Waiting for The Death of a Dictator

Or something else?

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The news has gotten… tedious.

Did you hear?

Donald Trump is dead (according to rumors). Oh, wait. There he is, at a golf course. What a surprise. There was another shooting. This country experienced record heat. That country experienced record floods. Nobody knows why. The president isn’t trying to take over the country, but it sure feels that way. Don’t look now, but here comes another big ugly bill.

Politicians are fighting hard for us, except when they’re buying stock in the tech companies drying up our rivers and using the last bit of resources to give us some of the worst art ever made, created by a bunch of tech bros who think they’re Picasso because they made an anime girl take off her top.

Have you heard about this week’s special? The Epstein files are going to derail Trump’s presidency. Wait, hang on. That’s over. This week, we’re talking about Ashli Babbitt. What’s on tap for next week? We don’t know, but it’s gonna be juicy. It won’t have anything to do with your actual life. The threats you’re navigating don’t matter until they become politically expedient.

Now for the monotonous montage of calls to action. Contact your representatives, even if they’re Tom Cotton. Hit the streets. Organize. Vote. Uh, what else? Have meaningful conversations. Go out and resist.

Everything is going to be fine.

You know, sometimes you have to take a break from all this. Not because it’s too depressing, but because human behavior fills you with so much contempt for humanity, you find it hard to function.

What then?

When you read about news fatigue, a lot of it focuses on the wrong problem. They talk about mental health. They talk about uncertainty and stress. But what happens when the news just gets, well, repetitive? What if you’re not feeling stress or uncertainty anymore? What if you know what’s going to happen?

Here’s the thing:

It’s all predictable. Nobody in the Trump administration has been secretive about their plans. They literally published them all in a giant manual. They don’t try to hide anything. They just shrug and lie. They tell you what they’re going to do. Then they do it, and the world spends weeks acting surprised.

Then they move on.

This weekend has made one thing extremely clear. Most people, even the ones “on our side” don’t actually want to do anything. They want to sit around and gossip about the health of a man in his late 70s who will be dead soon, regardless of whether that’s today or a few years from now.

But Donald Trump’s death has ceased to be meaningful. It might’ve helped back in 2020. Now? It doesn’t matter. The billionaires and their long list of thinktanks have gotten everything they need from him.

At every single turn, the public and their media have lagged behind reality a good five or ten years. For what it’s worth, the time to pray for the death of dictators was five years ago. The time to pay attention to the news was five years ago. The time to start building community was five years ago, or ten years ago.

Some of us have been doing this for even longer than five or ten years. It’s been twenty years. It’s been thirty.

It’s all to say…

I’m no longer soothed by thoughts of Trump’s death or impending demise. In the eyes of his betters, he has fulfilled his mission. He’ll die a free man and a second-term president. And yet, somehow we still have journalists running around telling us how doomed he is. Seriously, gimme a break.

I think I finally know why so many people out there have been waiting for Trump to die for ten years. It’s not because it’ll fix the world.

It’s so they can get back to brunch.

With someone like Trump in office, they have to pay attention, at least long enough to read a few articles and post their thoughts online. That’s the extent of their engagement. And it wears them out. After all, we’re talking about the ones who consider the smallest inconveniences an onerous burden.

This is what some of us need to step away from, not reality, but the constant deluge of outrage spiced with hopium that keeps tens of millions of Americans glued to their phones, posting political memes.

It’s the pretense of caring.

That doesn’t mean you should stop paying attention. I’m still reading climate science. I’m still reading articles about things that matter. But it’s time to stop feeling bad because you don’t know the latest evil thing the Trump administration did. They do too many evil things for every single person to keep track of. That’s the point. That’s their plan. And I hate to tell you this, but…

It’s working.

Your brain can only handle so much, and that’s not an excuse to bliss out and stop caring about all of it. But you probably have as much on your plate as you can handle. Odds are, you’re still dealing with something evil the MAGA goons did back in March. That didn’t just go away, even if the news cycle moved on. It happened. It hurt someone. That someone might be you.

There’s things my family is still doing that the news hasn’t touched in years. It takes up a lot of our bandwidth. For millions out there, it’s a life or death situation. Because we’re still dealing with those problems, we don’t have the capacity to take on the latest batch of super sexy crises and score virtue points with the larger internet. We’re just quietly soldiering through.

You might feel the same way.

The internet has a way of making you feel like the only kind of activism and resistance has to be loud and aggressive. As I learned at my old job, sometimes the most important thing you can do is walk a form around yourself and get signatures on pieces of paper. It’s to obsess over formatting guidelines. Often, the best thing you can do for someone is also the most thankless.

It’s almost invisible.

There’s no shame in taking care of your own. Your responsibilities might not overlap much with the latest outrage chum. Maybe you’re working two full-time jobs to support family members who go out and protest. Should you feel guilty for not being there with them, or is the right place for you to be on the couch resting, so you can continue to work those jobs?

Your priorities don’t have to align perfectly with what Rachel Maddow or Brian Tyler Cohen say you should care about today. Maybe you’re still focused on something they talked about weeks or even years ago.

The most important things aren’t usually on the front page.

They’re in front of you.