America in Distress

Finding courage in a state of despondency

Anti-ICE protest, Austin, January 10th 2026

Again I begin with gratitude.

When I hit send last Monday on the essay about my father’s death, I genuinely thought I would lose more than a few subscribers, and understandably so. I assume that many of you have signed up here to learn about AI and human cognition, and while those themes were somewhat present in my public grieving, let’s be real, this newsletter is presently serving as a form of therapy for me. Yet once again, somehow so many of you responded with words of kindness and empathy, and often while sharing with me your own vulnerabilities and tragedies.

Last week, I felt a wave of human decency directed my way that gave (and gives) me strength. I felt seen, heard, and loved. Saying thank you feels woefully insufficient to the magnitude of support you’ve collectively provided, but that is all I know how to say, over and over: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

That’s how my week started. Then on Wednesday, agents of the fascist regime in control of the United States murdered Renée Good, a queer poet who had the audacity to bear witness to their cruelties.

There have been many hard days since the second Trump Administration assumed power in January 2025, but for me, last Wednesday was the hardest, the absolute nadir. The despair that enveloped me as I watched the videos of Good’s killing, as I looked at the picture of the car with blood-stained seats and stuffed animals overflowing from the glovebox, I felt my brain fog over. I began sobbing uncontrollably throughout the day, seemingly at random moments, overwhelmed by the violent sadism of my own country and its purported leadership. All but immobilized by trauma.

Here again I need to share with you a bit more about my relationship with my father. As mentioned last week, we talked about AI frequently over the last year, but sitting right alongside at the top of our conversational agenda was Trump—or “T*” as my father used in texts, always refusing to name him fully—and this moment of tyranny in America. I would like you to know that my father was passionate about politics from an early age, he did volunteer work on the John Kennedy’s campaign when he (my dad) was only 11 years old (careful readers may connect this to him later becoming an assassination “conspiracy buff,” a story that again will have to wait). At every stage of my life, we talked about current affairs, through political lenses we largely shared, apart from my brief libertarian phase that scared the shit out of him (rightfully). These conversations intensified over the past year for obvious reasons, and I often asked about what life was like in the 60s, the last period when it seemed the US might dissolve, hoping to gain perspective and insight into how we might navigate the current moment. He had much wisdom to share, coupled with a gallows sense of humor that helped us both to cope.

Last year, I told my father I felt guilty about feeling so energized by the current moment. “It’s ok to feel purpose,” he told me.

But he’s gone now; Death has finished singing my father’s song, just as it has Renée Good’s. I wrote in advance of my dad’s passing how I sensed the coming unmooring from the last of my human creators, and that is exactly how I felt this past week, unmoored, like a tiny broken boat adrift at sea, battered by a violent storm and powerless to do anything to change the course of fate.

This is heavy and depressing and I won’t fault anyone for stopping here. Some close friends are worried about me, and I’m worried about me too. I’m worried about everyone living in America, if not the world, as no one is safe from this country’s violent power. But several months ago, someone shared on BlueSky a post that read, “too much ‘we’re cooked’ energy here right now, not enough ‘fuck this shit,’” and it’s that latter sentiment I want to harness. More specifically, I want to talk to you about courage.

I have never been a New Years’ resolution person, but many years ago, I started to pick “themes” for the year, meaning, I choose a topic and then endeavor to read, watch, listen, and learn about it in some greater depth. Sometime pre-pandemic, I chose courage as my theme, human courage. In particular, I wanted to learn about the people in history who faced overwhelming oppression but nonetheless fought back.

I read a lot about the Civil Rights Movement, including Reverend Fred Shuttleworth, the leader who vowed to kill segregation or be killed by it (I’ve shared my admiration for him with you previously). I read about Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, who demanded an open casket at her son’s memorial, and urged the pictures of his beaten body be made public so as to bring light to the terror of white supremacy in America. An act of courage that galvanized a movement.

I also read about Sophie Scholl. Her name may be unfamiliar to you, as it certainly was to me. She was a leader of the White Rose effort in Germany in the 1940s, an anti-Nazi resistance group comprised of university students that distributed pamphlets calling for active opposition to Hitler. Here is an excerpt from their third missive, one that was later air-dropped by the Allies all over Germany:

Prior to becoming a radical anti-fascist advocate and resistor, Sophie Scholl had taught kindergarten. At age 21, she and other White Rose leaders, including her brother, were captured by the Gestapo and, after a show trial for treason, these “domestic terrorists” were executed by guillotine.

These are a few of the stories of historical courage that I read. Now I want to share one with you about the here and now.

Over the past year, I’ve formed new friendships arising from my advocacy work in resisting the intrusion of AI into public education, including one with a veteran high-school teacher—I won’t say where, for reasons that will be clear momentarily—who is active in the “AI for Teachers” Facebook group. This place functions as my personal intellectual hell, a repository of literally hundreds of thousands of educators largely falling all over themselves to find ways to automate their own cognition and that of their students. But this teacher has taken it upon himself to speak up and push back.

