Being Here When This Is Happening
"I'm not here, this isn't happening."
When Radiohead released that line in October 2000, it wasn't prophecy—it was tuning fork, vibrating at a frequency already present in the cultural atmosphere. Thom Yorke's dissociative mantra, his plea to simply not be present for whatever unbearable thing was unfolding, became the perfect vernacular for living in what came after.
After 9/11 and the towers falling on loop. After the wars that followed, the ones we watched on screens while going to work and paying bills. After the surveillance state assembled itself with bipartisan efficiency. After the financial collapse and the foreclosures and the bank bailouts. After the drone wars and the "signature strikes" killing wedding parties while we filed our taxes. After the militarization of police and the camps at the border and the rolling catastrophes that kept arriving with such regularity that cataloging them became its own form of exhaustion.
"I'm not here, this isn't happening" wasn't protest. It was survival mechanism—the minimum mantra required to stay functional while witnessing the gap between official narrative and lived reality grow too wide to bridge.
For two and a half decades, that dissociation worked. It kept us participating in systems we knew were breaking. It let us maintain the routines that gave structure to our days even as the larger architecture—moral, political, environmental—dissolved around us. We learned to hold contradictions without resolution, to be troubled without being activated, to witness horror with the sophisticated detachment that passed for consciousness.
At the Goodwill Bins—that chaotic temple of American disposability where you pay by the pound—Nancy found a copy of the Stroop Report wedged between a broken lamp and someone's abandoned college textbooks. Not a facsimile, but an actual postwar translation, the kind with that particular midcentury binding that suggests someone once thought it important enough to keep on a shelf. Jürgen Stroop's meticulous documentation of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation: daily progress reports, tallies of buildings searched, Jews killed or captured, photographs proving operational success. A middle manager's status update—on genocide.
"The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence."
The clinical satisfaction of mission accomplished, preserved in leather binding, now offered for sale by weight alongside someone's old cookware.
I kept it. Not as morbid decoration, but as reference manual—not for what happened, but for how. The tone. The procedures. The banal professionalism of people administering horror while thinking of themselves as competent problem-solvers doing difficult but necessary work.
It sits on my shelf now, a reminder of what the Rubicon crossing actually looks like: not dramatic speeches and marching armies, but ferry boats operated by people who see themselves as professionals. Daily reports. Proper documentation. Things proceeding according to plan.
I. The Mantra and Its Exhaustion
The liberal discourse institutionalized the dissociative posture. The New Yorker voice—measured concern, aesthetic complexity, the performance of being troubled—became the sound of educated people processing structural violence into topics for contemplation rather than intervention. Every crisis rendered as fascinating complexity, every injustice translated into twelve-thousand words of nuanced observation that somehow never quite demanded a response beyond continuing one's subscription.
I was never comfortable in that register, though I couldn't name why for years. The careful hedging, the syntactic balance, the gentle tempo of moral inquiry—it all felt alien, like watching people perform a ritual whose purpose I'd never been initiated into. I thought maybe I was just bad at being progressive, that I lacked the sophistication to appreciate complexity for its own sake.
It took me longer than it should have to realize: that voice wasn't complexity. It was dissociation with a graduate degree. The eloquent moderation, the refusal of certainty, the insistence on seeing all sides—these weren't intellectual virtues. They were the sound of people who believed reflection itself was a kind of safety, that understanding a problem was functionally equivalent to addressing it.
I couldn't stay there because the mantra had stopped working for me. Not because I'd become braver or more moral, but because I'd spent enough time in communities where dissociation wasn't an option—where the threat was immediate enough and the consequences real enough that floating face-down while repeating "this isn't happening" would get you killed.
My entry to American gun culture started in 2019 when I signed up for a defensive handgun 101 class at the local sheriff's office public gun range. Learning about firearms at a cop facility does a lot of pre-filtering in terms of demographics and political thresholds, but I'm adept at adapting, and a common language around and commitment to safety and discipline do a lot of gap-bridging. It gave me a starting point for developing my knowledge and skills, and introduced me to a vocabulary and grammar that can act as a hall pass between political tribes.
Eventually I took the three-day NRA instructor certification class—not out of ideological alignment, but because it would allow me to sign off on the training requirement for the Oregon concealed handgun license for people who might not want to go to a "bubba trainer." A good portion of that class consisted of current and former law enforcement and military.
