Our exhausted brains and hearts cannot hold infinite suffering
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
excerpt
Trump’s second term: There’s a reason this one feels more emotionally draining.
...Our exhausted brains and hearts cannot hold infinite suffering, and it is the objective of authoritarians everywhere to cause infinite suffering, in the hope that it will extinguish citizens’ desire to fight back. It’s one of the reasons those who fight autocracy remind us to seek and find connectedness with strangers, reach out to folks in other countries, to force ourselves into community with people who challenge our preconceived ideas. Retraining ourselves to see everyone—even the people we don’t know, or haven’t yet met, or to whom we cannot feel any immediate intuitive association—as human and worthy is some of the most essential resistance work we can undertake. Reducing any living being to an NPC (nonplayer character) is the well-trodden methodology of fascists and sociopaths. But it is not an irreversible condition. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem can strip men naked and shave their heads, but they can’t make us not see. Only we can do that.
The invisibling of the other is, at bottom, just another authoritarian party trick that allows us all to accept some tolerable level of mass renditions, or school defundings, or arrests of public officials, or presidential pardons. It is not so much that most Americans are without basic empathy, but rather that we are being forced to ration it, and to serve ourselves first. Whether that effort can be reversed in time for the midterms or the 2028 elections is not really the exigent question. The weirdly urgent task lies in asking ourselves whether we have become unwitting accomplices in the imperceptible attempts to make some people unseeable, and why we might be willing to accept that. That isn’t the work of political parties or messaging or even of leopards or faces. It’s something to which we are all susceptible, and against which we all must be on guard.
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