Balancing being informed and sane is the trickiest part of existing right now. Safety, freedom, survival – they are all at stake. It’s a daily parade of incompetence and cruelty.

We are assaulted as soon as we rise by a storm of content. These stories we are consuming are hard to shake. We want to take action, working hard to stay brave while also being really fucking scared.

I’ve had lots of moments over the last six months, year, 10 years….where I was running low on hope and purpose. Often, there has seemed to be little stopping this unguided mass of pure hate and greed from barreling down toward us. Not the courts, not Congress, but there are more and more of us every day who are punching back. It feels a bit like trying to hold off a fire hydrant with a dollar store umbrella.

We are in a 24-7 cycle of atrocities from this regime. The cruelty is, of course, the point. Even though I try to read and watch it with the intent to inform and counter, I’m not AI. I remain very human, this little box of empathy, compassion, and hope.

The contempt for humanity is playing everywhere, all the time. What kind of empty vessel do you have to be to post photo ops in front of tortured humans? How devoid of soul must you be to risk the lives of soldiers? What kind of sick fuck do you have to be to defund clinical trials and literally seize healthcare from the most vulnerable? It is unconscionable to celebrate murder, torture, and the downfall of what should make us human.

Today, I am still haunted by the video of Edgardo, the young man accompanied by Brad Lander and taken by ICE. The fear on his face was gut-wrenching. It fucking broke me. I cried big tears for him and every other person harmed by these profiteers of evil.

How anyone could look at this and the many more videos of inhumanity and not feel this way is beyond my comprehension. It’s disgusting, and I promise that if I’m ever in a position to do so, I will protect those who need it.

As we all know, none of us is getting out of here alive. Have we not earned the right to live whatever years we have left in peace? We have, and we want it for all. Yes, all, because I and those who I stand with actually see every human as something.

I’ve always had this gut feeling that this country has too often been the bad guys. All the good doesn’t absolve all the pain inflicted and the tragedy created. From the Trail of Tears to possessing people as property to burning women to the McCarthy inquisitions to Reagan’s war on the social contract, this nation has a lot of reckoning.

The latest is a war no one wants except the goons in the White House. They’re already in line with their talking points and “sleeper cells,” so they can manufacture fear to push people to be pro-war and use it to remove anyone it deems a “threat,” regardless of their citizenship status. Now, SCOTUS has given them the green light for third-party removals (or trafficking, but not deporting. That definition is a return to origin.)

When does this end? This is every fucking Black Mirror episode in one, all the time. People are just cattle to these folks. The dehumanization and fear crusades have been ongoing for decades. We are here today because people stopped caring about most everything that was worthy of it. Instead, they cared about their perceived superiority and persecution. How you can hold those thoughts together, I don’t know. They bend their beliefs with the wind.

So, they cared about their own interests as fleeting as those are, since there’s little loyalty or empathy found there. One could say I’m demonizing them. I’m not.

I gave people the benefit of the doubt and ignored that side. I’ve never had a MAGA in my circle, but there were some on the periphery.

In the end, how I care is different. I want no one to hurt or starve. I understand equality isn’t a pie that gets smaller as all people earn rights. Isn’t that rather insane to think that anyone not of the dominant party, mostly white men, have had to fight, protest, and sue our way to just be on the same level. And that’s one thing they care about, too, just in a different way. They care about being at the top, while others lose their ability even to remain free.

That’s the kind of caring that destroys people and the world around them.

For me, I can’t turn that way. I don’t have it in me to fall in line. Please keep caring about the right things with me.