Yesterday I played tennis with a couple of players I’d never met before, at Chicago’s Waveland Park, next to a leafy municipal golf course built in 1901.

About 30 minutes into our set, something extraordinary happened. Just as I was serving, 10 or so ominous-looking helicopters came flying out of nowhere from the east. Matte brown, thundering low to the ground, they reminded me of military tanks Trump recently sent to scare people in LA’s MacArthur’s Park. 

I stood transfixed. For a moment, on a tennis court in a grand municipal park of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I caught a glimpse of living under siege. I thought of cities turned to rubble under direct orders from Hitler, Putin, Netanyahu, and other authoritarians  who brutalize “other” for power. In that instant, intuiting that Trump calls Democrat-run cities “war zones” because he plans to make them so, I saw the violence to come from Republicans giving Trump $170 billion for ICE: the deafening noise, the surprise of imminent sweep. 

But instead of feeling intimidated or afraid, I was overwhelmed with anger. I instinctively swung my racket at the helicopters with my left hand, while the middle finger of my right hand shot up to the sky. I started jumping in place and screaming at the helicopters like an insane person, “Fuck You! Fuck You! Fuck You!,” with tears of rage.

I didn’t care if I’d embarrassed the friend who’d invited me. I didn’t know if her friends were MAGA and it didn’t matter, even as I imagined the choppers turning back to open fire on the lot of us. 

Defiance is patriotic

My middle finger has a recurrent case of Tourrets; it gets stuck upright every time I walk by the Trump high rise defacing Chicago’s river view.

But while I assumed my playmates were disgusted at my outburst, they weren’t. All three of these middle-aged, white women some would call bougie were giving the same salute to the helicopters, perhaps with a tad less vigor.

Then I looked at the courts surrounding us and saw that we weren’t alone. Standing on one court to the west and four courts to the east, every single player, singles or doubles, had stopped playing, arrested by the rumbling sky overhead. 

When I saw that all the players around me were doing the exact same thing I was doing, the tears turned sweet.

Conflicted emotions

I come from a military family. My dad and his dad retired from the Navy, my brother was in the Marines, etc. I don’t feel proud for hating my government. I don’t feel proud to conflate the military with the drunk who commands it. 

But my anger, and that of everyone else on the courts that morning, wasn’t at the people in the choppers. It was at their Commander-in-Chief, an unhinged and dangerous man who should’ve been taken down already under the 25th Amendment. 

Our anger wasn’t subversive. It was patriotic, and it was electrifying. It restored hope just when the Supreme Court’s rapid fire perfidy had almost erased it.

Politicizing the military puts service members at risk 

I’m guessing people on the courts saluting the choppers had seen footage of ICE goons, tanks, and roof-mounted military rifles terrorizing soccer players at LA’s MacArthur’s park. Or maybe they saw the video that went viral of masked criminals with ICE badges repeatedly punching and beating a landscaper, a portly middle-aged father of three US Marines. Or it could have been a segment on the nightly news showing ICE raiding a farm with giddy brutality, using tear gas on peaceful protestors who ran, clutching their eyes.

Whatever horrors inspired them, their tiny acts of defiance on the tennis courts, as ridiculous as it may sound, made me proud to be an American. It made me proud, even as I know in my bones that Trump’s immigration raids will soon encompass other undesirables, and that I am one such undesirable. 

I know the violence and injustice that are coming, and I still feel proud of where it sits with me. I feel proud because, more than fear, I feel anger.   

Trump, Bondi, Hegseth, and Noem are grotesqueries wrapped in American flags, and 166 million Americans who did not vote for Trump see them for what they are. Trump may well get the Civil War he’s itching for, but he and his posse will eventually lose, and every one of them will be held to account. 

People resisting Trump are the best, brightest and bravest of America; we are the true Revolutionary throwbacks unwilling to love a king. We so fiercely love our imperfect country and the perfect ideals it stands for that no force of darkness will ever be able to defeat it.