On Windows

I’d like to speak for a moment about windows, specifically of the Overton variety. A refresher for those, like me, who sometimes mix up their Overtons with their Dunning-Krugers, the Overton window refers to a range of political opinions arrayed along a vertical axis, as pictured below:

I got this from Wikipedia.

The window may expand or shrink, which is what people mean when they talk about the Overton window “shifting.” What seemed unthinkable yesterday – like imprisoning a student for co-authoring an op-ed in a college newspaper – becomes viewed as acceptable, or even sensible, today.

Even I, frequent chronicler of outrage and despair, find myself struggling to keep my own Overton window fixed in place. How does one keep up with the hundreds of cases like the young woman above, or the desecration of our Constitution, or the carelessness with which the administration dispatches entire federal agencies, not to mention human beings? How does one manage to stay informed without succumbing to resignation?

Incoming attacks against the nation are coming from all directions. Trying to digest the entire smorgasbord about as well as taking cod liver oil for measles. Of late, I’ve been triaging my news consumption. 10,000 HHS workers fired for no reason? Social security being dismantled? Millions losing their right to vote? I’ll get to all of that later. Right now, I’m trying to understand why they put tariffs on Narnia. I can’t stay on top of all of it, and I’m not going to try.

Instead, I’m trying to preserve my sanity by reminding myself what I believe. I believe democracy is good. Free speech is good. Community, charity, and empathy – these are all good. Caring for our neighbors. Caring for strangers, here and around the world. Good. Pooling our money together in the form of progressive taxation to effectuate more help for more people than would be otherwise possible? Also good.

It strikes me as absurd that I even have to make the point that these things are “good,” but I must because every virtue I mentioned is currently under threat. Some of the items, like helping strangers around the world for a penny on the dollar, are already gone. Empathy, Elon Musk tells us between sobs over his falling stock prices, is “the weakness of Western civilization.” Even representative democracy is now viewed by a sizeable minority of the American population as an inconvenience at best, an anachronism at worst. The fact that nobody reading this will even be surprised by these words demonstrates how far the Overton window has already shifted.

While I never believed that the scenario through which we’re currently living was impossible, I thought it so improbable that it caught me off-guard last time around and, even though I found myself screaming into the wind about what it might look like this time around, I am still astounded every single day by the callousness, cowardice, and stupidity emanating from our nation’s capital.

Again and again, I find myself struck by my own naivety. Why did I ever feel secure in this place? Why did I place my trust in a 250-year-old piece of parchment? Why did I ignore the warnings of all those who told us, across the centuries, that those with low moral turpitude might, indeed, seize the levers of power and that those whose love of power and money exceeds their love of justice would allow it to happen? I can’t say I ever believed in “American exceptionalism,” but I allowed myself to believe that our history as the home of the maligned and dispossessed would keep our darkest impulses in check.

Yes, I’m an idiot.

And yet, I prefer my idiocy to the callousness of those, like Mike Johnson and his cabal of Republican lickspittles, who happily turn their back on the nation’s values in the name of political expediency. I prefer leaving my heart wide open to shuttering it against the cold Washington wind. I would rather be heartbroken than heartless. My Overton window may be drafty, but at least I know it still works.

Where all of this is heading, I have no idea. What I do know is that the administration shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, they’re accelerating their project to remake the nation in Putin’s image. Which calls to mind another sort of window which I once thought I would never have to discuss when considering the nation – it’s the one people fall out of with surprising regularity in the land of Trump’s greatest patron. Such windows in this country remain largely shut for now, but for how long?