so yesterday the Mayor of St Louis read the names and addresses of protestors who support police defunding on TV and just now the president has posted fifteen separate "attempt to identify" notices featuring photos of individual protestors

it's getting hotter, the plague is spreading, tens of millions are unemployed, and hurricanes and waves of evictions are coming. the election is still five months away, seems unlikely we'll get subtler about greenlighting scapegoats for extrajudicial killings and vigilante murder

tens of millions of USers are apparently copacetic with reopening and a quarter million plus dead or more. the horror of what we've long normalized and the rapidity with which we're metabolizing even more is stunning

this moment is a petri dish for morbid symptoms of psychotic acting out, sinister repression, cynical manipulation, desperate disavowal, extreme and low-level traumas, and just plain cognitive exhaustion. what will come of this situation, and what will it accommodate?

I don't just mean if some Q person decided one of the photos looks like their neighbor, which you could so easily becoming Just Another Thing, a blip. But really - what if we started having, say, Disappearances? how would people metabolize it? could even? would it even matter?