"The U.S.'s political landscape - and our daily lives - are increasingly shaped by repression and violence, amplified by a media cycle designed to keep us fearful in the present, uncertain about the future, and depleted. Exhaustion is not a side effect of this system. It is one of its core tools. Last year, I wrote that Donald Trump's attacks were designed to exhaust us. Over the past year, I've watched communities build movements and adapt their organizing under this reality."
"Communities did not respond with better individual coping. They changed how resistance is carried - away from the myth of the solitary activist hero and toward shared capacity. As Grace Lee Boggs taught us, "Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass." It was no longer treated as a personal struggle, but as shared terrain - produced by oppressive systems and requiring collective response."
The U.S. political landscape and daily life are increasingly shaped by repression, violence, and a media cycle that cultivates present fear and future uncertainty. Exhaustion functions as a deliberate tool within a system organized around crisis and attrition. Intensified political strategies exposed the mental and physical costs of persistent crisis. Communities shifted away from solitary coping toward collective approaches, building shared capacity, expanding care practices, and reframing exhaustion as a shared terrain produced by oppressive systems. Organizing began to center connections, mutual support, and strategies that reduce unequal burdens rather than relying on isolated individual resilience.
Read at Truthout
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