We are living through the intentional deployment of low-intensity warfare. By this, I mean a mode of governance and control in which pressure is applied continuously but below the threshold of formal war or declared emergency: no single event demands response, yet strain accumulates across time. Low-intensity warfare works by fragmenting attention, accelerating demand, normalizing instability, and dispersing harm so that responsibility is difficult to locate and accountability remains diffuse. It is designed to exhaust rather than confront, to thin meaning rather than clarify it, and to keep populations adaptive rather than oriented.

This strategy has a long history. Low-intensity warfare emerged as a formal military and political doctrine in the mid–20th century, particularly in counterinsurgency and imperial contexts, where the objective was not decisive victory but prolonged instability—keeping populations fragmented, adaptive, and unable to consolidate power or demand structural change. Over time, its logics migrated beyond battlefields into economic policy, information systems, policing, and governance, shaping everyday life without being named as such.

This is not a metaphor, and it is not an accidental condition. It is a strategy that operates by keeping pressure constant but diffuse—never quite reaching the threshold that would require acknowledgment, repair, or collective reckoning. There is no single front line and no pause. Strain is distributed across everyday life, institutions, and relationships, making it difficult to name harm as it accumulates or to determine where responsibility should land.

These conditions are not abstract to me. They are reminiscent of the environment I grew up in—one where instability was normalized, where people learned early how to stay alert and adaptive, and where responsibility was carried quietly because there was little expectation of protection or support. What feels familiar now is not only the level of disruption, but the way it settles into daily life and begins to shape how much rest, refusal, or clarity people believe they are allowed.

Low-intensity warfare also creates ideal conditions for extraction across the political spectrum. When people are fatigued, morally compressed, or chronically overwhelmed, they become easier to mobilize, monetize, polarize, and instrumentalize—often in the name of causes they care deeply about. In these conditions, urgency replaces judgment, reaction substitutes for interpretation, and people are asked to give more than they can sustainably carry.

One of the most consequential shifts in this moment is that internal and social psychological safety is no longer being produced by the state or by institutions in any reliable way. That work is increasingly falling to individuals, families, and communities. This is what we mean by displacement of consequences in Poetic Futurism.

Building the capacity to remain oriented, emotionally grounded, and relational under pressure has become a shared responsibility—one we must consciously practice and pass on. Teaching young people and children how to cultivate internal coherence, relational safety, and discernment is not optional; it is an essential skill for living in an age of acceleration and thinning of meaning.

I also want to be explicit about my relationship to this country. My love for the United States is not the outcome of partisanship or naïveté. It is the result of lived experience—of knowing what it means to live without rights, without protection, and without any meaningful recourse, and of choosing, deliberately, to belong to a constitutional democracy that affirms both freedom and responsibility. As a naturalized citizen, I treasure the rights afforded by the Constitution of the United States and will defend them to my dying breath.

This is not a moment for ambivalence about our power as a people, or about the force of our citizenship—domestically or internationally. Our strength rests in our capacity for relationship, community, and collective responsibility, and in the democratic principles that ask us to hold freedom and responsibility together. I believe we will do right by these principles domestically and abroad.

Sustaining ourselves under these conditions requires something different than urgency or resilience. It requires coherence—the capacity to remain oriented to what is happening—and continuity—the ability to carry meaning, relationship, and responsibility across time without fragmenting or hardening.

A few orientations that help sustain coherence and continuity over time:

• Attend to pace. Low-intensity warfare erodes people by keeping them slightly overwhelmed at all times. Protecting coherence often means choosing a slower pace than what is being demanded, even when that feels countercultural.

• Differentiate responsibility from exposure. Being aware of what is happening does not mean you are responsible for all of it. Coherence strengthens when you are clear about what is yours to carry—and what is not.

• Maintain relationship with meaning. When events accelerate, meaning is often the first thing to thin. Staying in relationship with what matters—through reflection, conversation, or creative practice—is stabilizing rather than indulgent.

• Protect memory. These conditions encourage forgetting as a way to cope. Continuity depends on remembering—what has already happened, what has already been learned, and what patterns are repeating.

• Practice refusal without withdrawal. Refusal does not require disengagement. It can be a way of staying present without being consumed—choosing limits that make continued relationship possible.

• Make room for delight. Delight is not an escape from these conditions; it is a practice that sustains life within them. Experiencing beauty, pleasure, laughter, or tenderness restores capacity, interrupts extraction, and reminds us that we are more than what is being demanded of us.

None of this resolves the conditions we are in. But it can reduce their impact, prevent collapse or numbness, and make it possible to remain engaged over the long arc rather than burning out or disappearing.

If any of this names something you’ve been carrying without language, that recognition itself matters. It is one way coherence begins to reassert itself, even in the midst of ongoing strain.

I’ll continue to share reflections like this as a way of offering orientation—support for staying intact and in relationship—during a period that is asking a great deal of many of us.