There’s no cavalry coming. It’s up to us.

I want to affirm as normal the feeling that it’s scary living in a community and country where so many otherwise competent adults, including nurses and people who teach our kids, are spreading disinformation that is killing people, or simply don’t care that hospitals/ICUs are full. And where leaders have shunned their responsibility to look out for our safety, choosing instead to downplay and lie about this pandemic, resist every effort to fight it, make fun of masks, promote non-existent “cures,” and tie the hands of local officials trying to protect their community.

I’ve been agonizing over a decision to travel to Houston for a class that could easily be delivered online, wondering why we’re pretending hospitals aren’t full, and I finally found words for what I must accept as reality: The cavalry isn’t coming.

Our own Capitol fell just 7 months ago, the Vice President narrowly escaping with his life. We’ve lost our longest war and find ourselves, again, leaving in chaos and disgrace.

Millions of Americans, having soured on democracy, now openly admire Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban and would gladly overturn the last election and give their man near-absolute power for life.

We’ve seen a blizzard of lies bury truth, fear-mongering extinguish rationality, and a delusional darkness swallow people we thought we knew, reducing them to angry robots programmed to parrot an incoherent narrative whose breathtaking absurdity is obvious to everyone but them.

There’s no cavalry coming. It’s up to us.