A friend of mine who is politically active and engaged every day in justice work here in our town recently confessed to me and a group of friends, “Dozens of times a day, I look around at everyone seemingly on autopilot, and I just want to scream, ‘The world is fucking on fire, people!’”

I felt seen.

According to a recent NPR article, three major reports warn that Democracy in America under Trump is eroding rapidly.

The piece cites an annual report by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, that has lowered America’s democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.

Staffan Lindberg, V-Dem’s Founding Director, is quoted as saying, “The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, which the founders wanted to avoid. It’s the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world.”

This should be a five-alarm fire, all hands on deck, stop-whatever-the hell-you’re-doing-and-get-in-the-game, national emergency, but to a terrifying number of Americans, it simply isn’t.

Despite the unceasing nightmare fuel of the news cycle, it seems like most people are still trying to do business as usual: going through the motions as if we’re not losing elemental freedoms by the hour, as if the checks and balances are still in place, as if all we need to do is show up at the polls in November.

From the outside, everything looks perfectly normal: pickleball courts are packed, people are out on restaurant patios having lunch, and weekend parties are in full swing. It doesn’t look like a failing democracy, which is part of the reason we’re in such trouble right now.

Many of us are fully cognizant of the steady slide toward the abyss, but it sure feels like an alarming portion of our family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers can’t see all that we’ve lost over the last 15 months: the dismantling of 250-year-old systems of governance, the reversal of human and civil rights that took generations to secure, the erosion of protections for people and the land, and the suffocation of the agency of its citizens.

Or, maybe they see it, and they just can’t manage to care enough to stop scrolling or streaming to do anything about it.

And, honestly, this is what terrifies me: not the brazen, incessant attempts by this regime to dismantle every structural system and safeguard set in place by our founders, but the collective apathy it is being greeted with.

I’m beginning to fear that Americans as a whole are too lazy to prevent the collapse of our Republic, not because we’re unaware, but because we are determined to remain unbothered.

We’ve become a nation of soft convictions and low energy, anesthetized by a numbing cocktail of Amazon Prime immediate gratification, social media dopamine dependency, stream-binge diversion, and artery-clogging, drive-thru self-soothing.

Oh, sure, we can manage to boycott a fascist-friendly big box store for a couple of weeks, but eventually ease and proximity win out, and we’re right back to tacitly funding ICE because we just had to have new patio furniture.

We may be temporarily devastated by scenes on our timelines of the genocide in Gaza, the growing devastation in Iran, or the crimes against humanity here at the hands of a weaponized law enforcement, but we’re quickly yanked away by videos of sass-talking birds or killer cheese dip recipes.

When I detox fully from American exceptionalism, I wonder if the United States has the wherewithal to prevent ourselves from falling into a dictatorship; if we’re really made of the stuff our forebears were.

Are we willing to get our hands dirty, to alter our previously planned lives, and to experience the discomfort that comes when the urgency of the moment refuses to defer to the story we want to be true?

Do we have enough good people who are willing to move together across lines of politics, religion, race, nation of origin, and orientation in sustained acts of civil disobedience and systemic disruption?

Do we have the diligence and courage to risk the loss of something: time, money, comfort, to ensure we don’t lose something far more precious?

Do we have the attention span and intestinal fortitude to fight like we’ve never had to fight before, because we’ve never had to go to war with our government in this way before?

I gotta say, I’m concerned that the answers don’t seem encouraging.

Look, I believe in the need to live fully in times when the darkness is thick and oppressive; to make sure that we’re not so consumed with encroaching horrors that we eliminate the restorative and joyful experiences of being human. We can’t and shouldn’t spend 24 hours a day in a state of unrelenting panic. Our ability to stay in the fight for the long haul is dependent on our ability to find moments of pleasure and rest and even escape.

But if we’re going to reverse the democracy death spiral much of the world is predicting we’re in, a lot more of us are going to need to get far angrier and more activated than we are right now.

I’m running out of ways to try to dislodge people from their stasis, and I’m beginning to doubt that anything will ever be a red line for some of them.

Democracy doesn’t always die in darkness.

Sometimes, it dies in the glow of a phone screen.