A Quiet Place in the Hellish Rafters of Dissent

My desire to hunker down and ignore the onslaught grows by the day

I’m part of a seething tribe of people who didn’t vote for the current condition of the United States. Our tribe is fed a constant diet of malevolence by those who did vote for it, or who didn’t bother to vote (which was the same thing as voting for it), and those who are currently cheering it on. At this point, the final result doesn’t seem much different than a metastasizing cancer beyond the reach of modern medicine. Attempting to find solace seems impossible.

It’s like living in a boisterous echo chamber of criminally insane patients, myself included, of course, incapable of processing not only the results of the November election, but the first few weeks of that election’s inevitable consequences, and now, some gruesome polling numbers. Most of my fellow inhabitants in the echo chamber are well beyond trying to understand or even process these events because it simply isn’t possible to do.

For the few newcomers to these echo chambers of dissent, you should know that the consequences of this election were known well before November. Americans have had nearly a decade to become intimately familiar with the lunatic in their midst. He hasn’t been hiding from view. Claiming shock or surprise is not an acceptable response.

Nothing he does has been, or will be, a surprise. No excuses remain. His lunacy wasn’t called out by a few lone figures who were suspected of crying wolf. That’s often the case in these kinds of matters. A few voices in the hinterlands cry out a warning about an impending catastrophe, and those voices are dutifully ignored. Then, disaster strikes.

But that wasn’t the case this time.

Everyone who has the most basic understanding of human behavior predicted this outcome. We all knew it was coming.

But here’s where it becomes impossible for me to process: 53% of Americans do not interpret current events as a disaster. They approve of the job Trump is doing, according to a new CBS/YouGov poll.¹

59% approve of Trump’s deportation plans. 64% approve of him sending troops to the border. 54% approve of his handling of the Gaza conflict.

Image of the 53 percenters licensed from Adobe Stock

The echo chambers of dissent are disconnected from the majority of people who seem perfectly fine bearing witness to events that seem insane to the rest of us.

This isn’t the Vietnam era, when an angry youth marched on Washington. There is nothing comparable to the Kent State killings, thankfully, because there is no Kent State. There are no campus protests that might incur the wrath of a police state that has only fortified itself since those days.

It’s not even a BLM moment.

Instead, there are handfuls of small protests around the nation filled with a few angry moms and dads (mostly moms) while their kids are at home ordering an Uber ride to the local hipster bar, which will be closed in a couple of months because there won’t be any migrants around to wash its wine glasses.²

Mostly, the kids are silent, aside from the occasional tug on their parents’ sleeves while they meekly ask, “Why are you so mad?”

The CBS poll seems about right, too. Where are the voices screaming about the Musk coup d’etat or about the battalions of ICE stormtroopers knocking on the doors of frightened refugees? They’re there, in our echo chambers. They’re loud, consistent, strong. But elsewhere, Americans are shrugging their shoulders or even cheering it all on.

Part of the problem is that many people are convinced, not without reason, that Democrats are complicit in building their grim, totalitarian future filled with burning forests and masses of climate refugees.

But they ignore that the state of the American body politic has been no different than any other political period this nation has known.

The history of this nation, of all nations, for that matter, is filled with power brokers and their limitless greed for more power. This is the very nature of politics, whether the politicians are named Hitler, Churchill, Caligula, Roosevelt, Khan, or Lenin.

What makes history interesting is when resistance flickers just enough to kill authoritarianism. Its threat is always there. History is full of authoritarianism’s successes and pending emergence. Resistance is the historical exception about which epics are written. Benign government is not the norm.

The unhelpful nature of American political parties is not unique. American political parties, whether Whigs or Democrats or Federalists or Republicans, have never been designed to nurture the general population.

For evidence, let’s consider the nation’s formation.

America’s Revolutionary War was the nation’s first war over slavery. Support for the war initially polled at about 50/50, according to historians. Then, in December of 1775, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and Virginia’s British governor, announced a radical plan.

