So, my friend Danielle Moodie and I have a launched a new weekly show (Wednesdays at 12pm eastern) we’re calling the Check-In. We’ll go live and discuss the experience of living through rising authoritarianism, get into the emotional and psychological toll, where we are, and what we can learn from the moment to get past this crisis and make something better.

In this first episode, we touch base and, guess what, we’re not feeling great. The impact of watching the President of the United States laugh it up with an autocratic buddy in the White House, fantasize about sending American citizens to a nightmare prison, and collaborating to keep an illegally deported man prisoner, just happens to take a toll. This leads Danielle and I to discuss how we, as a culture, are experiencing stages of grief, which can either keep us stuck in this mess or allow us to move forward.

We also touch on the damage of delusional dynamics, including denying the history of white supremacy, state-level violence, and capitalist exploitation that has spanned the entirety of this country’s life and remains there to this day. Viewing the nation as a large, extended family, and how these abuses mirror what many of us have experienced in our lives, and how that plays out politically and culturally, also gets a moment of consideration.

I left this first episode feeling, as I always do when Danielle and I have these discussions, heard and seen and hopeful that we’ll continue to drill down deeper into what’s going on and, as a result, win the future we deserve. It’s going to take work. Lots of work. But we can do it.

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