The grief I carry isn’t just personal; it has been shaped by years of sitting with survivors of this kind of trauma. When we dismiss their warnings, telling ourselves it can’t happen here, we fall into the very delusion that makes us vulnerable.
I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single most consistent policy, has been to foment antisemitism.
When I look at the reactions of us Germans to the Hamas massacre, I think I recognize a repetition of the structure so familiar to me from the process of coming to terms with the Nazi era. Feelings are not wanted.
It seems possible that this dulling may contribute to my current state of political fecklessness: while before I felt able to fight, now, with the situation seeming so much worse than in 2016, there are times I wish it would all just go away. I am used to being at least externally “okay,” even when many others are not. Whether rising above or cowering in fear, I lose my capacity to act from a grounded center.
Roy Cohn brought his style of aggressive attacks to our campus. I too often saw him, an unattractive, thin man, agitated and angry, standing on a platform, holding a megaphone, giving speeches to my fellow students in the quad, yelling at the top of his lungs, “The red sea of Communism is spreading over us all!” as he grimaced and pointed below to the crowd of booing students. As one of the few girls in this crowd, I stood among them, appalled, but silent and terrified.
… While the Declaration cannot tell us how to respond to tyranny in our time, it can perhaps encourage us as the actions of the Trump administration become ever more lawless and the danger in the nation mounts.
I realize now that I am composed of the full inventory of the slights and dehumanizing aspects of racism I have known. But why did this story return so suddenly? Was it because many people were talking about racism and anti-Semitism? Why did this early event cause so much anguish and trauma in me thirty-five years after it happened? Was it because all nuns represented a kind of goodness in my six-year-old mind, a goodness that was shattered in an instant?
Matt was crazy, or that’s what some people said. Once, in the midst of a panicked and angry moment, he sat down right in the middle of Braddock Avenue and refused to move. Drivers honked in confusion and yelled out their windows for him to get the hell out of the road, but he wasn’t going anywhere and certainly not for them, no matter how angry or leering or even genuinely concerned they might have been… These things happened with Matt, sometimes.
For 27 years it has been a local tradition. It is our little Sturgis. The town becomes unrecognizable but in a way that feels like the “rebellious, no rules, party of the century is here to stay” feeling. … And year after year I didn’t notice the subtle changes. It wasn’t until this year that I felt the pivot point of a paradigm shift. The realization of what I was seeing struck me with such a force that I had to stand frozen in the middle of a sea of bodies and go inward to try to reclaim my composure, emotions, and balance.
What I found particularly powerful was the sense of empowerment AI creation gave me. Suddenly, I could produce sophisticated visual art, compose music, or generate text that previously would have required years of technical training. This empowerment had a liberating effect on my psychoanalytic process, allowing me to externalize complex emotional states more rapidly and in more varied forms
For me, the art of being an analyst involves the art of writing—the two are inseparable, each opens the door to the other. Writing is like dreaming in that it is a medium in which I think and talk to myself in ways that I cannot do in any other form. Also, like dreaming, it keeps me alive in my work as a psychoanalyst, for I find that I have to be creating something of my own (to come more fully into being myself) as I am immersed in trying to help a patient engage in creating something unique of his or her own (in coming more fully into being).
We allow the future to come at us in tiny doses. Do we want to follow the news? Can we hold on to our internal compasses? Will they spin out of control? Is it even possible to set a course? My friend says, “I may not live to see us regain the changes we fought for. It is humbling.” When the cold afternoon sun lights up the floors, we sweep up glinting sand in a desultory way. No need to have things perfectly clean.
I’m in my own process of trying to find my way through this. My earlier attempts at activism were hampered by how I related to my own identity, which went something like this: I’m here as a white person to reckon with the harms that white people have done, but if whiteness is bad, how could I possibly do anything good?
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse, even lethal. Each is a “pathology of perpetration” that normalizes the physical and ecological but also the systematic and psychic violence that goes hand in hand with climate breakdown.
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse, even lethal. Each is a “pathology of perpetration” that normalizes the physical and ecological but also the systematic and psychic violence that goes hand in hand with climate breakdown.
The screen reflected back not just environmental catastrophe but my own complicity in the systems that perpetuate it. My car keys sat heavy in my pocket. The plastic water bottle on my desk suddenly felt like an accusation. In that moment of recognition, I understood something essential about hatred’s dual nature—how it can both separate us from and bind us to the very things we claim to despise.
Having ambition and drive is the usual thing to have in Aleppo. My name is Ammar and I am part of this culture.
It’s when you leave your inner self and move into the unknown; it’s when you are forced to flee from your awareness, from your assets, from yourself, to move as a physical creature and start to find any place or shelter. Literally, you are not aware enough to ask yourself, “What is this? Is this real, or am I watching a terrifying movie? Am I awake?”
I have not had the luxury to mourn fully, to scream, to collapse under the weight of it all. Every time I feel the pull to surrender, to collapse under the immense weight of my grief and exhaustion, I remind myself of all those who have anchored their strength within me. They planted the stakes of their resilience within my ribs.
This collapse of the boundary between inside and outside, which induces in the spectator a sense of profound spatial disorientation, is paradigmatic of the collapse of the parameters that sustain a basic sense of reality in experiences of catastrophe. In war, this collapse becomes utterly literal: the actual destruction brought upon familiar spaces, both private and public, material and spiritual, bodily and mental, renders the distinction between “inside” and “outside” obsolete.