An Honest Emotional Reckoning with What's Happening
(a lot has been happening, as I'm sure you've noticed)
Last week my work took me to D.C. Within a few hours of my at Reagan there would be a plane crash involving a commercial flight and a military aircraft.
By the time I arrived back home, Elon Musk’s lackeys had gained access to the Treasury’s payments systems.
By the end of the weekend, Musk was boosting comments made by the disgraced former general Mike Flynn (who pled guilty to charges but was pardoned by Trump) to his 215M followers about services provided by groups like Lutheran Social Services and Global Refuge to refugees, asylum seekers, and others navigating the US immigration process.
Further, USAID is under attack and at serious risk, not from any legal process, but by the illegal and unconstitutional actions of Elon Musk, his cohort of Musk Youth doing his bidding, and the sitting president.
I haven’t even touched on the tariffs levied at China (which are halting shipments from USPS already), or Trump’s claim to “take over” Gaza, or the plan to dismantle the Department of Education (a stated goal of Project 2025), or pulling out of the Paris Agreement again, or the revocation of an immigration program that endangers 350,000 Venezuelans who sought refuge here.
I am not sure how to feel, let alone what to do. I am just one person, writing a woe-laden post for a newsletter that, if past performance is indicative, somewhere between two-to-five thousand people will read.
I am not sure what to do when the institutions that we place our trust in, and the leaders entrusted to guide them, also do nothing.
I am not sure why the leaders best positioned to resist these illegal, unconstitutional actions are so reticent to use the powers entrusted to them. Why stay in a fight this dirty if you aren’t willing to get dirty yourself? Don’t they see what’s at stake, and that no sense of decorum or “business as usual” will meet this occasion? Are leftists and liberals so caught up in decades of purity tests that they can’t see that mere participation in this endeavor is enough to sully oneself? They are failing the Criminal Interview, and are being victimized and brutalized.
I make no excuse for any member of the GOP who also stands by, but they have spent years ignoring the angels of their better nature. The GOP that put country over party in the shadow of Watergate is a mere memory; in its stead we have McConnell’s GOP, willing to take cover from and take cover for Trump. All of this could have been avoided, had McConnell & his colleagues had the courage and integrity to impeach Trump and bar him from office.
In their book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, the philosopher Timothy Morton states that we have passed beyond “the end of the world,” and further, that humanity is hypocritical, weak, and lame. Here’s further context:
Hyperobjects are directly responsible for what I call the end of the world, rendering both denialism and apocalyptic environmentalism obsolete. Hyperobjects have already ushered in a new human phase of hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness: these terms have a very specific resonance in this study, and I shall explore them in depth. Hypocrisy results from the conditions of the impossibility of a metalanguage (and as I shall explain, we are now freshly aware of these conditions because of the ecological emergency); weakness from the gap between phenomenon and thing, which the hyperobject makes disturbingly visible; and lameness from the fact that all entities are fragile (as a condition of possibility for their existence), and hyperobjects make this fragility conspicuous.3 Hyperobjects are also changing human art and experience (the aesthetic dimension). We are now in what I call the Age of Asymmetry.
I was surprisingly comforted while reading this book, because as an exvangelical, it helped redeem (or at least make use of) the irrational fear of the end of the world that survives in the basement level of my psyche.
But it’s the other element of the book’s thesis - about our individual hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness - that I’m feeling in these last few days.
Things feel so big and I feel so small.
I know that means their strategy is working.
I also know that this feeling will pass (that is, after all, what feelings do). Last Friday alone I went from feeling invigorated to feeling despair.
Yet Morton’s book tells us to resist cynicism:
Cynicism is the worst hypocrisy: hypocrisy squared, since cynicism is hypocritical about its hypocrisy. The hypocrite understands that she is caught in her own failure. The cynic still hopes that if he vomits disgustingly enough, things will change. The cynic hopes: he is not beyond hope—he is a hypocrite. He is trying to escape doom.
I won’t presume to try and distill Morton’s book-length philosophical treatise into a single post here. But for a while now, it has given me the comfort to try anything, because the world has already ended and begun again and again.
But I am human, and under the weight of all these events, I feel discouraged by the early success of Trump and Musk to foment chaos in the administrative state.
I am trying to find ways to make a difference. I need leaders of institutions in media, government, and elsewhere to try too. They need to communicate clearly and loudly what they are doing. We can’t all lose hope all at once.
Find courage to match your despair, and things that feed you while you work at things that drain you. That’s my advice to you and to myself.
Tomorrow I’ll feel different. But today I’m sitting with all of it.
A beautiful post that I resonate with in so many ways. Thank you.
I am glad you are willing to feel big, hard feelings and not become a cynic. Your words make me believe less in religion and more in humankind/humanism, and please let me know how if im misinterpreting them.