Ever since Trump got back into office, I’ve been refusing to engage. Not as a protest or a position, but because I didn’t have the energy to pour the rest of my life into another national crisis. I stopped watching the news. I stopped reading headlines. I stopped talking politics. I told myself it was self-preservation.
I’ve lived through enough political cycles to recognize the pattern: attention turns into exhaustion, exhaustion turns into despair. I’ve seen how quickly a constant state of alarm can hollow people out. So I stepped back, believing that distance might be the only way to stay intact.
American history has always had low points — some worse than this — and we’ve survived ugliness before. I told myself this was another swing of the pendulum: painful, destabilizing, but not worth sacrificing what remained of my sanity. That belief made my withdrawal feel reasonable. Even responsible.
Then ICE killed Renée Nicole Good, and suddenly this wasn’t abstract or distant anymore. It was local. Personal. On our streets. And still, I hesitated. Since then, Alex Pretti has also been killed, and the weight of it has only grown.
In response, I did what seemed necessary. I re-engaged. I watched the news again. I talked with friends. I paid attention. And what I began to notice was less about answers than observation.
What I see around me now is shock — and alongside it, a quiet surge of care. Artists, neighbors, friends — thoughtful people — seem stunned, still trying to understand how we arrived here, in a country that no longer resembles the one they thought they were living in. Some are making things. Some are organizing. Many are quietly bringing food to people afraid to leave their homes, checking on elders, reaching out to people they didn’t know before this moment. Almost everyone I know is wrestling with depression, but what I see isn’t disengagement. It’s people trying to stay human, trying to find solid ground while the ground is still shifting.
Watching all of this, I had to find a way to stay open myself. For me, that often means reading — not the news, but books that help me slow down and resist seeing enemies everywhere. Reading has long been how I cope when I don’t fully understand what’s happening. It doesn’t make the fear disappear, but it reminds me to stay tolerant, to listen longer, and to resist the urge to retreat into certainty.
Long before this moment, I explored those ideas through an installation called Plato’s Cave, trying to understand how fragile shared reality really is. I didn’t expect those questions to feel this present again.
When Good was killed, I was in the middle of reading George Packer’s novel The Emergency. Headlines from Minneapolis kept bleeding into the pages, until it was hard to tell where the book ended and real life began. What unsettled me wasn’t the novel’s bleakness, but its accuracy. Collapse doesn’t arrive as one dramatic event. It seeps in through a thousand small withdrawals. People disengage. People retreat. Shared reality thins until fear takes over and we revert to our most basic survival instincts.
After reading The Emergency, I went looking for ways to understand how we arrived here. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind helped me think about how quickly “us” and “them” take hold, and how easily listening breaks down. It didn’t make this moment easier, but it helped me stay tolerant — and that felt like a form of courage in itself.
What frightens me now isn’t anger. It’s exhaustion.
Fear, I’ve come to believe, is not a personal failing. It’s a reasonable response to a moment that feels genuinely unsafe and unfamiliar. Many of us are being asked to hold emotions — anxiety, grief, disbelief — that we’ve never had to hold all at once, in a world we thought was more stable than this.
And this feels important to say plainly: it has to be okay to be afraid.
More about the installation and its origins can be found here: website or memoir.
Courage doesn’t come in one approved size. For some, it looks like marching. For others, it looks like making art. For others, it looks like feeding people, opening doors, keeping spaces alive where conversation can still happen. For some, courage right now may simply be refusing to become cruel or numb.
For me, engagement now means remaining awake inside this moment — writing this essay, signing my name, and choosing attention over retreat.
If you’re feeling unsteady, you’re not alone. If you don’t recognize the world you’re living in, that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you — it means the world has changed.
We will each find our own level of courage. And for now, that may be enough.
Written by: Remo Campopiano
YOUR TURN
I’ve shared how I’m trying to stay awake and human inside this moment.
I’m listening — as one artist to another.
What are you thinking right now?
If you’re waiting to feel ready, you may be waiting a long time. It’s okay to start imperfectly. Comments are held in a moderation queue to keep this space constructive and non-violent. If you ask, we will not publish your identity.
