America Is In A Dangerous Moment

Since January 20, 2025, Americans have been rocked by massive firings of federal employees, departments and agencies have been turned upside down and the images of masked ICE agents acting like resurrected Gestapo members as they seize people on the streets and make them disappear.   Each day brings some new outrage by the Felon's regime and while the courts have blocked some of the dictatorial moves, one is nonetheless left shell shocked and grasping for some sense that life can still be "normal."  The end result can be complacency and the normalization of the abnormal and/or immoral. A piece in the New York Times by an author who has witnessed the death of other democracies looks at the phenomenon which has occurred in other countries as they slid towards dictatorship or autocracy.   The message is that Americans need to not fall into this trap and become complacent or, worse yet, complicit.   What we are witnessing is NOT normal and must not be accepted or normalized.  Here are column excerpts: 

Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power, I was shocked many times. I couldn’t sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships.

I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn’t breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Along the way there were many smaller, yet also catastrophic, milestones: the state takeovers of universities and media outlets, the series of legislative steps that outlawed L.G.B.T.Q. people, the branding of many journalists and activists as “foreign agents.” The state of shock would last a day or a week or a month, but time went on and the shocking event became a fact of our lives.

The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.

Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.

And now that has become familiar. I’ve reported on many wars, and I’ve seen how they come to feel routine — to the people living through them, the people reporting on them and the people reading about them.

Even Israel’s massacre in Gaza, which makes Russia’s warfare in Ukraine look restrained, can’t produce new headlines after more than 19 months of indiscriminate bombing and warfare by starvation. It is news when two Israeli Embassy employees are murdered in Washington, D.C. But when entire Palestinian families are killed, or when Palestinian children die of malnutrition, it’s just another day in Gaza. Nor is it news that the U.S. government is indifferent to war crimes committed by its allies.

In this country, too, fewer and fewer things can surprise us. Once you’ve absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around the Trump administration’s revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t entirely unexpected.

Once you’ve realized that the administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.

We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to what used to seem unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit — when someone gets released from detention (as the Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was a few weeks ago) or some particularly egregious proposal is withdrawn or blocked by the courts (as the ban on international students at Harvard has been, at least temporarily) — it’s easy to mistake it for proof that the dark times are ending.

But these comparatively small victories don’t alter the direction of our transformation — they don’t even slow it down measurably — even while they appeal to our deep need to normalize. They create the sense that there is more air to breathe and more room to act than there was yesterday.

And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.