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I am taken aback, and not for the first time, that terrible and shocking things now just flow over Americans as if chaos is part of a normal day. We dont have to accept the new normal.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

I began the morning, as I often do, with a cup of coffee and a discussion with a friend. We were talking about last weeks nuclear warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and while we were on the subject of unhinged threats, I mentioned Donald Trumps bizarre statement over the weekend that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a DEATH WISH, with a racist slam on McConnells wife, Elaine Chao, added in for good measure.

Oh, yeah, my friend said. Id forgotten about that. To be honest, so had I. But when I opened Twitter today, The Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwells tweet that we are still under-reacting to the threat of Trump jumped out at me. Shes right.

We are also, in a way, underreacting to the war in Ukraine. Our attention, understandably, has become focused on the human drama. But we are losing our grip on the larger story and greater danger: Russias dictator is demanding that he be allowed to take whatever he wants, at will and by force. He is now, as both my colleague Anne Applebaum and I have written, at war not only with Ukraine, but with the entire international order. He (like his admirer Trump) is at war with democracy itself.

And somehow, we have all just gotten used to it.

We are inured to these events not because we are callous or uncaring. Rather, people such as Trump and Putin have sent us into a tailspin, a vortex of mad rhetoric and literal violence that has unmoored us from any sense of the moral principles that once guided us, however imperfectly, both at home and abroad. This is the widening gyre W. B. Yeats wrote about in 1919, the sense that anarchy is loosed upon the world as things fall apart.

For many years, I have often felt this way in the course of an ordinary day, when it seems as if I am living in a dystopian alternate universe. A time of hope and progress that began in the late 1980s was somehow derailed, perhaps even before the last chunks of the Berlin Walls corpse were being cleared from the Friedrichstrasse. (This was a time, for example, when we started taking people like Ross Perot seriously, which was an early warning sign of our incipient postCold War stupor.) Here are some of the many moments in which I have felt that sense of vertigo:

Against all this, how can we not be overwhelmed? We stand in the middle of a flood of horrendous events, shouted down by the outsize voices of people such as Trump and his stooges, enervated and exhausted by the dark threats of dictators such as Putin. Its just too much, especially when we already have plenty of other responsibilities, including our jobs and taking care of our loved ones. We think we are alone and helpless, because there is nothing to convince us otherwise. How can anyone fight the sense that the center cannot hold?

But we are not helpless. The center can holdbecause we are the center. We are citizens of a democracy who can refuse to accept the threats of mob bosses, whether in Florida or in Russia. We can and must vote, but thats not enough. We must also speak out. By temperament, I am not much for public demonstrations, but if thats your preferred form of expression, then organize and march. The rest of us, however, can act, every day, on a small scale.

Speak up. Do not stay silent when our fellow citizens equivocate and rationalize. Defend whats right, whether to a friend or a family member. Refuse to laugh along with the flip cynicism that makes a joke of everything. Stay informed so that the stink of a death threat from a former president or the rattle of a nuclear saber from a Russian autocrat does not simply rush past you as if youve just driven by a sewage plant.

None of this is easy to do. But we are entering a time of important choices, both at home at the ballot box and abroad on foreign battlefields, and the centerthe confident and resolute defense of peace, freedom, and the rule of lawmust hold.

Related:

Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality

Five years ago, after Hurricane Irma pummeled Floridas Gulf Coast, I rode a boat through the canals of Cape Coral, the Waterfront Wonderland, Americas fastest-growing city at the time. It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze and just a few puffs of clouds, so as I pointed to the blown-out lanais and piles of storm debris, my guide, a snowbird named Brian Tattersall, kept teasing me for missing the point of a magical afternoon. He said I sounded like his northern friends who always told him he was crazy to live in the Florida hurricane zone.

Come on. Does this feel crazy? he asked, as we drifted past some palm trees. Cape Coral is a low-lying, pancake-flat spit of exposed former swampland, honeycombed by an astonishing 400 miles of drainage ditches disguised as real-estate amenities, but to Tattersall it was a low-tax subtropical Venice where he could dock his 29-foot Sea Fox in the canal behind his house. When I asked if Irma would slow down the citys population boom, he scoffed: No way.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Read. A new poem by Mairead Small Staid.

Though each night he cried out, each night / no angels came, no ministers of grace to save the son / from the spotlight glare of grief.

Watch. Hocus Pocus 2, on Disney+. The sequel wears its ridiculousness so proudly that its impossible to disdain.

Play our daily crossword.

My colleagues will be writing the Daily for the next few days; Im back on Friday. But I dont want to start off the week on such a grim note, so let me suggest a bit of light reading if youre looking for an escape from the news.

Often, when I see a reference to the Yeats poem The Second Coming (which includes the expression the widening gyre), I think of one of my favorite books, The Widening Gyrean entry in the Spenser detective series by the late Robert B. Parker. Spenser, an urbane and wisecracking Boston gumshoe, was played capably on television by Robert Urich (and later by a woefully miscast Joe Mantegna), but the books are a delight, especially if you read them in order. The Widening Gyre, however, is great as a quick stand-alone read. Written in the mid-1980s, its a political blackmail mystery set in Boston, Washington, and my hometown area of Springfield, Massachusetts. It has some wry laughs in it too: Spenser, good Bostonian that he is, rolls his eyes at Washingtons inability to deal with snow, protects his clients while calling himself a policy implementation specialist, and downs a thug with what he considers maybe the best left hook ever thrown in Springfield. Its a nice visit back to an earlier and simpler timeespecially in politics.

Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump, Putin, and the Assault of Anarchy - The Atlantic