Through a proclamation that went viral, Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, Murray offered slaves their freedom if they fought for the British. Out of approximately 450,000 colonial slaves, some historians estimate that nearly a quarter of them took Dunmore up on his offer during the length of the war.³

Murray’s proclamation turned the tide of the war because colonials who had been on the fence, or were even British loyalists, couldn’t imagine living without chattel slavery. Colonialist opinion swerved heavily in favor of rebellion, in large part because of outrage over Murray’s proclamation. An early emancipation of slaves would not stand.

The fanciful good grace credited to America’s founders is a myth. They were interested in power just as much as anyone. Ask the ghosts of their slave women if you doubt me. But their lust for power wasn’t unique. History’s list of benevolent politicians is smaller than the number of abortion clinics in Oklahoma.

Many Americans, however, seem certain that they are facing a unique challenge, and that the two major political parties are playing a game that is impossible for the rest of us to play.

The problem is twice as bad as they think it is because there is now only one legitimate political party. This party isn’t any more corrupt than any other political party in America has been. That there is only one of these parties is the bigger problem. Worse, the other party, the one with no legitimacy, the one that threatens to turn America into a totalitarian Christo-nationalist state, has full control of all levers of government, most of the large media outlets, and the majority of state governments.

So as the nation gears up for a desolate closing chapter, I am beginning to think I need to find a quiet place away from it all. Self-preservation needs to take center stage.

It’s time for me to ask a simple question: Why should I care if most Americans don’t? And what should I do with my grief over this lost country?

Americans have experienced grim times before. A world war in which 80 million people lost their lives, and a great depression that sent millions of people into a state of ravaged destitution: These both qualify as much more transformative events than anything modern Americans have encountered.

But suddenly, Americans are acting like children over problems that previous generations have faced with much more gallantry. The price of eggs meme works because it represents children sitting on the floor screaming over, well, the price of eggs.

Meanwhile, these children close their eyes to the oncoming train, forcing upon me a simple question: How do I find my hidden, safe place as far from the maddening crowd⁴ as possible?

Our echo chambers are filled with dissent and anger. I can’t help but assume that the mental health of the entire nation is permanently at risk as we cope with a president who lost whatever slivers of sanity he had several years ago, then triumphantly walked into the Oval Office anyway, and who now, according to at least one poll, has the support of most Americans.

Increasingly, I think about what my reaction to all this should really be. I know myself well enough to realize I can’t disengage from my rage fests. My fiction writing alone won’t allow it.

So the questions become more practical. Should I move out of the Confederacy here in Georgia back to my home state of Illinois, which is governed by a billionaire but one with a heart?

My instinct is becoming one of self-preservation. If the country must burn, maybe I should focus on getting closer to the blue waters that can act as the moat to the fires that others have started. Rage when I must, but leave the harder work to people with a stronger heart for it.

But a very large part of me balks at this response. It suggests that we cede some beautiful forested country to Southern rebels who never signed a peace treaty. It’s as if the South really did win the Civil War, but it took them 150 years to do it. They don’t get their slave state, but they do get their Christo-nationalist fascist state, and who knows what comes after?

Today, a deranged American president will attend the Super Bowl deep in what I consider enemy territory, Louisiana, near the coast of the Gulf of Gilead. There, he’ll receive a rousing ovation from the crowd. “Long live the mad king,” they will chant in unison (hopefully there will be few Philly fans to tamp down the insanity).

When that happens, I’ll be reminded that America is lost, a creator of its own infamy, a flame that has become Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s candle in the wind, blown out by a stubborn determination to hold onto ignorance for the sake of a few cheaper eggs and an unwillingness to ask even one hard question about itself.

1. Salvanto, Anthony, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus, and Kabir Khanna. 2025. “CBS News Poll — Trump Has Positive Approval amid ‘Energetic’ Opening Weeks; Seen as Doing What He Promised.” Cbsnews.com. CBS News. February 9, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-approval-opinion-poll-2025-2-9/.

We can argue about the accuracy of this one poll. But I argued against the polls that showed Trump winning the election by a slim margin, too.

2. They have already begun to close: “Atlanta Restaurant Closings - Eater Atlanta.” 2025. Eater.com. January 30, 2025. https://atlanta.eater.com/closings.

3. “Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, 1775 | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.” 2025. Gilderlehrman.org. 2025. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lord-dunmores-proclamation-1775.

4. Not quite Thomas Hardy’s crowd, this one is simply quite maddening.