Today, the President of the United States admitted, out loud, that “smart people don’t like me.”

And yet, this won’t get the attention it deserves.

Because we are all living in the United States of Numbness, where even the insults from our own leader, hurled directly at his followers, barely register anymore.

In eight months, in just eight short months, we have watched our country fractured.
Fractured in a way our enemies always dreamed of doing.
Fractured in a way so many bad actors tried and failed to accomplish.

But this time it wasn’t an outside job that did it.
It wasn’t foreign armies or bombs or cyberattacks.
It was one man with a playbook, Project 2025, doing from the inside what no outside force ever could.

And now the break is everywhere.
Our alliances shaken.
Our neighbors divided.
Our children watching violence play out on repeat.

And the danger is how quickly we grow numb to it. Each new fracture, each new outrage, piles on top of the last until it all starts to feel routine. And nowhere has that numbness felt heavier than in what we all saw this past week.

This past week spurred even more numbness.
I was scrolling, just like millions of others on social media. And then suddenly, there it was. The video of Charlie Kirk being shot and passing away. Before I could process what was happening, it was over. Before I could even blink, I had seen the act itself, the life leaving his body, the horror of seeing people running for their lives.

It wasn’t hidden on some dark corner of the internet. It was everywhere, autoplaying in feeds, pushed into timelines, impossible to avoid.

I’ve been vocal. I have opposed everything Charlie Kirk stood for. I believe his politics were poisonous for this country. I believe his words divided us, hurt us, and dragged America backwards.

But I need to be clear: what shook me wasn’t about who he was. It was about what I saw.

Murder. In real time. On my screen.

And the repulsion I felt was separate from him. It was about the act itself. It was about watching another human being die in front of me. That kind of violence leaves a heaviness in your chest that doesn’t go away quickly. I carried it for days, that gross, unsettled feeling, the pit in my stomach.

It reminded me of a time I’ve felt it before.

Back in 1986, when I was home from school with the chicken pox, sitting in front of the television, watching the Challenger space shuttle launch. We had been celebrating the lead-up to this day at school for weeks. We were excited. There was a teacher on board, Christa McAuliffe, and it felt like all of us were going with her into the stars.

But instead, I sat there sick on the couch and watched the shuttle explode. I remember the confusion. The fear. Not fear for my own safety, but fear of the unexpected. Fear of what else could happen, if this could happen.

Back at school, my classmates told me what that day was like for them. There was screaming in classrooms, teachers on the verge of tears themselves. Alongside that shuttle, something else exploded too, the feeling that the world was steady, predictable, safe.

That’s what horror does. It shatters the illusion that the world is steady. And when you see too many horrors, you become numb.

But back then, we had buffers. We had teachers who helped us process it. We had parents and news anchors who explained, who tried to give us context, who reminded us that while tragedy happens, it doesn’t define everything. The difference was that those tragedies, as shocking as they were, were framed for us by adults. They were mediated. We weren’t left alone with them on endless replay.

And again, this isn’t about Kirk or about comparing the people involved. This is about the act itself, about what it means to see something horrific unfold in real time.

Even then, there was shock, grief, confusion, but not numbness. We still knew how to feel. We hadn’t yet learned to scroll past horror as if it were just another headline. The way we processed tragedy then is the opposite of how children are forced to process it now.

Today, our kids don’t get that luxury. They can’t escape these things and go to safe places and safe people where they are guaranteed not to face more.

They see murder as it happens, and then over and over again on loop. They see blood, bullets, and broken bodies.

They don’t get the buffer. They don’t get the chance to process before it sears itself into their minds.

And that scares me more than almost anything.

Because desensitization is its own kind of violence. And numbness is dangerous.

When murder becomes spectacle, it plants seeds. It numbs us. It makes horror feel normal. It convinces young men, and yes, they are almost always young white men (statistically 97% of the shooters) that the way to make themselves heard is to pick up a gun and reenact the horror they saw online.

We may have lit another fire without even realizing it.

And I keep thinking: what does it do to a generation of children to see this again and again?

To have their innocence interrupted by the sight of a man gunned down in real time?

To watch their peers share it, push it into each other’s feeds, dare each other to look?

It’s human curiosity, yes. To want to see, to want to convince young minds that it really happened. But there’s a cost. And it’s one we haven’t reckoned with.

And then the endless school shootings. What has that done to our children? The ones who survived it and the ones who fear it happening every day they walk into their schools.

Violence piles on violence until the numbness itself becomes a kind of silence. And in that silence, hypocrisy takes root.

And then there’s the hypocrisy.

The people who say they are outraged that he was murdered “for free speech” are the very same people now threatening others for using their free speech to talk about him.

I see people posting his words, not commentary, not spin, just his direct quotes. And they’re being attacked for it.