I learned a lot about their sense of loss and disillusionment, though the disillusionment ran in opposite directions. Some had served and suffered and came away worried that the tactics they'd learned abroad might be turned inward, deployed domestically in ways they hadn't signed up for. Others had served and suffered and come away convinced the country was broken enough that maybe those tactics were needed here—that force was required to restore what they felt they'd lost.
Both griefs felt real. Both were rooted in genuine sacrifice and genuine sense of betrayal. The left mourns the republic burning; the right mourns the nation they feel is already gone. I felt sympathy for all of it, even as I recognized that one set of conclusions about what to do with that grief leads toward machinery I can't support. Both groups had the same training, had operated the same systems, had learned what those systems could do. They just disagreed about whether the threat was the machinery itself or the collapse that might follow without its application.
By fall 2021 I was helping out as a range safety officer at a rifle training class that a friend offered. Almost two dozen left-leaning gun owners spent a gloriously sunny September day on public land, learning about tactical marksmanship, malfunction clearing, shooting around barriers and cover, as well as the mandatory "scoot 'n' shoot" against metal gongs. I'd never seen so many well-armed LGBTQ+ folks in one place, and woe to the bigot who'd dare to stir shit up.
That said, despite the ideological congruence of that group, for whom competence mattered as much as politics, they weren't ideological warriors. They were trans folks calculating threat matrices, immigrants who'd learned not to trust state protection, people who'd discovered that dissociation was a luxury they couldn't afford. I kept showing up not because I'd found my tribe, but because these were people who'd been forced to be present, and their presence steadied mine.
Training and practicing next to law enforcement one weekend, observing muzzle and trigger discipline among liberal gunners on another, building relationships across contexts where competence mattered more than ideology. Range safety briefings with trans friends calculating whether they'd lose gun rights as prelude to worse. Mutual aid networks doing actual logistics rather than theoretical solidarity. People maintaining skills because institutions couldn't be trusted to protect them. These weren't communities of the dramatically radical—they were just people who'd been forced to be present because the alternative was erasure.
I found myself in what I started calling an ideological shanty town: population one. Not a coherent position, but a hand-built shelter made from salvaged planks of liberal empathy, libertarian self-reliance, pragmatic collectivism's insistence on mutual responsibility. Each piece came from a conviction that made sense somewhere else. It leaks and creaks, but it's mine, built for the actual weather rather than theoretical climates.
And from that provisional shelter, I could see something the dissociated couldn't: the ferry boats were being positioned.
II. The Rubicon and the Ferry Boats
Wednesday, October 8, 2025. Oregon Public Broadcasting runs a story with the bland headline: "Federal appeals court ruling keeps Oregon National Guard federalized ahead of oral arguments."
The language is studiously neutral, the kind of procedural update that slides past most readers as bureaucratic inside-baseball. But read it closely:
A three-judge panel has stayed an order that would have prevented President Trump from bringing 200 Oregon National Guard troops under federal control. The troops remain federalized—seized from state authority—but cannot yet be deployed in Portland. A second order bars any federalized Guard members from any state from being deployed in Oregon.
"The effect of granting an administrative stay preserves the status quo in which National Guard members have been federalized but not deployed," the panel writes.
Oral arguments are scheduled for Thursday at 9 a.m.
Read that language again: "preserves the status quo."
The status quo now includes federal seizure of state military assets. Administrative stay. Oral arguments scheduled like ordinary docket business. The extraordinary rendered procedurally routine.
This is what the ferry boats look like. Not dramatic militarization with ominous music, but lawyers threading procedural needles while the machinery of domestic deployment gets assembled and tested. The court has effectively split the question: federalization (taking control) is provisionally allowed, but deployment (actual use) remains blocked—for now, pending further litigation that will happen this morning as if this were routine business rather than the live question of whether the President can override state sovereignty to put troops on American streets.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice holds internal discussions about ways to strip trans Americans of the right to bear arms. One senior official tells CNN the goal is "to ensure that mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell."
The language does its work efficiently: mentally ill, suffering, unstable, unwell. A medical problem requiring administrative solution. Never mind that mental illness alone doesn't currently disqualify gun ownership under federal law—only involuntary commitment or legal declaration of incompetence does. The discussion is about creating new categories, new frameworks, new procedures to solve a problem the administration has defined.
This is the same tonal register as the court order. Neutral. Technical. Just describing process. Just professionals doing their jobs, working through complex policy questions with appropriate deliberation.
