I landed at SFO yesterday after three weeks abroad. I told myself I'd catch up on the news when I got back, so I did. I spent most of the day on the couch, scrolling through everything I'd missed.
As I'm sure you've seen, on January 7th, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot a 37-year-old mother named Renee Good in Minneapolis. She had just dropped her kid off at school. Ross's bodycam footage shows him circling her car, then firing three shots into her face as her wife watched.
By the time I was reading about it, the President had already declared she "viciously ran him over." The video shows her wheels turning away from Ross when he fired. Six DOJ prosecutors have since resigned in protest. The Justice Department opened an investigation into Good's ties to activist groups. A GoFundMe for the agent who killed her has raised $375,000.
I felt the familiar heat rise in my chest. I composed arguments against people I'll never meet. Then I fell asleep.
I have come to believe there is no breaking point with this administration. There is no line they will cross that finally triggers the response we keep waiting for. Denaturalization quotas. Calls for executing Democratic senators. Federal agents raiding schools and churches. Thirty-two dead in immigration detention this year. Courts defied, then attacked.
Each headline carried the implicit promise that this one might be different.
The mother shot in her car wasn't the line either. I've stopped waiting. The line doesn't exist.
I know people are fighting. Millions are protesting, lawyers are filing emergency motions at 2am, organizers knocking on doors in districts they'll probably lose. The outrage is real, and I don't mean to diminish those efforts.
But I watch all of it with a growing dread that none of it is sufficient.
The protests get covered, then absorbed. The lawsuits get filed, then ignored. The resignations get noted, then forgotten. We're screaming into a machine that converts dissent into content and content into nothing.
The people who could end this tomorrow are Republican legislators. They respond to one thing: the threat of losing their seats. They are immune to moral appeals, legal arguments, and public shame. They'll move when their constituents decide that loyalty to this administration costs more than it's worth.
Which means the only people who can stop this are the ones who voted for it.
I don't know how to reach them. I don't know what breaks through. But I know that tragedy and cruelty alone are insufficient. COVID killed over a million Americans and the mortality rate didn't produce the backlash. Closed gyms and cancelled brunches did. Vietnam didn't end because the body count became unbearable. It ended when the draft reached middle-class living rooms and the machinery of daily life started to wobble.
Americans respond to inconvenience. The system responds to interference with its operations.
If immigration enforcement interrupted Amazon's supply chain, Congress would act within a week. If federal agents accidentally took down Netflix for an afternoon, there'd be hearings by Friday. A mother gets shot in the face and we scroll past. The internet goes out for ten minutes and we're all on Twitter complaining.
For most of the people reading this, daily life hasn't changed at all under Trump's second administration. The horror is real, but it remains contained. Geographically, economically, racially. As long as it stays contained, nothing will force the people with power to act.
That continuity is the verdict.
It’s time we accept that the containment is the point.
The cruelty lands on bodies that most Americans will never encounter, in neighborhoods they'll never visit, affecting families whose suffering will never interrupt a single Prime delivery. The comfortable stay insulated from the costs.
My outrage is real, but it’s also free. I can post, donate, show up at a march, feel the catharsis of public anger, and return to a life completely untouched by violence and cruelty. Each day I go back to work as if the republic isn't burning is a day I've accepted the terms of containment.
I don't have a solution, only a diagnosis: we're waiting for a breaking point that will never come. The people who could break have already broken. The people who haven't have decided this is acceptable. The rest of us are left with a kind of helplessness that doesn't mean we've stopped caring, just that we've realized caring isn’t enough.
Renee Good's wife watched her die. Millions of us watched the footage and thought this might finally be a bridge too far. Tomorrow, most of us will go back to work, because we don't know what else to do.
The Civil Rights Movement didn't succeed because the violence finally became bad enough to matter. It succeeded because ordinary people found ways to make the violence everyone's problem. Montgomery's buses sat empty, Nashville's lunch counters lost revenue, and Birmingham's business district ground to a halt. They broke the containment.
The horror won't save us. It never has. The people who could stop this are comfortable, and comfortable people don't change until their comfort is threatened. The question is, what threatens it? What makes the horror their problem? What closes the distance between the violence and the people who have been allowed to ignore it?
I don't know what that looks like yet. But it’s time we stop waiting for a breaking point that will never come.
Up and to the right.