The international students fracas that ended today with an apparent surrender by the administration is a microcosm of how hard it is to exist in this moment, and how hard it will be to recall it

In one sense, nothing happened: there was an announcement, a flurry of resistance, and then the administration backed down. In another sense, hundreds or thousands or more people experienced severe stress and uncertainty ...

... while thousands of people had to respond to the crisis by dropping other work that also had to be done, wasting likely tens of thousands of people-hours on this.

Indeed, if the administration merely wanted to waste universities' time, they could not have developed a more cost-effective way of doing so.

So, again, in one sense, nothing happened. In another sense, a whole lot of human energy and emotions went into that "nothing". And that's definitely something.

And yet: this entire crisis will go all but unrecorded, and I bet unremembered (except by students).

This has been the constant cycle of Trumpism: some rash action or implication, a roar of outrage and effort, a modification or retraction, and then another outrage. Sometimes, the outrages inflict lasting and huge damage; at other times; they do "nothing" at all.

We are nearing four years of this cycle, which has touched practically all areas of federal control and even beyond. From the Muslim ban to the trans ban to the thwarted-for-now online ban, minorities and immigrants have been hurt the worst, but we've all been touched by it.

It is so exhausting to contemplate and remember. It is chaos that harms and exhausts. It makes forward progress difficult to imagine, much less achieve. I am so tired of it all.