When the Darkness Is Not Metaphor

Today, ICE agents moved through Belfast, Maine—door to door—under a statewide surge that is scheduled to continue tomorrow. Immigrant communities have been advised to shelter in place. People at my church were frightened. Not because they are fragile, but because they understand exactly what this kind of state power can do.

Fear is not irrational in a moment like this.

And the fear is not isolated to Maine. Across the country, people are still reeling from the news of a VA nurse in Minneapolis who was shot eleven times while intervening when ICE agents assaulted someone. Eleven bullets for refusing to look away. Eleven bullets for choosing to protect another human being.

As US citizens under ICE, we find ourselves in a climate of fear. I spend my days anxious about the possibility of a knock on the door, being forcibly removed from our home, and deported to a country unfamiliar to us, simply because of the choices we've made as individuals living in a free nation with the right to make those decisions.

I’m not writing this to dramatize anything. I’m writing it because pretending this isn’t happening is its own kind of violence. When the state escalates harm, silence becomes complicity.

I’ve already written my representatives more times than I can count. And yet here we are—ICE on our streets today, ICE on our streets tomorrow, and communities bracing for impact. There is no illusion left that someone else is going to fix this for us.

Today, I watched people I care about tremble. I watched them try to make sense of how to stay safe, how to protect their families, how to keep going. And I felt the weight of the question I built Fifth Element around: What does it mean to be a force against the darkness when the darkness is real, present, and sanctioned?

Fifth Element was built on the belief that people deserve to live and work with dignity, clarity, and agency. It was built on the understanding that boundaries are not luxuries—they are survival tools. It was built on the truth that systems shape behavior, and that we have a responsibility to design systems that do not replicate domination.

Days like today make that philosophy feel less like a framework and more like a lifeline.

Because when state violence intensifies, the practices of grounding, connection, and collective care stop being “wellness” and become resistance. When fear spreads through a community, the ability to stay present—to breathe, to think, to choose—becomes an act of defiance. When people risk their lives to interrupt harm, they remind us that courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is what happens when love refuses to step aside.

I don’t have a policy prescription today. I’m not going to pretend that a coaching framework can solve what is fundamentally a crisis of power and state violence. What I can offer is a commitment: to help people stay grounded in themselves, to help them reclaim their agency, and to help them build structures—personal and organizational—that refuse to mirror the logic of domination we are seeing on our streets.

If you are scared today, you are not alone.

If you are angry, you are not alone.

If you are determined to protect your community, you are not alone.

When people choose to care enough to act. When they refuse to let fear sever their humanity.

Today, that choice matters.

Tomorrow, it will matter again.