Donald Trump's urges couldn't be stranger, more destructive, or more violent. The most recent example has, of course, been his decision to attack Iran, where, on the very first day of his attack (and Israel's), 165 people, mostly young girls, were slaughtered in a single primary -- yes, primary! -- school in the southern part of that country. And that, of course, was just the beginning.
Meanwhile, in this country, the president and his crew have loosed ICE agents on immigrants in a distinctly devastating fashion. They have driven many Americans (or future Americans) into their homes for fear that their world might soon be all too literally ripped away from them, while actually killing or wounding others of us. No American, it seems, is beyond the Trumpian grasp anymore. Even in my own neighborhood in New York City recently, ICE agents (who lied to get into her apartment) grabbed Elmina Aghayeva, a 29-year-old Columbia University student from Azerbaijan, and only released her when this city's mayor, Zohran Mamdani, went to the White House and spoke out for her.
And she, of course, was a -- or perhaps the -- lucky one in Donald Trump's America, the place that TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer considers today in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. Tom
After Loneliness
Left for Dead in Donald Trump's America, Communal Life Stirs
All the way back in 2023, the surgeon general diagnosed Americans as suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. More recently, amid the rise of American fascism, I started to notice that people were not only lonely but had also begun referring to the world as simply "the news." Perceived that way -- as a phenomenon pre-packaged via our devices -- our bond with the world was distilled into just two options: consume the news or don't. A sense of powerlessness is baked into such a perception.
By contrast, I remembered once reading an interview with billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who described the world as atoms constantly shifting and moving. With intention and focus, she pointed out, you can move those atoms yourself, and so move the world. Baked into that worldview was a sense of interconnectedness, not to mention power.
Was such a perspective a luxury of the billionaire class?
In fact, no. Lots of non-billionaires, including many young people, regard the world as so many moveable atoms and they're acting accordingly. In the process, they're piercing the isolation in their neighborhoods, schools, and even workplaces, while occasionally quelling their own loneliness, too.
A Party in the Park
In December, when thousands of ICE agents descended on Minneapolis, neighbors started checking in on one another. A woman I'll call "M" learned something new about her South Minneapolis intersection: dozens of Ecuadorian families live within just a few blocks of her. (M chose to be identified only by her first initial to protect her privacy as well as her neighborhood collaboration.) She also learned that many of those immigrants were not going to work because they were too afraid to make the commute. As a result, their families were struggling to pay bills.
That was when a few people got onto a chat thread and organized a rideshare system for the neighborhood. The thread quickly grew and now, M told me, there are more than 200 people on a chat thread covering just a handful of city blocks through which neighbors connect for rides that get adults safely to work and kids safely to school.
"Just in our little neighborhood, we're fielding 20 to 30 rides a day," M told me, though we spoke after the official end of the Trump administration's Operation Metro Surge -- its local deportation-machine operation. (ICE is, however, still present in the area.)
Notably, that rideshare effort brought some unanticipated changes to their community. Neighbors, who previously hadn't known each other at all, now spend time together daily, chatting and learning about each other's lives.
"This whole experience has rewoven who we consider our community," M told me. "When this is over, we're going to throw a big party in the park."
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