Habit Forming

In recent years, journalists and others who have warned of impending dangers in America were written off as being overly hysterical. In retrospect, they could rightly be criticized for having understated the threat. So these days, when I see a headline that includes the word Beware, I beware. M. Gessen in the NYT (Gift Article): Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era. And it’s not his phase. It’s ours. “Once you’ve absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around the Trump administration’s revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t entirely unexpected. Once you’ve realized that the administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.”