I keep thinking about trans people arming themselves for self-defense, about the profiles of people buying their first firearms, learning to shoot, calculating threat matrices. The reporting treats this as a story about identity and rights, about the contradiction between progressive gun control policy and marginalized self-defense, about people responding to conditions they see in front of them.
But the Oregon National Guard federalization suggests a different question. Not "should trans people arm themselves?" in some abstract libertarian sense, but: what does self-defense mean when the state is actively building legal scaffolding to deploy organized military force domestically while simultaneously working to disarm populations it's designated as problems?
I have friends who'd look at all this, roll their eyes, and say: everyone has the right to self-defense by whatever means necessary, full stop. It's a position of beautiful clarity, refreshing after pages of liberal hand-wringing. The argument is simple and carries a kind of moral minimalism that feels honest: self-defense isn't a cultural puzzle or sociological curiosity, it's a corollary of personhood.
But that simplicity assumes a level field—that every person's right to self-defense is equally real and equally enforceable. In practice, who can safely exercise that right without state or social reprisal depends on race, class, gender presentation, zip code. For trans people or Black gun owners, "by whatever means necessary" isn't just a declaration; it's a wager on how society will interpret the sight of them armed.
The libertarian grammar flattens that asymmetry because its moral universe is atomized—just individuals and their rights. The New Yorker grammar overcomplicates it because its moral universe is mediated—everything filtered through layers of context and complexity that somehow never resolve into clear implications.
I occupy some third position, more uncomfortable than either: recognizing the necessity of the libertarian argument (the gun as equalizer in a hostile world) while also recognizing the fragility of its premise (that everyone's rights are equally legible to power).
Because here's the operational reality: a handgun is a response to interpersonal threat, to street harassment, to individual aggressors. It's not a response to federalized National Guard units if those legal barriers fall. The scales are incommensurate.
The arithmetic is brutal. A handgun holds 15 or more rounds, a standard AR magazine holds 30. A National Guard unit brings air support, communications infrastructure, night vision, coordinated logistics. They can impose curfews that make movement illegal, cut cell service that makes coordination impossible, control roads that make resupply impractical. This isn't pessimism—it's just counting. The "good guy with a gun" scenario assumes symmetrical conflict. Against organized state force, the asymmetry is the point.
The historical pattern is what keeps me up at night.
Not because I think 2025 America is identical to 1943 Warsaw—crude analogies obscure more than they reveal. But because the operational structure is recognizable. The way normal people with careers and procedures organize elimination. The tone of professional problem-solving applied to questions of who gets to exist.
That's what the Stroop Report documents. Not the ideology that motivated the Final Solution, but the how of its implementation. The daily logistics. The competent management. The proper documentation proving thoroughness.
Stroop wasn't a fanatic—he was a middle manager solving problems his superiors had defined. The SS men under his command were punching timecards. The Polish police auxiliaries were collecting paychecks. Everyone doing their professional duty, executing on organizational objectives with appropriate diligence.
The trains ran on schedule. People still needed to eat. Commerce continued. And the machinery of extermination assembled itself through procedural professionalism that would look, to anyone reading the daily reports without context, like any other administrative operation.
"The effect of granting an administrative stay preserves the status quo in which National Guard members have been federalized but not deployed."
That's the same register. The language that makes extraordinary measures sound like routine process. The tone that says: we're just doing our jobs, following procedures, working through complex questions with appropriate care.
I'm documenting what's visible from here, October 2025, knowing that every claim I make is hostage to Thursday's oral arguments and a hundred procedural moves I can't see. I don't think we're inevitably heading toward camps and ghettos. I genuinely hope I'm wrong about the trajectory I'm seeing. I would much rather be corrected than right, would gladly accept being called paranoid if it meant the machinery never completes its work.
But I also can't unsee the pattern once I've seen it. And the pattern says: when a state decides a category of people is incompatible with the social order, and when it has both the apparatus and the will to act on that decision, the outcomes are historically consistent. The machinery that produces ghettos and camps isn't exotic—it's bureaucratic, legal, procedural. It happens through memos and court orders and troop deployments that are each individually justifiable as security measures.
The ferry boats are being positioned, and I'm watching them, and I genuinely don't know what response makes sense beyond: stay alert, maintain competencies, don't pretend this can't happen.
III. The Impossible Positions
So what are the choices when the state moves from hostility to mobilization, from policy debate to procedural deployment?