That’s not honoring free speech. That’s strangling it.

And I can’t help but wonder: would Charlie Kirk himself have been angry about that? Maybe. Maybe not. I do know he once said that some amount of loss of life was worth it for the Second Amendment.

I don’t believe that.

I don’t believe any amount of loss of life is “worth it.”

Charlie Kirk should still be here. Not because I agreed with him, but because violence should never be the answer.

And every child killed in school shootings should still be here, too. Their desks shouldn’t be empty. Their backpacks shouldn’t gather dust in closets. Their names shouldn’t be read out at vigils, year after year, while politicians do nothing.

This is the numbness we live with now.

We don’t just lose lives. We lose our ability to feel the loss.

We scroll past murder. We absorb horror in silence. We grow used to the sight of it. And then we forget what it’s supposed to mean.

And while we’re numb, the world shifts beneath us.

Trump said just this week that maybe the Russian drones over Poland were “an accident.” Poland’s leaders pushed back hard, because nothing about 20 drones is accidental. And today, Romania reported its own airspace breached, NATO scrambling jets to intercept. These aren’t mistakes. They’re tests. And they keep coming.

When a NATO ally is attacked, even by “accident,” the treaty obligates us to respond. Pretending 20 drones crossing borders is no big deal undermines deterrence and invites more aggression.

And while NATO scrambles, Trump weakens us. He flatters dictators who are five steps ahead of him, while insulting the allies who actually hold us together.

He tells us he’s a dealmaker, a negotiator, but he’s getting played. Look at TikTok. China now has direct access to millions of American children, feeding them information, propaganda, influence, and they refused to approve a sale unless trade and tariff demands were met first. Trump dangled tariff relief, but China held all the cards. They hold the power. We don’t. National security experts across both parties have warned about this for years, not just because of data collection, but because whoever controls the algorithm controls what millions of kids see and believe.

And the scariest part is how numb we’ve become to watching it happen in real time, our leverage slipping away while we scroll.

We are eight months into his four-year term, and there is a very real threat that by the end, we will have no allies left. NATO could fracture. We could be cut off from critical medications manufactured abroad. Our global standing could collapse until we look more like a developing nation than a world leader. We don’t get to skip past history. Nations that lose allies, lose credibility, and lose their supply chains don’t stay superpowers. They slide.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. The seeds were planted years ago.

Back in 2019, Trump withheld nearly $400 million in military aid from Ukraine, aid Congress had already approved, while pressing President Zelenskyy to announce investigations into the Bidens. Officials testified that this was a quid pro quo, plain and simple.

That scandal led to his first impeachment. But it also sent a signal to Russia: Ukraine could be treated as a pawn. U.S. support could be politicized, leveraged, delayed. And Putin took note.

Russia understood. America under Trump was unreliable, transactional, willing to trade away allies for personal gain. That crack in the wall was all Putin needed.

And now, Trump tries to rewrite history, claiming Ukraine’s war is Biden’s fault. But we know better. He created the cracks. He created the opening.

He thrives on tearing us apart, calling division strength, calling lies truth, calling numbness patriotism.

He counts on our numbness to keep us divided. But numbness is not strength.
It is surrender.
That’s what authoritarianism depends on: a nation too numb to resist, too dulled by violence and chaos to rise up and say no.

And I want to be clear about something.
When I talk about unity, I am not talking about uniform unity.

That’s not possible.
And it’s not even desirable.

We cannot unify with people who define “unity” as us giving up our humanity, laying down our love of country, and letting them prop up a dictatorship.
We cannot unify with those who want a fascist regime, or who believe Donald Trump is good for America.
We cannot unify with people whose entire politics is built on hating others for the color of their skin, or who they love, or what they believe.

That is not unity.
That is surrender.

Real unity is different.
It doesn’t mean everyone agrees.
It doesn’t mean everyone looks the same or worships the same or votes the same.
It means we commit to something higher than our divisions.

It means we refuse to hate our neighbors just because the President says we should.
It means we stand together against cruelty, against lies, against authoritarianism.
It means we choose democracy, even when it’s messy.
It means we choose love of country, even when we don’t love everything about it.

Unity isn’t uniformity.
It’s finding common cause in the belief that America is worth fighting for, not tearing down.

I’m from the United States of Numbness. But I don’t want to stay here. Because numbness is what lets them win. And feeling is what saves us. And it’s time we all start feeling again.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

P.S. Please keep talking to your neighbors, your friends, and your family. Don’t unfollow them if you believe there is still something reasonable inside them. Remind them what’s at stake. Remind them what Trump has done, and is doing, and ask if that is really the future they want for our country. Share this post with them. Hope can be found in many places, often in people we once thought were too far gone in the MAGA cult. Many are beginning to realize it isn’t the path they want to walk anymore, and we need to be there to guide them.