After the explosion, before it’s too late

Moving forward, on the other side of shock and awe

I’m well aware that the Trump government has not actually sidelined Elon Musk. He’s being hidden, a move more symbolic than substantive. The embittered work of DOGE continues, regardless of whether a chainsaw is being wielded for the cameras. There is, however, an impact to the obfuscatory stagecraft of it all. Not to policy, mind you, but to our attention.

This goes without saying, but I deeply disliked the early days of the second Trump administration. I hated the numbing spectacle of executive orders by the hundred. I detested the Muskian chaos, the authoritarian directives, the sweaty attempts to declare that everything was different now. I recoiled at the insults, the Salvadoran prison sizzle reels and the theatrical occupation of federal offices by trollish young men.

There is no silver lining in oafish destruction. Were an elephant to charge through a daycare, nobody would remark, the next day “well on the bright side…” As such, I need to word this very carefully: How awful those first couple months of Trump (Reprise) were. How awful, but also how unignorable. Again, back to the metaphor of the elephant. You do not “have to hand it” to the lumbering animal. But neither can you turn away.

Trump’s intention, in those first few months, was to make us feel as if the world had turned upside down at his beck and call. And thank God so many of us reacted with a collective no. First tentative, then more confident. It started slowly, but as winter turned to spring, opposition mounted. Tesla protests, which began with just a few lonely sign-wavers, soon swelled in size. On the first national day of protest, thousands upon thousands rallied, in places both expected and not. Town halls were disrupted. Loudly. Something was brewing.

We didn’t stop the strongmen in their tracks, but we proved something. They could create spectacle, but so too could we.

I was fortunate, in that restless season of Trumpian sturm und drang, to receive a front row seat for a nation of left-wingers getting riled up in all sorts of wonderful ways. I’d hear from activists I’d once trained about how meetings that would typically attract a handful of usual suspects now necessitated far larger venues. Writers and speakers who were publicly identifiable as organizers or rabble rousers found inboxes suddenly stuffed to the brim with entreaties. This was true even for those of us with relatively modest platforms. “I don’t know how I found you,” Californians, South Carolinians, and Maineers alike would write me, “but I’ve got a group, and we’re trying to figure out what to do.” I’d offer a class, and within a day it would be larger than any I had taught in the previous five years. 

I loathed the cause of this sudden wave of activation, but it would have been far more heartbreaking if there was no collective clamoring at all. So I was grateful for the requests, though I struggled to respond to all of them. I was more than happy to add more capacity to my trainings. I loved getting to know so many of you for the first time. What a gift it was (and is) to grieve and hope and care together.

Even when our collective energy was growing, though, I knew that the spark would fade. That’s not cynicism speaking, just experience. I’m not the oldest nor wisest activist on the block, but I’m far enough into middle age to have learned a thing or two about seasons. Nobody, not even a ketamine-fueled apartheid billionaire, operates at the same frenzied rate of action and reaction in perpetuity. Many of us expected, consciously or not, that the first few months of the Trump administration would give way to something different– still disruptive, but more banality of evil than arena rock bombast. And we expected, in turn, that as our opponents did a better job of hiding their cards, we too would fall into old patterns of distraction and entropy.

So we are here now, still hungover from the first few months, with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it haze of summer on the horizon. There are fewer breaking news alerts about this or that unprecedented action. Many of Trump’s most brazen moves are being held up in court. True or not, we are continually reassured that Musk has ridden off into the private sector sunset. 