This is where all the careful discourse encounters its limits. The New Yorker's measured contemplation, the libertarian's principled absolutism, the mutual-aid organizer's practical solidarity—all of them assume a certain baseline condition: that the state, however unjust, responds to pressure through its own mechanisms. That we contest within bounds. That courts stay orders, legislatures debate, civil society exerts influence.
But federalized military deployment breaks that grammar. It's not law enforcement with nominal civilian oversight. It's not even ICE raids, which at least pretend to target "illegality." It's the state saying: we will use organized force, and the question of whether that's legal will be sorted out in oral arguments while boots are on the ground.
For vulnerable populations, that represents the collapse of the buffer zone—the space between "hostile government" and "government as direct threat to existence." And when that buffer collapses, the options narrow to a brutal set:
Invisibility. Go underground, erase presence, detransition socially if not medically, survive through negation. This is psychic death as survival strategy—rationally choosing erasure over elimination. Many will. Many have, historically, in every context where state power decides a category of person is unacceptable. It works, until it doesn't. Until the invisibility fails or the cost of maintaining it becomes unbearable.
Flight. But where? The federal apparatus reaches everywhere within the border. Crossing borders requires resources, documentation, receiving countries willing to grant asylum to people fleeing American state violence. We're not yet at "refugee crisis from the US," but the infrastructure that makes that unthinkable is exactly what's being tested by these court orders. And flight requires privilege—financial resources, mobility, skills that translate internationally. For most people facing threat, it's not an option.
Armed resistance. This is where the libertarian fantasy meets not just its moral limit but its tactical annihilation. I saw a Puget Sound Socialist Rifle Association sticker on a car in Bellingham last week, out for anniversary dinner. Nice sentiment—resilience, preparedness, mutual defense. But a sticker is a sheet of paper against an RPG round, and the "Wolverines" daydream ignores everything the state learned from two decades of counterinsurgency warfare.
The US military spent the entire Global War on Terror developing doctrine, technology, and institutional knowledge specifically designed to identify and eliminate exactly this threat profile. They have thermal imaging that reads body heat through walls. Drone coverage that tracks individuals across terrain. Signals intelligence that maps social networks from metadata. Biometric databases. Predictive software. And most critically: they have officers who cut their teeth doing precisely this work in Fallujah and Kandahar, who know how insurgencies communicate, supply themselves, and hide—and how to dismantle them.
The minute you fire back at federalized troops, you've crossed from victim to combatant. And the state's response isn't just legal escalation—it's the application of two decades' worth of hard-won expertise in killing people who shoot back. You don't get to be the scrappy underdog. You get to be the target set. They'll track your phone, compromise your networks, cut your supply lines, and drone-strike your safe house. Then they'll arrest your cousin for material support.
This isn't pessimism or defeatism—it's just counting. A handgun or even an AR-15 against an apparatus that perfected counter-insurgency doctrine across two theaters of war, that has satellite surveillance and biometric tracking and officers who've done this work professionally for twenty years? The asymmetry isn't a challenge to overcome. It's the entire point.
And even if you watch Andor and understand the seductive power of dignified resistance—small cells, symbolic victories, the meaningful death—Cassian Andor is fighting an Empire stretched across a galaxy with roughly symmetrical technology. You're fighting a state apparatus that spent two decades perfecting counterinsurgency on its own soil, that has metadata on every communication you've ever made, that can drone-strike a safe house before you've finished your first cell meeting.
The narrative gets written before your body is cold. Look at how fast it happens: Luigi Mangione shoots a healthcare CEO and within 72 hours goes from folk hero to terrorism defendant, his image paraded in maximum-security theater, his politics retroactively constructed as dangerous radicalism that threatens civilization itself. Mass shootings by trans people, vanishingly rare statistically, become "trans terrorism" that demands federal response and categorical exclusion. Mass shootings by cis men, statistically dominant, remain individual pathologies that tell us nothing about cisgender identity.
You don't control the story. You never did. The state apparatus and media infrastructure will metabolize your violence—defensive or offensive, justified or not—into whatever narrative serves the current project. Armed resistance by trans people defending themselves? That's the terrorism justification they needed to expand crackdowns. Armed resistance by anyone the state has designated as problem population? Domestic extremism, cells being investigated, your friends arrested for material support before you're buried.
