People first
These past few weeks have been hard. Hard to keep up with, hard to stomach, hard to assimilate, and hard to find a pathway forward. It's designed to be hard. The intent is to cow those of us who would be cowed; thrill those of us who would join the merry mayhem; find targets of who might have more of a spine; and overall normalize what they are doing.
This administration is building towards war. Internal war with ICE, external war in so many directions that the zeitgeist would be appalled if it had any more bandwidth. They are building towards population collapse, with joblessness, hunger, disease, and environmental poisons. They are building a deep surveillance state. These aren't tea leaves, but fiscally placed dominos, trails building in the background, and just waiting for the right vector force to tip them into action.
ICE will keep escalating until they see broken spirits wherever they scan. Then they will use that level to start on the next target. There is no de-escalation in these abuser tactics. They will either be abolished, dismantled, and prosecuted to keep from reforming extra-legally; or persist until they find the right recipe to get the next submission easily. And the side of that binary where we don't submit...I don't think we can ever stop being vigilant.
I don't have any pithy words to help people wrap their heads around this. It's happening. Accept it. Work through it, not around it.
If you're hesitating on where you want to land, all I can say is that stories will be handed down. You're audience is not social media, or your friends and family, or work, or (if you happen to be amongst those who are failing us the hardest) your constituents.
Your audience is history. You won't have a say in how your life is interpreted. You won't be able to modulate and spin to fit the narrative of your choice into the accepted framework. What will survive is an overall mien, level of consistency, or a single action that has ripple effects. It will be seen, if it's seen at all, with the point of view of which ethos is in ascendence. Picking your ethos and sticking to it is the only weight you have.
There is a potential future where the simple belief that humanity matters takes on the sheen of evil. The potential has been there my entire life, built into our metrics of economy; and can be traced back so deeply in our histories, beyond slavery in it's many iterative incarnations. But, it's grown in the past decades.
I say this with my immediate future weighing heavy, as the only drum worth beating: people matter. Our whole humanity is where our magic is. Diversity is how we weather the unknown future. Together, we can do such amazing things. That there is a subset who have decided that people can only make things when they are forced, that violence is a useful tool especially when wielded first, and who would erase information to assert concept and control is heart-wrenching.
What to focus on is not that we have problems, but how we go about seeing them and managing them. That is my bet for the difference between a civilization that stumbles, and a civilization that collapses.
See what's happening. Care. Vote with your behaviors and actions. The thing about authoritarianism and fascism is that it needs buy in. It needs complacency: in pretending that the board hasn't changed (Schumer); that your corporate obligations are priorities if you want re-election (Jeffries); that there's any appeasement to be found (most of our Democrat leaders); or acceptance that what was always at the foundation of your politics was that people don't matter (any party-first Republican leader).
