Though Nothing Is Surprising, We Must Stay Horrified at the Horrifying
We are in a war for our attention.
After almost ten years of nonsense and cruelty from Donald Trump and the GOP it is very understandable for us to become people who are chronically unsurprised. Maybe you already are. Scrolling the latest news with the affect of someone checking the weather in a city you don’t live in. Gray, rainy, chance of fascism. Nothing unexpected.
I can hear the shrugs. “Of course that happened.” “Of course he said that.” “Of course they’re doing this.” It’s the new baseline position of the perpetually braced. Half a nation reaching the emotional equivalent of a hospital porter who has seen it all taking a nonchalant drag from a cigarette.
And I get it. It’s exhausting being shocked all the time. Our nervous systems are not really built for all this information. There’s simply too much. Too many headlines that want to open your heart with a pry bar. Too many men who look like they were carved out of cold deli meat making decisions that affect tens of millions of people. Too many files emerging from too many servers in too many jurisdictions containing too many names attached to too many crimes so grotesque you can’t say them out loud around children or pets. Too many videos, always in portrait mode, documenting things that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago and are now common, slotted into our daily digital consumption.
Cynicism usually feels like quite an adult posture. Surprise is for people who still say things like “this isn’t who we are,” which at this point is either naïve or historically ignorant rather than any form of aspirational.
But here’s the problem: becoming unsurprisable is not the same thing as being resilient. And if we let our surprise truly die, our sense of horror can fade with it. The soul calcifies. The moral nerve endings dull. The house keeps burning but the alarms are on mute.
Which is how you end up with entire swaths of the population scrolling through the latest details of the Epstein files — names and dates and documented abuse networks — like they’re reading Yelp reviews. Typing jokes. Making memes. Not because we don’t care, but because caring has become physically painful, and numbness is a more efficient operating system for existing in a society that expects you to watch a genocide before 8am and then function professionally at your work desk.
It’s how you get ICE agents prowling through neighborhoods with cocky confidence with the “errand” of terrorizing entire families. It’s how you get AI technocrats treated like endearing sci-fi side characters instead of the oligarchs quietly re-drafting civilization in private Slack channels while subsisting on Soylent and the fumes of their own self-regard. And it’s how you get Gaza, bombed, starved, bulldozed, and still talked as a “complex geopolitical situation” rather than the moral collapse of our western governments.
And floating above it all like a tragicomic balloon animal is Trump. A man whose personal decline is neither secret nor metaphorical, but an observable, time-lapse deterioration playing out on camera in high definition. A man who once commanded a kind of chaos-theater charisma now wobbling into microphones and mixing up world leaders like a confused train announcer. A man whose orbit still warps national policy even as his coherence flickers like a fluorescent light in a gas station bathroom. And somehow none of this surprises us. Not the petty press conferences, not the dementia-adjacent ramblings, not the violent cosplay of the people who love him.
Outrage is everywhere, but it is not the same thing as horror. Horror is a moral organ. Horror is the internal alarm that something incredibly precious is being destroyed. Horror is the exact sensation we are supposed to feel when children are abused by the ultra-powerful and the ultra-wealthy and those who traffic them operate with impunity because their clients keep the yachts afloat and the stock market rising.
Horror is proof that you’re still human.
It’s not easy, so of course people retreat into the safety of being unsurprised. But staying appropriately horrified is not about amplifying emotional pain. It’s about refusing to normalize and accept cruelty just because the cruelty is repetitive and unavoidable. The horror is a signal. And while you don’t have to keep the alarm on full volume 24/7, you might want to make sure the red light still flashes.
The key to this is to keep paying attention. And make no mistake, we are in a war for our attention...