We talked on Friday, or just yesterday as I’m typing this. We asked each other how we are doing, and we both agreed, not well. And it was then he told me about one of his students, a 13-year-old girl who’s mother has been snatched by ICE and is now facing deportation. This student is looking for somewhere to stay so she can continue her schooling.

Moments after telling me this on Zoom, this student entered his classroom. She walked straight to him and hugged her teacher, she hugged him so very hard, a desperate hug, the hug of someone overwhelmed and in need of love. This brief embrace, even recalling it now, well my fingers are shaking. I hear my friend Audrey’s voice again, crying out, What are we doing, what are we doing to children? To mothers, to fathers, to people without children, to innocent humans who simply want to live without fear?

I later asked my teacher friend for permission to share this story, which he granted, and he told me this:

That hug was the first of many this morning. She came back and we talked for a good half hour. She came across the border two years ago at age 13 from Venezuela--which means if her mom gets deported back there, she’ll end up in jail for pretty much ever unless there’s true regime change. They were separated for four days when they crossed--didn’t speak any English--and thrown into holding cell. Didn’t know what was happening, but when reunited, mom told her they would never be separated like that again. So incredibly sad and infuriating at the same time as she told the story with tears in her eyes.

Her mom basically has a couple weeks to appeal the deportation order, and so me and another teacher have been working frantically to get her an attorney to take the case, and we were able to get one about an hour ago. So that’s great news. I’ll keep you posted.

This is not fair. No educator should have to take time out of their day to search for legal representation for their students’ families. It is emotionally exhausting and it is time consuming. But I am so very grateful to those who bear this burden nonetheless. I am in awe of their courage. (My teacher friend also wanted me to note here that none of this should be interpreted as his supporting the Trump Administration’s actions in Venezuela.)

Every human being has a claim to a useful and just state. I had to pause the writing of this post to attend a protest on Saturday. I carried an American flag with me, as I typically do at these rallies, but for the first time, I mounted it upside down. Someone asked me why, what does it mean. It’s a distress signal. America is in distress.

Photo by Chris Juhn, Minneapolis

So I return to the question of courage. In the wake of Renée Good’s killing, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a personal hero who has long called us to account for America’s long history and ongoing practices of violent subjugation of non-white communities, she wrote on social media, “this is just the beginning.” She is right, I have no doubt about that. Those of us who still believe in the best aspirations of American democracy will be tested by even greater horrors than what we’re witnessing at present. We must find the courage to bestir ourselves to fight back. We need “fuck this shit” energy and lots of it.

That will come to me, I trust. And maybe next week, I’ll return to writing about cognition and AI, we’ll see. Right now, though, I hope you will permit me to share with you a poem I’ve just written. It’s not very good, but it’s all I’m capable of.

---

Blood of White Roses

they are called stuffies nowadays, at least that’s what my nine year old daughter calls hers
she presides over a vast empire, a coterie so large as to put the lie to Noah’s story
no boat could be so big
a few years ago her mother declared a moratorium on further acquisitions
one of the most useless and flaccid policy pronouncements of this century

there are axolotls and capybaras and a pink silky chicken-like creature that reminds me of David Bowie
that one being the last present my mother ever gave her
Puppy is her favorite, a ragdoll of a dog, but I always ask about Rainbow Goat
Which I made for her during the pandemic and drove from Texas to Florida to deliver
accompanied along the way by a baby yoda that I took pictures of in odd places
which delighted her in transit
but upon arrival she proclaimed him “creepy”
now he sits with me in the passenger seat when I roam about America
so I am not alone

my Puppy I named Barney, a panda bear pillow with a face I slept upon for who knows how many years
(there’s no one left to ask)
at some point his eyes wore away, leaving a trail of synthetic cotton wherever I dragged him
one day my mother—she didn’t know, she couldn’t possible have known—threw him away
it’s my earliest memory of screaming

(we rescued Barney after digging through the trash, or so I choose to remember)

I am going to do the hard thing now
and look at the picture again
the one with the blood-soaked airbag, a yellow line of police tape in the foreground
as I type this so many are looking at the other pictures and videos
trying to figure out where the gun was
which way the wheels were pointed
but I am staring at the glovebox with the stuffies crammed into it
a unicorn I’m almost sure of, with a mane like a mohawk
what I first thought might be a brown platypus
now I think, perhaps a bear's butt
a little blue octopus, I don’t know
I have to stop looking now

news reports inform me that these three little creatures may have belonged to a six year old boy
I keep thinking, he’s somewhere out there
his father died years ago
and the mother that brought him into this world
she who wrote poetry that asked us to make room for wonder
she is gone too
so that is one immutable fact shared between us
newly orphaned in our common country

only he is so much younger

---