Everything you care about is under attack but you still need to function -- Dan Froomkin

[erronis]

https://www.headsupnews.org/p/everything-you-care-about-is-under

“How are you doing?”

These days, what used to be a casual greeting can seem like an existential question -- something more like: “So, how are you personally handling the extraordinary cognitive dissonance of the moment?”

Because on the one hand, Donald Trump is doing catastrophic damage to our country and our democracy and the world every single day. It’s awful.

But on the other hand, life goes on -- for most of us, pretty much the same as usual. The job still needs to get done. The errands still need to get run.

I was quite taken by an essay in the Guardian the other day, by writer Adrienne Matei, in which she uses the word “hypernormalization” to describe “the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.” She explains:

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

One possible response is to just shut down:

Confronting systemic collapse can be so disorienting, overwhelming and even humiliating, that many tune it out or find themselves in a state of freeze.

But here’s the little bit of good news:

Experts say action can break the spell. “Being active politically, in whatever way, I think helps reduce apocalyptic gloom,” says Betsy Hartmann, an activist, scholar and author of The America Syndrome, which explores the importance of resisting apocalyptic thinking.

And just doing it online doesn’t count, apparently:

“It’s easy to feel like: ‘Oh, I’m in community because I’m on TikTok,’” she says. But genuine community is about “getting outside and talking to your neighbor and knowing that there’s someone out there that can help you if something really bad goes down,” she says.

“You’re actually out there talking to people, working with people and realizing there are so many good people in the world, too, and maybe feeling less isolated than before,” says Hartmann.

. . .

Much, much more. Please read.