Involuntary Violence: Why Americans Are Worn Down

This isn’t ordinary political exhaustion like we saw in Trump’s first term. It’s become something heavier and more destabilizing.

Evan Fields is a veteran who writes the Fourth and Democracy and Weekly Wrap newsletters for Lincoln Square. Subscribe to his News from Underground Substack.

Illustration by Riley Levine

Everywhere you turn in American society — outside of the occasional Netflix binge or sports escape — the media we’re asked to consume is violent, chaotic, oppressive, and increasingly fascistic. It’s not optional anymore.

Social media feeds are flooded with footage and updates showing what our government is doing to people — immigrants and American citizens alike — while cable news treats it as round the clock debate instead of an emergency. The result is a constant churn of outrage and normalization happening at the same time.

People aren’t burnt out because they’re seeing too much news. They’re burnt out because the news has become involuntary violence.

There was a time when Americans could say they were “tired of the news,” because the worst headlines felt distant. But in Minneapolis, we see federal agents — paid for by our tax dollars — shooting and killing innocent people in broad daylight. Peaceful communities have watched militarized forces patrol city streets, protesters clash with officers meant to protect them, and judges have had to step in to limit how law enforcement can treat those protesters.

It’s not noise anymore. It’s sustained structural pressure to exhaust us.

Why It Feels Different

What people are experiencing right now isn’t ordinary political exhaustion like we saw in Trump’s first term. It isn’t the fatigue of election cycles, constant press conferences, or partisan shouting matches. It’s become something heavier and more destabilizing.

For most of modern American life, bad news came with distance. Wars happened overseas and were encountered through evening newscasts, newspaper headlines, or carefully managed press briefings. State violence was framed as rare or exceptional, something to be investigated over weeks or months. Even when injustice was visible, it was mediated through institutions, delays, and narratives. You could be “tired of the news” because the news still felt like something happening somewhere else, to someone else.

That distance is gone.

Today, violence isn’t episodic — it’s continuous. Its visual. It’s immediate. Footage appears on your phone within minutes after being captured by the people experiencing it — stripped of context or resolution. There’s no beginning, middle, and end. The story doesn’t conclude, it just refreshes.

Social media accelerates this in a way traditional media never did. Algorithms prioritize engagement over understanding or closure. That means the most emotionally jarring clips rise the fastest, repeat the most, and follow people everywhere: to work, to bed, to moments that offered mental peace. The same violence is seen from multiple angles, reposted, debated, memed, defended, and dismissed.

All in the same scroll.

In Minneapolis, federal agents — paid for by the same tax dollars Americans are waiting to pay for healthcare, housing, and schools — shot and killed a civilian in broad daylight. In the days that followed, residents watched militarized forces patrol their neighborhoods, protesters were beaten and shot, and people are waiting for a resolution. Official statements from DHS have minimized what people saw with their own eyes. MSM panels have argued semantics over fascism. Procedure and rhetoric continue to replace accountability.

When violence is visible, normalized, and unresolved, it stops functioning as information. It becomes psychological pressure on the public.

People aren’t reacting emotionally to “one bad story.” They’re reacting to a decade long pattern where harm is broadcast instantly, defended reflexively, and then folded into the daily media cycle as if it were just another talking point and not human lives.

When the state uses force domestically and the response is endless discussion instead of action and consequences, the message isn’t subtle, it’s: this is allowed, and it will happen again.

That’s what exhausts people.

Not outrage — proximity.

Not too much information — too little protection.

This is why numbness and affect have become common. Why people withdraw. Why even deeply engaged, morally grounded Americans find themselves feeling shut down. The reaction isn’t apathy. It’s self-defense. The human nervous system isn’t built to absorb constant, unresolved threats — especially when that threat is delivered through devices we’re required to have in order to function in modern life.

In this context, burnout isn’t a failure to care. It’s a rational response to a system that keeps showing harm without offering any release or solution.

And Minneapolis isn’t an exception. It’s a visible example of the broader collapse. The collapse of distance between state power and ordinary life. When people have been beaten into that collapse, they don’t just lose energy… They lose the sense that the rules apply evenly. That safety is guaranteed. Or that public participation will lead to change.

That’s the pressure the American people are carrying right now — whether they can articulate it or not.

For over a decade now, there has been a slow roll of fascism. A moral rot. An infestation taking over the bloodstream of our country.

A parasite named Donald Trump.

Exhaustion Is Not a Personal Failure

What makes this moment in our nation’s history especially corrosive is that people are being taught to blame themselves for their response to it.

If you’re tired, you’re told you’re disengaged.

If you pull back, you’re accused of apathy.

If you stop watching, scrolling, or reacting, you’re warned that democracy itself depends on your constant attention.

