The dark clouds have not just been gathering on the weather radar but on just about every other radar you can think of.
People I meet every day, who consider themselves politically ‘middle-of-the-road’ and declare their general disinterest in politics, even as a topic of casual conversation, are really worried about what is happening in the USA right now.
Some even confess to a palpable fear that there might be another great war coming into which we will all be pulled.
They seek reassurance from those they know are interested in these things that they are overreacting to social media and that it won’t come to that.
They berate the President of the USA as a megalomaniac and wonder how he gets away with it.
During the Covid pandemic, they berated Boris Johnson and wondered the same thing.
What is making them more anxious is that everywhere they look, the political leadership of elected governments is seriously lacking leadership, common sense, or any clear strategy for getting the state of the world.
It is now disturbing their sleep and sense of wellbeing. It’s a bit like a bad dream that keeps haunting you the next day when you are wide awake, except that it isn’t a dream.
They were shaken by the brazen cruelty of Netanyahu but, as many people in the world to whom our own ‘war’ was no more than a ‘foreign news’ item, they considered it sorted once a ceasefire was announced as being off their radar.
Friends and family in the USA, equally disinterested in politics, aren’t helping to ease their anxiety because now that the ‘Facetime’ chats include topics about Trump, they are either downright scared stiff, or create even more anxiety by turning out to be generally in favour of the ICE agents, and are convinced that those protecting their neighbours and protesting against deportations and racism are indeed ‘domestic terrorists’, and deserve all they get.
People with relatives in the USA are wondering if they wouldn’t be better to pack up and come home.
It’s like a reverse of the old conversations when they worried over there if their family here were safe every time they heard of another incident in Ireland.
Sometimes people who are very actively involved in saving the planet and its inhabitants from the excesses of Capitalism, and those whose money sees them treat the planet like a personal playground, have very little sympathy for the slumbering forces of the working class, whose marginal comforts leaves them cocooned until shaken by things they see as entirely beyond their control.
These are, however, the small human spaces away from the frontlines of social battle, beyond even the circle occupied by spectators, followers and commentators where most everyday lives are lived in varying degrees of blissful ignorance, with the element of bliss depending largely on their economic circumstances.
They are otherwise occupied in their own lives, and the small circles of family, friends, and neighbours that forms their world – until the world beyond such circles comes uninvited to their door.
It is not an unnatural reaction to be afraid to open that door, and to close the curtains in the hope that what you don’t see, won’t see you!
It is in these small spaces that, in conversation, I feel the fear of others, and their sense of helplessness and growing despair.
It is in these conversations too that I get routinely asked what I think is going to happen, and if I share that sense of it all being beyond a sane person’s control?
“Who’s going to stop him [Trump]?” is the most common, exasperated question I hear these days.
It is usually followed by “Somebody would need to do something!”
When whatever is happening begins to waken these folk, we are at what the Governor of Minnesota declared to be “an inflection point”!
Outside of the mathematics world, and in the common speak of people in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, he was answering that question.
The people of Minnesota have had enough, and are doing something to bring their President to heel.
The reality is that tens of hundreds of thousands of people in the USA are standing up to be counted as good neighbours, and are protecting those being hounded because of the colour of their skin.
They are not ‘domestic terrorists’. Nor are they some lunatic fringe – that fringe is running the aptly-named White House.
Nor, for the most part, are they Left-wing in their political outlook; they are just people like those I meet in the street and the supermarket, who stop me these days to ask me what on earth is going on in the world?
They do what they are doing to ease the pain and despair of doing nothing in the face of the cruelty on the other side of their garden gate.
Decent white people in the USA have wakened up to what people of colour have known for years: the ‘somebody’ who ‘needs to do something’ is ourselves.
Nobody is coming to save the people from the government and the class it represents: the idle one per cent who, behind the scenes, run the whole world because they own it.
The MAGA movement, and its allies over here, hijacked the word ‘woke’ as a slur to discredit and trivialise that sense of human compassion, empathy, and solidarity we can feel for people we don’t even know.
But the word goes back more than a century, and has a positive meaning in being ‘awakened’ and alert to danger before you are knee-deep in it.
Unsurprisingly, it originates in the vocabulary of Black America, and emerged again as a common word in that population with the rise of Black Lives Matter in the USA.
Oppressed people aware of the systemic cause of their oppression were ‘woke’.
Trump has awakened the sleeping conscience and courage of decent human beings who make up the population of the USA.
We need to take inspiration, hope and courage from that, and stop the political leadership of these islands from appeasing Fascism with human sacrifice.