The morning Trump and Netanyahu attacked Iran, I posted on Threads, “Those crazed monsters and sniveling cowards have made the horrific seem ordinary.”
That’s where we are at the end of February 2026. Outrageous acts have become so commonplace, they seem strange when they don’t happen. The abnormal feels normal. The terrible becomes logical. War with Iran is just another Saturday morning.
It has become hard to imagine what calm was like, when you didn’t wake up to a shocking headline, and you can go about your day without wondering what bizarre thing is going to happen. You could plan for the future. You could make a major purchase without worrying how you’ll pay for it. You could raise children and believe the world will be better for them.
Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil and how ordinary people can commit horrible acts out of habit. I can now see how it starts by making the horrible ordinary. When cruelty becomes the norm, it’s hard to think about empathy. When criminality is expected, you lose the ability to challenge it. Evil doesn’t triumph because good people are afraid to say nothing. It’s because people stop considering goodness as an option.
At the beginning of this funhouse mirror of a presidency, I wondered if there was way out of this that doesn’t involve millions of people dying. I wish this weren’t true, but these things always end that way. At very least, we can’t escape this situation without discomfort and loss, and we’ll never go back to the world we had. When evil has become ordinary, we will need something extraordinary for goodness and decency to return.
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