Thanks Remo for this article. I am sure it mirrors and brings comfort to so many who are overwhelmed by those recent events. It may even help them be kinder to themselves about what flavor of objection and protest they may be capable of. It IS a very fearful time.
Hi, Remo ≈ If I had as much money as Oprah right now, I’d buy myself another planet, move right in and stare at earth from afar, at least until the 2026 midterms.
THEN if the MAGAloids retain their governing majority because voters were boobs on November 3…well, if so, at that time I will open a book store on my new planet, filling the chairs by the fire with US political migrants who couldn’t get into Canada or Mexico. We might even choose democratically to name it after our inspiration.
“Welcome to Planet Oprah.” We pioneers—we “oprahlings”—wish earth and its -lings well •!sincerely!• and with fond memories. Yet farewell. On November 4, 2026 in America, our great experiment launched in 1776—as Benj. Franklin deemed it, “A democracy you could count on”—civic evolution (living together and cooperation has fled online); the national vibe (how we feel about stuff generally, the “right to be happy”); and human self-management (how each person behaves, toward others and themselves)…well, our scientists tell us they, all those precious things, (sigh) seemed to have reached apparent dead ends. Really. Did you see how those idiots voted? We’re going to have to chug down 2 more years of bizzaro actions of the
Here’s real news from the back porch network. My best friends here in town are Trumpers. Fabulously caring people. Industrious. Goofy. Warm. Capable. Curious. We have looooong, honest, revealing talks. And I do swear they want pretty much everything I want—their flaming liberal friend. “Happiness” sums it up.
For them, Trump is simply a means to an end. We hate him. But they don’t love him.
They see him clearly and don’t care about that because these are mature adults and they’ve seen a lot over the years. So he’s a jerk? We’re all jerks sometimes. He’s a RICH jerk, so what do you expect? Of course: horseplay, scandal, and charity events. He seems to get a few things done. They don’t forgive him his sins so much as think, “He can still do the job he promised.”
They do not follow politics closely. They react to it if something changes in their lives.
He DID close the southern border. And he tut-tuts bloated organizations (no complaints; we’ve all known those). Look, you have orange juice for breakfast; TrUmp fires people for breakfast … like your OJ, it’s good for his health, he became presidential-famous on a reality show where he fires people.
Here’s the big secret: TrUmp is their only choice because [drum roll] they seriously can’t imagine voting for ANY proposed Democrat. For my best friends in town, the Dems brand is completely shot. I think they saw Clinton as a disappointment, Obama as slick but not dangerous, Biden as a bad joke.
The Dems rule my state with a significant majority, which makes them responsible in the average citizen’s mind for every f•ed-up thing that goes wrong locally. My TrUmper best friends up the street in my rural town, they consider Democrats the biggest ninnies in Washington. And the biggest sissies in Washington (no offense to the Sissy Lobby), incapable of growing a pair of balls. ALSO: Democrats are whiners. Self-hating whiners, inventors of, heavy investors in the KKK: Kancel Kulture Klan. You know why DC Dems cannot be a marching band? They will not turn right. The Dems need a TrUmper-esque prez candidate (MINUS all the assholisms he brings to daily life in 2026 America but KEEPING his energy, his drive, his willingness and desire to be different and entertaining).
¶ …In their minds, the Republicans stand for less bureaucracy (despite the moronically mismanaged down-sizing of fed. gov’t), a fairer standard of living (promises, minority-white pop.s discover the value of equal rights, tariffs, the Fed, and a stagnating, discouraged middle-class “settling for” instead of dreaming big; we live in an age of uncertainty and that’s very stressful; life-event questions like “do I go to college or not?” ≈ OMG); that’s the stuff my friends want handled with some dispatch and they do NOT trust the Dems to do anything fast enough or well enough.
