5 Ways to Stay Strong When Society is Breaking

Reducing harm and staying (relatively) sane amid chaos

Tim Wise
7 min readDec 20, 2021

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Photo by Echo Grid on Unsplash

It’s not your imagination — American civil society is in deep trouble. Some days it feels as though it’s falling apart altogether.

To review:

  • Right-wing parents are threatening school boards and teachers over honest discussions about racism in American history and COVID mask mandates.
  • Domestic right-wing terror plots and incidents are on the rise, eclipsing the threat posed by foreign or Islamist violence.
  • Eight in ten Republicans tell pollsters, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
  • According to one recent survey, as many as 21 million Americans believe Donald Trump should be restored to power by force.
  • Others openly ask when they “get to use the guns” to kill Democrats and liberals.

This is how a nation dies.

For years, I’ve signed copies of my books with the inscription, “Stay Strong.”

But what does that mean amid deliberate efforts to weaken the foundations of democracy itself?

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Tim Wise

Anti-racism educator and author of 9 books, including White Like Me and, most recently, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020)