There is still plenty of uniquely Trumpian bad behavior, of course– corruption and threats and a bizarre volume of discourse about white genocide– but mostly the administration has eased into more classically conservative means of terrorizing the American people. Deportations continue, but are less likely to be televised. Project 2025 true believers are running the agencies, still undoing the last remnants of the New Deal and Great Society, just more quietly. And on Capitol Hill, a budget of death is following the slow parliamentary journey between houses. Soon, I fear, we will be poorer and sicker, but not because of an Elon Musk temper tantrum. The deed will be done with decorum, with Roberts Rule of Order, with an orderly roll call. “I’m just a bill, up on Capitol Hill, taking away your right to live…”

As our opponents have grown stealthier, many of us have grown wearier (or at least less active). There hasn’t, as of yet, been a new wave of mass protests. Across the country, I’m hearing about meetings growing sparser again. People are still upset, but talking a bit more about flight and a big less about fight.

I’m worried about this moment, much more so than I was a few months ago. I know full well that there are still steadfast agitators holding the line. No doubt some of you are still out there doing your best– lighting up switchboards and volunteering for ICE watches and fundraising for any number of urgent human needs. But I also know what happens when a wave of terrible news becomes less spectacular with time. It isn’t that we lose our awareness of tragedy. It’s just that the voice that says “I should do something” becomes drowned out by the voices that say “ I’m so busy” and “the risks of action are too high” and “will it really make a difference?”

I am worried because we (and I mean we here, myself included) have metabolized so much over the past five years that very well could have driven us to a permanent station at the barricades. Robber baron capitalism, growing more rapacious by the day. America’s continuing war on Black and Native Americans (you no doubt noticed the five year anniversary and all the headlines that said “has anything changed?”). A world on fire (which we notice in spurts, when the blazes are literally raging in a place we recognize). A pandemic that has and continues to claim so many lives. Gaza. Oh God, Gaza (to say nothing of all the other war zones where the weapons say “Made in the U.S.A.”) . And now all this, the various misdeeds of Trump and company.

If this sounds like it is leading towards a “do something, damnit!” excoriation, I assure you it’s not. If only this were a problem that could be solved through holier-than-thou scolding. Just imagine all the progress we would have made.

The reality is that none of us can live in a constant state of action and agitation. Our lives were too precarious long before we were implicitly charged with also single-handedly standing against war, diseases, fascism and all of society’s ills. Those counterpoints I listed above (our busyness, our fear, our sense of futility)? You’re not wrong for feeling all of them. They’re all rooted in truth. For many of you, the risks are real, the tradeoffs are tremendous, the barriers aren’t just excuses. 

So where does that leave us? Is resistance futile? And if not futile, at least unsustainable?

I dropped a phrase in passing a few paragraphs ago. You’re familiar, I’m sure. “The banality of evil.” Thank you Hannah Arendt. I wish it didn’t remain instructive, but here we are. I’ve never doubted how the most horrific violence can be undertaken by societies where the majority of us are doing our jobs and going with the flow. I just wish I wasn’t getting so much more present tense evidence to support the hypothesis.

But increasingly, I’ve come to believe in its corollary as well. I’m talking about the banality of effective resistance. More often than not, revolutions and social movements succeed not because most people thought of themselves as revolutionaries who dropped everything for the cause. It’s because normal people were welcomed into social networks and webs of connection that met them where they were and then called them to action. That’s why, in South Africa, a mass domestic consumer boycott was more successful than an armed guerrilla war in bringing down apartheid (the former was able to attract more participants, from a broader cross section of Black South Africa, who could keep up their resistance longer). It’s also why, in revolutions across the globe, the key to success was robust participation in collective organizations— unions, youth leagues, allied religious groups, etc.— before mass street action began.

With apologies for using an instructive but over-used example, the reason why the Mongtomery bus boycott worked wasn’t because the Montgomery Improvement Association inspired every Black Montgomerian to drop everything in their lives for the movement. It asked them to do one specific hard thing, every single day, and then made it easier for them to do so (much of the MIA’s daily work was in organizing taxi and carpool services so that boycotters could still get to work and school). Likewise, the most successful union actions succeed because, long before a strike is called, the union arrange for as many supportive pillars as possible (a robust strike fund, a wellspring of formal and informal community support, safety precautions, etc.). Successful organizers build communities first, agitative hubs second.

