A few people have noticed my absence here over the past several months and wondered if I’m okay. Well, no, I’m not. As an American, how could I possibly be “okay” right now? I’ve started a half dozen draft posts in my blog account over the past few months, but haven’t been able to finish any of them because my writing quickly devolves into expressing my deep anger and disgust, and I don’t want that to be the energy of this place; I created this blog to focus on the wonders of nature and how it can help us be healthier. On the other hand, I can’t possibly go back to happily writing about bugs without somehow acknowledging the horrors of the American authoritarian experience. My sensitivity makes me prone to dwelling on the injustices and suffering I’ve watched on news videos, and it’s not serving me well at all in this new world. I have to find a way to strike a balance between staying informed and yet maintaining enough emotional distance that I can function in my life.

So let me get some of this off my chest and hope I can move forward and share happier things with you. I understand how upsetting it all is, and why people don’t want to talk about it, but we cannot look away from this! Especially those of us who have relative safety because we’re not (yet) in the most persecuted groups. We have to stand up for the people who are being denied their rights and terrorized. It’s unAmerican and heartbreaking. I cry every time I watch one of the videos of the latest brutal ICE raids. How dare they do this in the name of the American people, and with our tax dollars? It’s disgusting and vile. I feel a little bit of hope when I see people starting to stand up to the masked and unidentified men who are grabbing people and shoving them into vans, but everything is going to get much worse now that they’ve budgeted unfathomable amounts of money to put people in concentration camps. As I write that, my mind struggles to believe the reality of this happening here. How can we stop it? And are enough of us strong enough to do what needs to be done?

Since February, I’ve been going to protests to show solidarity with other protestors and to help alleviate some of the stress in my body. It’s amazingly cathartic to be in a crowd of people chanting together about shared beliefs and insisting that our elected officials defend the Constitution. My garage has accumulated a pile of protest signs, American flags, pride flags, and Ukrainian flags. The first two protests I went to were in my state capital city, Columbus, Ohio. I drove two and a half hours to get to those, and stood against the frigid wind at our statehouse with a few hundred other people.

In April I began staying in Toledo for protests, as my city began to have larger events and I could try to get more of my friends involved in this growing resistance. Our latest #NoKings protest had a turnout of about 6,000 people in Toledo. (Some estimates were 10,000 but that seems high to me.) There generally aren’t many counter-protesters, other than the usual jacked-up pickup with enormous M*GA flags, speeding too fast and too close to our lines of protestors, trying to intimidate us. I’ve been called names and flipped off a few times too, but none of that matters one bit to me. I know we protesters are on the side of good and love, and those people who are committing and cheering on the violence will be judged by history (and hopefully punished appropriately at some point).

I’ve also been participating in a weekly Zoom call with thousands of Indivisible members around the country. This meeting is led by co-founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, and it’s an hour for us to touch base about the latest news as well as to discuss the best ways to continue increasing the size of the resistance so we can keep fighting an obscenely corrupt and cruel government. These help me stay calm (sometimes).

But even with regular protesting, my anger and fear persist. I struggle to cope every day. And then, on top of that, something tragic happened in my neighborhood last Sunday that redirected my anger, at least temporarily. I live in a usually-safe middle-class neighborhood, and dozens of people walk past my house getting their daily exercise. But my 26-year-old next door neighbor was shot and killed in a driveby shooting on Sunday night as he drove toward home. I was sitting in my garden and heard what I thought were fireworks, but shortly afterward heard sirens racing down toward us, and it turned out that I’d heard gunshots. I then heard my neighbor screaming and ran over to help him as police surrounded him trying to get him to talk about what had happened. He’d been the driver with his partner as the passenger. There was apparently a large party at an Airbnb on our block and traffic was parked along both sides of our road all evening. As a result, there was only room for one car to pass, and when two cars approached from opposite directions, the other car (unknown driver at this point) got angry and started shooting at my neighbors in their car. There are so many things wrong with this situation that I can’t even begin to talk about it. And yes, we’re already talking to our local elected officials about why there was an illegal Airbnb on our street and how we can prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

I’ve been lucky to have not ever been up close with this level of violence before, and I’m still trying to come to grips with the fact that this really happened here. Along with two other neighbors, I spent maybe a half hour holding and trying to comfort my neighbor until his family could get to him. As you would expect, he was in shock after watching his loved one taken away by ambulance with a head wound. I stood beside the car and caught a glimpse of the blood-covered car seat and forced myself to look away from that. I later discovered that I had blood on my arms after trying to calm my surviving neighbor, also a 26-year-old. My heart breaks for him and his family. This young couple had spent the past two years fixing up their new house and had just chosen a wedding venue; they were planning a happy life and then in an instant it was all gone. This is the kind of stuff you read about all the time in this country, unfortunately, and it always feels sad. But when it happens to someone you know, it’s an entirely different level of shock and sadness.

On Monday, we had a brief neighborhood memorial service next door in their front yard, to show the family that we’re all here for them. To my disgust, there was a photographer and reporter from the Toledo Blade at our solemn event. I went to the photographer and quietly asked her not to take facial photos of the family or the neighbors during this service. She said she would be respectful and I thanked her. And I was furious the next day when I saw that she had published several close-up photos of crying family members and the mourning neighbors, one of them on the front page of the paper. I felt so betrayed and disgusted by the way they were exploiting the family’s grief. A couple people tried to tell me not to be so angry about it, but I just couldn’t stand by and accept that “this is just what news media do these days.” Well, it may be so, but I don’t have to read it. I cancelled my subscription to The Blade today. The world has enough pain in it without me having to watch corporations profiting off of people’s suffering.

I met with a friend yesterday and asked her about how she balances the need to be informed while still taking care of her mental health. I took her advice to heart because I have a lot of respect for how she copes with the ups and downs of life. So, for the first time in my life, I’m taking a very big step back from “staying informed,” and will make a concerted effort to avoid doomscrolling on social media and constantly checking the news to find out the latest in this American horror show that we’re all forced to live in until we figure out how to stop it.

So that’s how I’m doing, and how life goes on, mostly.

And in stark contrast all of that anger and sadness, I’ll share a couple videos from something that helped me a lot a couple nights ago. The Black Swamp Conservancy holds a series of floating concerts on the Maumee River in downtown Toledo each summer, and I got tickets with a friend for the event on Wednesday night. Called “Paddle & Groove,” these concerts feature a band on a pontoon boat, and dozens of kayakers as the audience. For 90 minutes, we all floated up and down the river listening to the music. This was such solace for my weary heart; it was the best thing I’ve done in a looong time. Bobbing in a kayak always makes me feel at peace, and the twangy music of Nick Dittmeier and the Sawdusters lifted my spirits in a way I’d forgotten was possible. I can’t wait to do this again next month. I see how it’s going to be essential to find moments like this to put aside the anger and take comfort in being with good people for a good cause. The Paddle & Groove events benefit conservation projects in northwest Ohio.

This one has a nice view of downtown Toledo.

If you’ve made it through this one, I thank you for bearing witness to what I needed to say. I pray my nation finds a way to stand up against this evil. And I hope you’re all finding healthy ways to cope and stay strong through this difficult time.

I’ll leave you with this image that continues to remind me how important it is to find the courage to stand up against tyranny and give others the courage to stand with you. (I’m sorry that I don’t know the artist who created it.)