¶ …Public education is a chief worry for my TrUmplets. In our town, about 65% of our annual tax dollar goes to public schools. TrUmper #1: She’s a teacher beloved in a tough, urban, white-minority high school. She puts her heart and shocking gobs of creativity into so many kids; adopts 1 or 2 annually big time to help them have a successful adult life and has done that for 25 years, and those kids come back, only now their professors, entrepreneurs, military officers. And yet despite her exposure to every problem in public education on a daily schedule, she has voted for President Pathetic (whom I consider a near-extinction-size asteroid which struck the White House + international law and order; we’ll be waiting years for that debris to settle on our economy) 3 times, as no reasonable person should, my heart tells me.
Or so goes Dems arrogance. These are thoughtful, experienced, responsible adults, way better at being a good neighbor and good citizen than I am. And they pump TrUmp all the way. The Democrat Party sux so badly at messaging compared to the GOP. Offend no one except maybe that single, little, crushed and convicted serial killer in the corner; you can insult and offend her all your want. But nobody else. Stay tough, sound sane. As opposed to…. ¶ There are no policy goals for the midterms EXCEPT win.
Win win win win win win win win win • to do that, you must know your audience
Do Dems know their audience? They THINK they do.
I have to admit, Tom, the first time I read your piece it felt like a late-night rant and I almost dismissed it. But then I went back and read it the way you were asking us to read the people in your life — slowly, and with some good faith. That changed the whole thing for me. I could see you weren’t trying to excuse anything so much as describe real, flesh-and-blood people you care about, and how they end up making the choices they make.
It actually fits with this book I’m reading (again), The Righteous Mind. The big takeaway for me isn’t theory — it’s just the reminder that most people think they’re being reasonable, even when I can’t fathom their conclusions. Your stories about your friends helped me feel that in a more human way. Not headlines, not slogans — just neighbors, with histories and worries and blind spots like the rest of us.
I keep thinking that if we’re going to get through this stretch of history, it won’t be by escaping to some imaginary safe place or sharpening our put-downs, but by staying in conversations like the ones you’re having on those back porches. At our best, the Minnesota instinct is to pull together when things get hard, not drift farther apart. I’d rather lean into that — messy, imperfect, human — than give up on each other and fly off to Oprah planet.
Thanks Remo for being a catalyst in this timely and important conversation. Below is an excerpt from my recent Social Media post I feel goes along with this conversation:
I want to recognize the pain, grief, sadness of the moment; the fear, anger and restlessness; the angst, confusion and poignancy of this at once rare, and powerful moment. It is my bias that ALL these feelings have a place at the table of the heart. They all perform some service — can we listen with interest, with out impulse fed reactivity? I want to honor the heart’s desire to understand, to act, to DO something. Yet I aspire to act skillfully, with wisdom and compassion. I often fail, but find this to be at the heart of my practice of being an aware, compassionate human being.
At first I wanted to preface this sharing by saying that this is not about taking sides, even though I definitely have my leanings. Yet, I counsel myself: “I don’t want to throw anyone out of my heart.” But, as I write this, I realize, I definitely do want to take sides, not the side armed and fortified with ideology, rather wanting to side with wisdom and kindness. It is hard being a human being. I realize it does not help me to hurt you — even in the justified battles I imagine in fantasy. I’m not saying the warrior should be squelched, in fact that aspect holds an important position. Importantly, I do want to acknowledge the communities that support me: my family, friends, neighbors and nature. And, I seek, with discrimination, to support and expand my community — to acknowledge that even those that trigger my reactivity, those that evoke aversion — are inextricably part of our collective human (and other than human) community. In the one great universal community, all are contained, and connected, in can not be otherwise. I may not be able to effect great change in an outwardly tangible way, but I can nurture this wish: may we all be safe and protected; may we all be healthy and happy; may we live our lives with ease of being; may we acknowledge our connectedness and creatively collaborate in this great experiment we label as life.
Richard, thank you for this — I really feel the sincerity and care behind what you wrote. Even if some of the language leans more inward than I usually go, the heart of it lands with me: trying to stay open, not let pain harden us, and remembering we’re still connected even when we’re triggered. That feels especially important right now. I keep wondering how we carry that kind of inner intention into the outer world we actually share. As artists, what can we do — in our work, our spaces, our conversations — that helps people feel more human with each other instead of more dug in?
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