American View: Stealing a moment of joy in a world on fire

Human Resources10 Feb 2026

I feel guilty. History tells me I shouldn’t, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve let our side down. I didn’t attend a protest against authoritarianism and extrajudicial murder this last weekend. I didn’t donate money or supplies or labour to a resistance group. I didn’t take the piss out of neo-fascist performance artists on social media. I didn’t do any of the activities that resistance “leaders” insist are necessary to hold the line against the current regime’s relentless dismantling of the American Experiment. Instead of anything “useful,” I laughed with some friends for a few hours on Saturday afternoon.

Here’s what happened and how I got there: for the past twenty years or so, I’ve been running tabletop RPG games for my friends and family members. Mostly Dungeons & Dragons 3^rd edition, Pathfinder 1^st Editions, and Champions 4^th edition stuff. We’d get together on person and play in my kitchen before COVID, then switched over to Zoom sessions during the lockdown. We’ve been playing like that every 3-6 weeks or so since. Players have come and gone as life got complicated. Nonetheless, it’s been a fun way to stay connected with friends and to burn off some stress after a long workweek.

Our current game – the Iron Gods adventure path for Pathfinder 1E – has been running since February of 2025. We’re only halfway through book 2 (of 6) because it’s vexingly difficult to schedule sessions where at least four of the six players can attend. That factor has given us a lot of unclaimed time for other activities.

One of my Iron Gods players is my youngest son, Austin. He’s been playing TTRPGs since he was five and is a fiendishly clever player. For IG, he asked if his best mate Brennan could join and help him play twin brothers: local ne’er-do-wells who separated visitors from their cash before the main story began. Austin’s setup was too good to pass up. Brennan is a reliable player and eagerly took on the role of the laconic twin to compliment Austin’s manic sales weasel positivity. It’s been a blast watching the two of them improv.

They always keep me guessing, which greatly increases the challenge of staying a step ahead of them.

Brennan was inspired by the “street hustler twins” experience in IG and volunteered to take his own shot at running a game. He invited Austin, me, and two of his coworkers – Mika and Kay – to give his debut a try. Ambitiously, Brennan wanted to run a folk horror themed game in a new system – D&D 5^th Edition (2024 revision) – that we’d all have to learn together. Points for chutzpah!

We’ve been playing Brennan’s game sporadically since July and it’s been a hoot. This last Saturday, we all got together for an old-fashioned in-person session at Austin’s flat. Five people sitting around a small kitchen table with piles of dice, paper character sheets, and soda cans just like it was 1985 again. Most of our interaction consisted of jokes, laughter, and the inevitable “betrayal” of one’s dice at a critical moment. It was only four hours stolen from of a sunny winter afternoon, but it was a restorative and uplifting experience … fun without complications, and socialising without drama. A welcome break from the real world.

That last thought is what gnawed at me on the drive home. I spent an hour in awful Texas traffic worrying about what else I should be doing with my limited time, including:

Research and apply for a new job, since I was laid off in early January
Reconnect with friends who are also looking for work and help them where I can
Prepare my key talking points for an upcoming podcast interview
Catch up on all the latest news about the inexorable collapse of our nation
Sort through all the old IT kit in my office and box up loads for electronics recycling
Recover my wife’s crashed PC (or at least save her data)
Triage boxes and boxes of old books to see what can be donated
Clean out the stacks of goods and housewares left behind when our kids moved out
Research preventative maintenance requirements for my car
Shread six months of bills, receipts, and other sensitive printed information, and
Write a column that somehow magically brings down our corrupt government 🙄

I realized somewhere between the traffic jam on Interstate 35 and the traffic jam on Interstate 820 that I was simultaneously (a) happy that I got a welcome respite from my seemingly overwhelming backlog of active tasks and (b) deeply regretful that I’d taken advantage of said respite rather than doing something more “productive.”

I don’t see much point in “raising awareness” at this stage of the game. Anyone who doesn’t know what’s happening to the country by now is either incapable of understanding it or wants the USA to fall to totalitarianism.

This is where most of my friends and family find themselves in 1st Quarter 2026. We’re attempting to live our lives as if everything were normal and struggling to find effective ways to push back against a world that is cataclysmically not normal. Everyone feels like we should be mortified that we’re not doing enough, even there’s so very little we can do locally. There’s no practical way to go join the protests in other states when there aren’t enough resources to make it happen (see above, re: laid off in January). Nonetheless, there’s a persistent urge to step up and do one’s part whilst realising there isn’t a way to do said part without making everything significantly worse at home.

To be fair, as Sarah Sophie Flicker pointed out in The Nation last August, the Danes’ resistance tactics employed against Nazi Germany included exactly what I spent my Saturday afternoon doing: “The contemporary list of commandments includes demands to protect education, free speech, and fair elections and calls to support unions and the people who are under attack by the administration. It encourages people to create ‘subversive art and random acts of joy’ and to ‘slow down, obstruct, and destroy the machine of fascism.’”

Sure enough, the time I spent at Brennan’s game on Saturday did count as both “subversive art” and “random acts of joy” since our party’s jokes included a lot of anti-authoritarian quips and mockery directed at mewling quislings like Ted “Blobfish” Cruz, Stephen “White Nationalist Dracula” Miller, and Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem. Everyone at the table encouraged everyone else to remain resolute.

Still, that just didn’t feel like it was enough. That’s exactly what we do all the time; there wasn’t any special effort made beyond our normal downtime activities … and it felt like there should’ve been.

It wasn’t like I needed to convince anyone at the gaming table that NAZIS ARE BAD; they’re all educated and understand the stakes. So … what did I really accomplish other than getting a few laughs about topics we already agree on?

The administration’s goal is to exhaust the population’s will to resist … and it’s working. There are too many “intolerable scandals” to keep up with, let alone to fight. Everyone’s rights and protections are eroding before our eyes, week after week, yet there’s no way to reverse the erasure of government checks and balances. Our opposition party seems worse than useless, and our guardrail institutions have proven themselves to be thoroughly corrupted. What can any one person – or even a handful of not-billionaires – do that matters?

I don’t have an answer. The reason I shared this story is to illustrate the sort of chronic stress and inner turmoil that your colleagues are experiencing in this, the year of our dying democracy, 2026. Even if you yourself aren’t, everyone around you is fighting an internal battle with themselves about what, if anything, they should be doing to address a challenge so huge that nothing that one person can do seems to make a difference. Even joining a protest feels like a pointless endeavour; when 7,000,000 people marched in the “No Kings” protest and made no impact whatsoever on the regime’s draconian assault on human rights, what did the 7,000,001s participant matter? Sure, we all believe that “every little bit helps,” but the evidence just doesn’t substantiate the cliché. It’s thoroughly exhausting, just as intended.

So … if you hold any position of power over others in your workplace, I urge you to have some compassion and empathy for the people around you. Odds are, most everyone you pass in the halls is depressed, fatigued, and frustratingly forbidden from talking about current events by laughably obsolete company policy. The people in the cubicle are already at their carrying capacity for frustration; if you can’t give them your empathy, at least don’t make things worse by ignoring their suffering.

You don’t have to agree with your colleagues’ political positions; even the supporters of the current regime are wrestling with mixed feelings. The last eighteen months have been a deluge of disappointment and disillusionment for The Faithful. Everyone is struggling with current events and stressed out trying to work out what – if anything – they should be doing. Be humane. The absolute worst thing that anyone in power can do right now is to pretend like everything is fine when it so assuredly isn’t.

Human Resources