what land I call home. I have family there, of blood and of choice. People I love. People I will not abandon. And it will always be my job to dismantle the systems of harm that my ancestors built, actively with foreknowledge and blindly with passive participation.

What does accountability and activation look like for me, from Portugal? In part, it looks like the words I have put on this page. It looks like speaking up. It looks like supporting activists and organizers and mutual aid organizations in communities that I care about. It looks like educating myself. It looks like never getting comfortable. It looks like not looking away. It looks like not giving up even when all hope is lost.

(Hope, too, is a privilege. Look at indigenous people the world over— the Lakota, the Mayas, the Inuit, the Saami, the Aborigines, the Maori, the Palestinians, who have lost everything and everyone but never, ever lose sight of who they are. Never, ever stop fighting for justice for their people. )

I left my country, in part, because it was never really mine. Portugal isn’t really mine, either. But here is where I am now.

The more our world fractures into dagger-shaped shards, the more we club each other to death with our genes, our gods, our flags, our languages, the colour of our skin, the purity of our roots, our histories both true and false — the more my answer to that question (Where are you from?) remains the same: I’m here now. -Arundhati Roy in Mother Mary Comes to Me

I’m here now. And I am not done doing what I can.

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Copyright © 2026 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author; This Is America collage by artist Chiara Do’wal Sehi Enriquez}