If we want to carry on, together, in both the loud and quiet seasons, we can’t scold each other for a lack of commitment or too-short attention spans. Yes, it is a privilege to turn away, but sustainable resistance isn’t any less difficult for those who bear the brunt of oppressive hierarchies. The reason why you might notice me returning to the gospel of community building week-in, week-out is that the only way we figure out how to make it easier to keep going (with our feet, with our hearts, with our attention) is if we are connected deeply enough to a finite group to know how to help them carry on. I want us to be able to tell our group chat or our softball buddies or our churches, mosques and synagogues “hey, let’s talk about what action we can take, and how we can make it easier to take it?” and actually be heard, because you as a messenger are trusted and your peers, as message recipients, already feel seen and heard.

Returning to this particular cruel administration, I have no doubt they are counting on us to not have a long fight in us. They hope we burn out and fade away. And to be fair, they have plenty of evidence that we’ll do exactly that. 

We can prove them wrong, though. We can be ready to face evil in its most banal and spectacular forms. But not if we merely hector and berate each other’s inaction. If you, like me, wish that somebody were doing something more (about any number of issues), I’d direct the question first back at you: to whom are you connected, and how are you all making the next right thing easier for all? 

Your next potluck won’t change the world, but a dozen potlucks from now, I have a sense that you’ll have created something. An opening. A new possibility. A space for a question.

“Hey, I really love getting together with you all every week. If it’s all right, I need your help. I’m really angry and sad and hopeless right now, and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it. Can we talk about that?”

Carpool ledger, Montgomery Bus Boycott

End notes:

1. That budget of death? It’s not law yet, which means there’s still work to do.

2. And also, who’s to say that we don’t have a few more big street protests in us?

3. I promise that I didn’t write this essay as a tie-in with the new Barnraisers Project cohorts (a support group, of sorts, for people trying to keep community spaces going). But yes, I am offering some cohorts that you might enjoy, and you can learn all about them here. Registration opens later today, Wednesday May 28th (if it’s not open when you read this, just check back in a few hours). There are a few different elements this time around (including an enrollment cap) so please read the expectations document before registering. The good news? As always, they’re free, virtual, and a lovely time (well, I hope that last one is true).

4. A super earnest request: In the scale of world horrors, the sustainability of this newsletter/Barnraisers (or any tiny nonprofit effort) is a small potatoes concern. With that said, one tiny ripple of the ebbs and flow of our political attention is that it’s really hard to plan a sustainable living in this line of work. There are certain moments (like Trump’s election) where there’s a temporary flood of new donations and subscriptions, but that’s inevitably followed by a wave of cancellations and non-renewals (very understandable, by the way: for many of us, contributing once is all we can manage, but last week was a tough one for donations— particularly one large donation- coming to an end). That’s to say, my ability to do this work gets a lot easier the more I can trust that I’ll have a relatively stable income (my goal, for my family’s financial sake, is to make as much as I would if I left this job to be a public school teacher or a mail carrier, the two jobs I’d most likely take if I can no longer keep this work up). Are you in a place where you could chip in to sustain this space? If so, thank you (and I’ll work hard to make doing so non-overwhelming but worth your while). Are you struggling yourself? Well then know that I’m just glad you’re here (and if I can help you in any way, let me know).

3. Speaking of housekeeping: Coming this summer, look forward to another (occasional) White Pages movie series. More details coming soon, but last week paid subscribers got a sneak peek.

4. This week’s “Musk and Trump don’t care about you” sticker in the wild: A Walmart in Hilo, Hawaii! Apparently, this particular check out desk is sticker central in Hilo. Before this beauty, there was a “Jesus loves you” one up there. My theology isn’t perfect, but I think if Jesus were ever to make his way to the Hilo Wal-Mart electronics section (what size TV would Jesus buy?), he too would understand the urgency of the situation.