No crown for a clown
Nº 040
I am at the gallery, holding space, wearing a “Make Orwell Fiction Again” hat, which, at this point, feels less like a joke than a basic statement of situational awareness.
The thing I keep coming back to is how much damage Trump has done not just to policy, which is obvious, but to the emotional weather of the country. He has made America feel cruel. Petty. Meaner than it should be. More suspicious of itself. More performative in all the worst ways. He has made this place feel like somewhere people are afraid of, and increasingly, somewhere people do not even like. You can feel it economically, too. People are not coming here the way they used to. Not even for vacation. The country has become a billboard for instability and grievance.
And here we are with a president who plainly looks unwell, drifting further into war with Iran for reasons nobody can explain in a sentence that does not collapse under its own bullshit, while the economy keeps sagging and gas prices keep climbing. What the fuck are we doing? At what point does the spectacle stop being entertainment and start reading as the obvious failure that it is? When do people wake up and admit that cruelty is not governance, chaos is not strength, and wrecking institutions is not leadership?
If you want to see people who still understand what democracy is supposed to mean, go to the No Kings rally today. That is where the actual patriots are. Not the ones wrapping themselves in flags while cheering on authoritarian nonsense. Not the ones confusing domination with love of country. The real ones are the people showing up peacefully in public, refusing the lie, refusing the fear, refusing the idea that democracy is something we can casually hand over to the loudest bully in the room.
Peace is protest. Holding space is protest. Standing in a small town and refusing to let public life rot into cynicism is protest. And community resilience is protest too, maybe the most important kind. In a place like this, that means mutual aid. Checking on each other. Feeding people. Showing up. Making room for them, especially the ones that power would rather isolate or erase. It means building enough local trust that when national politics turns openly hostile, the community has some muscle memory for care.
Small communities do not survive on slogans. They survive on relationships. On who brings soup, who shares information, who opens the room, who stays late, who notices who is missing, who says no, we are not doing cruelty here. That is resilience. Not rugged individualism. Not macho nonsense. Interdependence. Real neighbors. A place where people know they are not facing the madness alone.
That is what I am thinking about today while I sit here at the gallery. If the federal government is committed to vandalizing democracy, then the rest of us had better get serious about practicing it close to home. Not abstractly. Not as branding. In person. In rooms. In towns. In the daily habit of showing up.
cp out.
Amen!!!!! This why I am helping with our local candidate forum events, to ensure that we ask good questions of the elected officials close to home. Building that democracy muscle. Thank you for your beautiful writing, Chris.