Armed resistance isn't insurgency—it's the fast track to martyrdom. Which might be morally necessary in extremis, might be the only choice that preserves dignity when all others are intolerable. But it's not revolution. It's witness through dying. You're not building a movement that wins; you're forcing the state to kill you visibly, hoping someone remembers, hoping your death means something to someone later. That might be worth it. But anyone picking up a rifle against federalized troops needs to be clear they're writing a suicide note, not a battle plan. The fantasy of armed resistance isn't just morally compromised—it's operationally suicidal. And worse, it hands the state exactly the narrative it needed to justify the overwhelming force it wanted to deploy anyway.
Mutual protection networks operating outside legality. Underground railroads, hidden housing, falsified documents, parallel economies. This is what people do when the state makes their existence illegal—but it requires coordination, resources, operational security that most communities don't have pre-built. And it marks everyone involved as criminal the moment they're discovered. The networks become targets themselves, and the same surveillance apparatus that tracks insurgents tracks mutual aid with equal efficiency.
Martyrdom. Some people will refuse to hide or flee or fight, will insist on visible existence as a moral stance, and will be destroyed for it. This isn't a choice so much as a consequence—but it's one that historically has mattered for how later generations understand what was done. Someone has to refuse to disappear. Someone has to force the state to show its hand. But the cost is total, and there's no guarantee anyone will be left to remember or care.
None are good. None scale. None of them prevent the machinery from completing its work—they're just different ways of trying to survive while it operates.
This is the rupture I'm mourning. Not some perfect past—I'm not naive about how unjust American society has always been, how many populations have always lived under state threat. But I am mourning the particular quality of a society where these choices weren't yet forced on people I know. Where there was still friction between capability and deployment. Where "civil society" meant something, however fragile.
Civil society presumes reciprocal legibility. The implicit bargain is: we contest within bounds, we litigate, we organize, we vote, we make noise, and the system—however unjust—responds to pressure through its own mechanisms. Courts stay orders. Legislatures debate. Even police violence, horrific as it is, operates within a framework of nominal accountability.
When federalized troops can be deployed while courts debate whether that's legal, the presumption breaks. It reveals that "civility" was always contingent, a privilege extended to those the state deemed manageable through softer means. The moment a population becomes unmanageable—or useful as scapegoat—the velvet glove comes off.
We're being dragged across the Rubicon, and on yonder side lies the possibility of repeats: Waco, where federal agents sieged a compound for 51 days before the assault that killed 76 people including 25 children. MOVE, where Philadelphia police dropped explosives from a helicopter onto a residential neighborhood, burning 61 homes and killing 11 people. The Warsaw Ghetto, where systematic extermination was documented with bureaucratic precision.
I invoke these not to say we've arrived at their equivalents, but to name what states do to populations they've decided are existential threats. The pattern is consistent across contexts: rhetorical preparation (designating the group as dangerous), legal infrastructure (removing protections), normalization of force (each deployment setting precedent), isolation (severing solidarity), and then violence described as regrettable but necessary.
The state always narrates its own violence as defensive. The targets were armed, they were dangerous, they threatened public safety, we had no choice. And the machinery of justification usually works. Waco became shorthand for "dangerous cult" rather than "federal overreach." The MOVE bombing resulted in no criminal charges and is barely remembered outside Philadelphia.
What makes me think the current machinery, if it continues to build, would produce different outcomes?
IV. Being Present Without Answers
So what does it mean to stop dissociating, to be fully here when this is happening, without pretending you have solutions?
Not hope—that would be dishonest. Not despair either—that would be indulgent. Something harder: presence without certainty. Maintenance without grand strategy. The discipline of taking threats seriously while genuinely hoping you're wrong.
This is where my ideological shanty town becomes more than metaphor. It's not that I've rejected all existing frameworks—it's that I've salvaged pieces from each and built something provisional that can shelter me through what might be coming.
From liberalism: the basic empathy that says everyone deserves dignity and protection. The insistence on seeing people as people rather than abstractions. The refusal of easy cruelty.
From libertarianism: the recognition that the state is not your friend, that rights are real things that matter, that individual agency and competence are worth maintaining even when—especially when—institutions fail.
From the pragmatic left: the understanding that solidarity has to be enacted rather than performed, that mutual aid means actual logistics and material support, that survival under threat requires coordination and skill-sharing.
None of these fit together cleanly. The shanty leaks. But it doesn't depend on structures that are currently collapsing, and it lets me stay functional while remaining alert.
