A few thoughts related to recent events

I haven't wanted to use this blog to comment directly on current events - I rarely feel that I have anything to add to the "discourse" that someone with more insight and a larger platform hasn't already said, and I simply don't have the time and energy to try to keep up with everything that is going on. But it is often impossible to think of anything else; and one contribution that I feel I can legitimately make is to offer an account, at least occasionally, of what it "feels like" to be living through this period - from a certain point of view, of course, but a point of view that is held enough in common with my milieu (liberal, educated, PMC) that I feel there might be something gained in articulating it for others.

What follows is a handful of thoughts and impressions I wrote down toward the end of January, in an attempt to express the distress I felt at the news coming out of Minneapolis. These are fragmentary and inadequate; I thought about compiling them into a more coherent statement, but that seemed dishonest and somehow disrespectful. As they are, I think they convey at least some of the anger, frustration, and helplessness that I have periodically felt; also the guilt, shame, and incongruity that comes with continuing to live comfortably while knowing that these abuses are happening daily around us, often not very far away. I don't feel quite so pessimistic now as I did when I wrote these, but that can change quickly from one day to the next.

Written on Jan 22, 2026

I am so angry right now. Angry at the bullshit justifications, angry at everything. Angry and afraid.

Started at the same time under the title "helpless"; expanded and rewritten later

In an ideal world we would stand up together. When I wrote that a new consciousness was emerging, that's what I meant. And yet we continue to go to work (why am I going to work every day?), worry about our finances, plan trips, etc. - to live our disconnected, self-centered, oblivious lives. It is as if we can't accept that what is happening to us is real. And it is possible that we will continue to not accept it - which is to say, paradoxically, that we will accept it - even as it overwhelms and blots us out.

Written on Jan 23, 2026 under the title "Managed Tension"

The time of managed tension is gone. What we are involved in now is, if not an all out war, certainly an explicit assault. One can no longer claim, unless one has thoroughly internalized the logic of the right (of hierarchy, of domination), that there is any sort of reasonable justification.

Written the same day

It is hard, almost impossible to explain how I feel.

Started on Jan 24, 2026, after the murder of Alex Pretti; expanded and rewritten over the following week

It is intolerable to continue on like this. When our cities are under siege, when our neighbors are being disappeared, when good citizens are murdered in the streets, how are we supposed to live? Of course, one cannot let oneself go to pieces; but to carry on as if nothing has happened - to neither grieve, nor feel anger, nor fear - is that not the height of unreality?

One feels that at some point the tension between the normalcy that so many of us continue to enjoy, and the abuses that we are confronted with daily, must become too great, and those of us with any sense of decency or conscience will have to commit ourselves wholly to resistance. And yet one also feels that that day will never come, that this is just how life is: every moment of indignation squandered, unacted upon- each outburst subsiding into a nagging sense of doom.