What that looks like in practice:
Pattern recognition without needing vindication. I watch the ferry boats being positioned—the court orders, the DOJ memos, the rhetorical escalations—and I take them seriously. But I'm not attached to being right. I genuinely hope I'm catastrophizing, that the machinery stalls, that resistance I can't see creates enough friction to prevent deployment. I'd much rather be wrong than watch this play out.
Maintenance of small competencies. Not survival fantasy or militia cosplay, but the basic work of remaining capable when institutions can't be trusted. Range time, yes, but also mutual aid logistics, emergency planning, the skills that don't depend on systems continuing to function as designed. This isn't about becoming Rambo—it's about being the person who knows how to read a map when GPS fails, who can coordinate distribution when supply chains break, who doesn't panic when services stop.
This assumes resources most people don't have: ammunition isn't cheap, range time costs money, secure storage requires space, and all of it presumes the time and mobility to acquire skills in the first place. Fuller's over In-N-Out is a choice available to people with cars and disposable income for burger preferences. Mutual aid sounds virtuous until you're coordinating who has freezer space, who can afford bulk rice, who owns a vehicle that can haul supplies. Competence scales with class, and pretending otherwise is how stoicism becomes privilege's self-congratulation.
But within those constraints, within whatever capacity you have: maintain it. The question isn't whether you can survive alone in the woods—you can't, and the fantasy is deadly. The question is whether you can remain useful to the people around you when systems that currently work stop working.
I won't pretend there isn't satisfaction in it—the clean press of trigger, the tight grouping, the bodily knowledge that you're doing a thing correctly. Competence feels good, even when the tool is politically contaminated, even when admitting that pleasure marks you as suspect to people who think guns are exclusively symbols of violence. But mastery matters. Not as power fantasy, but as the small dignity of knowing you can do a difficult thing well under stress. That matters whether or not you ever need the skill for its intended purpose.
Lateral connection without tribal affiliation. I maintain relationships and responsibilities across different communities, but I don't embed deeply enough in any formation that might become a target or might demand allegiances I can't give. The shanty town stays population one, but I know my neighbors. We help each other without needing to share ideology. That's not isolation—it's just refusing to make myself legible to the targeting systems.
Witness as practice. Keep the Stroop Report on the shelf. Note the court orders. Share the information. Refuse the comfort of "this can't happen here" while also refusing the paralysis of certainty that it will. Document what's visible. Make it harder for people to claim they didn't know what was happening.
This isn't a strategy to prevent catastrophe. It's just the work of staying present—really present—without dissociating back into the mantra or freezing into inaction. It's being here, acknowledging this is happening, and maintaining capacity for response even when the right response is unclear.
The key move: rejecting both the dissociative comfort that kept us functional for two decades and the false certainty that would make us rigid. The ferry boats might sail or they might not. The trajectory might complete or it might break. I don't know, and I don't need to know to take seriously the possibility that it could.
V. Fuller's and the Wondering
Wednesday afternoon, scrolling my news feed, I see two headlines from the same regional source, displayed with equal prominence:
"Appeals Court rules Oregon National Guard will remain under Trump's control, but deployment blocked"
"In-N-Out purchases massive warehouse in Gresham"
Both are logistics stories. Both involve infrastructure, real estate, regional expansion. One is about the procedural mechanisms of domestic military deployment; the other is about Double-Doubles and animal-style fries. The cognitive whiplash is perfect.
In-N-Out has purchased a 71,600-square-foot industrial building to "expand its footprint in the region." They're planning locations in Gresham, Washington County, near the airport. The company is known for its commitment to quality and customer service, and this new facility will create jobs and enhance their ability to deliver.
The language is identical in structure to the court order: neutral, procedural, just describing things happening in the region that readers should know about. Commerce continues. Plans made months or years ago proceed according to schedule. Because what else would they do? That's what corporations do—execute on strategic plans regardless of political upheaval.
The traffic around these new locations will be absolutely awful because people love novelty and In-N-Out has cult cachet from California. Lines around the block, cars backed up on Sandy Boulevard, the whole performance of hype and scarcity that makes a burger into an event.
Nancy and I will drive past all that. We'll go to Fuller's Burger Shack, or Killer Burger, or Mike's Drive-In, or even Burgerville if we're feeling virtuous about regional ingredients. Fuller's nostalgia factor, Killer Burger's excessive toppings, Mike's old-school vibe. Better burgers anyway, and we won't have to sit in traffic for the privilege of California chain mediocrity.
We'll split an order of tots because nobody does tots better than Fuller's—I know this sounds ludicrous, I know it's the most Portland hipster thing to have strong opinions about tater tots, but it's true and I'll die on that hill.
And still, underneath the burger debate and traffic avoidance and local loyalty:
Are federalized troops going to deploy in Portland? Will the DOJ strip gun rights from trans people as prelude to worse? Is this the last normal summer before something breaks? Am I watching the machinery assemble or am I catastrophizing? Should I be stocking more dry goods? Should I be having different conversations with people I care about? What does preparation even look like when you don't know what you're preparing for?
The wondering doesn't stop us from eating the tots. The tots don't stop the wondering. Both are real. Both continue.
This is what actually living through potential collapse looks like—not constant panic or dramatic rupture, but this low-grade persistent wondering that accompanies every mundane decision. Planning next week's schedule while wondering if there will be a next week in any recognizable form. Making dinner while watching news alerts for signs the pattern is accelerating or breaking.
The New Yorker reader does this too, but the wondering gets metabolized differently. They read another analysis piece, feel slightly better because someone smart wrote about it, trust that the discourse itself is doing something. The wondering resolves into content consumption, into the feeling that understanding is adjacent to action.
My wondering doesn't resolve. It just persists. Background radiation. I've learned to operate with it—you have to, what else would you do?—but I can't unhear it. It's there at Fuller's over the tots. It's there scrolling past the In-N-Out headline. It's there when I look at the Stroop Report on the shelf and think about ferry boats being positioned.
This is what it means to be here when this is happening:
The good tots. The bad traffic. The court order. The warehouse purchase. The historical pattern. The uncertainty about whether this time is different. The decision to keep showing up for your life while staying alert to the possibility it might all change suddenly.
The wondering is the price of presence. You can't unsee the pattern once you've seen it. But you also can't stop participating in the world just because the pattern might complete its cycle. You can't live in permanent emergency posture any more than you can maintain permanent dissociation.
So: Fuller's, not In-N-Out. Local loyalty, better food, avoid the traffic.
And still wonder.
Not as weakness or failure of nerve. As the most honest way to be present when you can see the Rubicon but don't know if we'll actually cross it, can see the ferry boats but don't know if they'll sail, can see the machinery assembling but don't know if it will complete its work.
The mantra—"I'm not here, this isn't happening"—kept us functional through two and a half decades of serialized collapse. But it's failing now because the thing we were dissociating from has moved from ambient dread to procedural reality. The machinery isn't abstract anymore. It's court orders with oral arguments Thursday at 9 a.m. It's DOJ memos about creating new categories of exclusion. It's National Guard units federalized while we debate whether that's legal.
Being here means acknowledging that reality without pretending to know what comes next. Maintaining the capacity for response without needing a perfect strategy. Watching the river, recognizing what rivers do, making choices accordingly.
It means keeping the Stroop Report on the shelf as reminder of what completion looks like—not to guarantee it will happen here, but to refuse the comfort of thinking it couldn't.
It means going to Fuller's and splitting an order of tots and having the conversation about whether we're seeing the pattern correctly or catastrophizing, whether there's still time for the trajectory to break, what we do if it doesn't.
It means living in the space between the mantra's failure and whatever comes after. Being present for the wondering without letting it paralyze us. Staying functional without pretending everything is fine.
The shanty town might have more residents than I thought. People who are also holding pattern recognition they wish was paranoia. People who are also mourning preemptively while hoping the funeral gets canceled. People who see the ferry boats and hope someone sinks them before they sail—but who aren't betting on it.
What comes after, if the boats do sail? I don't know. Nobody does. The question isn't answerable in advance.
But I know what can't come after: not a return to the dissociative comfort that kept us functional while the machinery assembled. Not the fantasy that understanding injustice equals preventing it. Not the certainty—liberal or libertarian or leftist—that any existing framework has the answer.
What might be possible instead: small shelters built from whatever materials we can salvage. Communities of the correctable, people willing to update in real-time as the situation develops. Maintenance of competencies and connections that don't depend on institutions holding. Witness that refuses both paralysis and premature reconciliation.
Being here when this is happening.
Splitting an order of tots while the world potentially ends or potentially doesn't, staying alert while staying functional, watching the river while still participating in the ordinary beautiful mundane work of being human with other humans.
That's not hope. It's not despair either.
It's just being present, with all the wondering that entails.
And the tots really are that good.