That framing is backwards.

No system that requires permanent vigilance to survive is healthy, and no population can be expected to remain fully engaged while being shown constant harm with no resolution, no protection, and no accountability or consequences. Exhaustion isn’t a moral shortcoming, it’s a predictable outcome of prolonged exposure to unresolved threat.

This isn’t how civic participation is supposed to work. Democratic societies are meant to reduce fear and harm, not manufacture it. They are meant to absorb conflict through institutions, not push it downstream onto the nervous system of the public and call it engagement.

The reason so many people feel frozen right now isn’t because they don’t care, it’s because caring has been made exhaustion.

And it isn’t accidental.

Exhaustion Is the Point

Yes, it’s deliberate.

What people are experiencing right now isn’t a result of incompetence or bad planning or a side effect of modern media. It’s a condition that benefits those in power. A population that is exhausted, overwhelmed, and psychologically saturated is easier to manage than one that is focused, organized, and clear-headed.

Permanent crisis fragments attention by preventing people from staying with any single injustice long enough to demand a resolution. One outrage bleeds into the next while anger spikes, collapses, and resets. Nothing ever fully lands and nothing is ever really addressed.

It’s attrition. When governance stops delivering stability, legitimacy, or any form of improvement, control shifts from consent to exhaustion. People don’t need to be convinced to agree, they only need to be beaten down enough to disengage. Confusion replaces opposition. Fatigue replaces resistance. And survival replaces participation.

That’s why unresolved harm like Renee Nicole Good is so effective.

Domestic force can be deployed, debated endlessly, and normalized without any consequence because the system doesn’t require public approval — it only requires burnout. Courts intervene too late. Investigations drag on. Media cycles move faster than accountability ever could. By the time any answers arrive, public attention has been redirected elsewhere.

This is how the normalization of violence happens without consensus.

Trump didn’t invent this strategy, but he exposed how effective it could be in this country. His politics thrive on constant escalation — not to achieve resolution, but to prevent it. Each crisis erases the last. Each scandal makes the next feel inevitable or normal. The goal was never to govern competently, it was to keep the public permanently off balance.

That logic has embedded itself into institutions, enforcement strategies, media incentives, and political culture. ICE raids don’t need to be popular — only to exhaust the opposition. Military action doesn’t need to be justified — only debated long enough for outrage to decay. Fascism no longer announces itself with spectacle alone — it advances quietly into society through attrition.

That is why so many people feel like they’re drowning without being attacked directly. Because the pressure isn’t designed to crush everyone at once. It’s designed to make sustained resistance feel impossible.

And once that exhaustion sets in, the system doesn’t have to silence the people. They silence themselves.

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Involuntary Violence

It isn’t just the volume of information. It’s the way harm is delivered without consent, without resolution, and without any protection. We worry about children consuming content on social media but fail to address what it is doing to adults when it’s piped directly into every day life. Our phones, workplaces, kitchens, bedrooms — and treated as a normal cost of being informed.

The public is forced to witness harm they can’t stop, debate harm they didn’t choose, and absorb consequences they didn’t cause. That constant exposure reshapes how people experience reality. When violence shows up without context or conclusion, the mind can’t process it properly as information — it perceives it as a threat.

And threats, when they never resolve, don’t mobilize people — they wear them down.

There is no off-ramp built into this system. No moment where the story ends, accountability arrives, and safety is restored. Harm is introduced, argued over, reframed, and then replaced by the next instance before the last one even settled. The body never gets the signal that it ended. The nervous system stays activated. It’s not awareness — it’s stress conditioning.

That’s why so many people are feeling foggy, detached, or emotionally blunted. Not because they don’t understand what they’re seeing, but because understanding without agency becomes corrosive. Being made to watch real suffering without the ability to intervene doesn’t deepen civic engagement — it trains helplessness.

People are told to “stay informed,” to “pay attention,” to “not look away,” while nothing about the structure of power changes in response to that attention. The burden of processing violence is placed onto the public, while responsibility for stopping it remains out of reach.

Awareness becomes obligation. Obligation becomes exhaustion.

That is what involuntary violence looks like in practice: a population required to absorb harm as part of daily life, with no meaningful mechanism for relief or redress. Not because people wanted it, but because the system learned it can function this way.

When violence becomes so present, it doesn’t shock anyone. It drains you. And that drain isn’t a side effect, it’s the condition under which normalization becomes possible.

And that’s where we are now.

When people believe their fatigue is personal, they turn inward. They disengage quietly. They blame themselves for not keeping up, not doing enough, not caring enough. That’s the most efficient outcome for a system that runs on attrition — wide scale crackdowns aren’t required, nor censorship — just a public that feels worn down and alone.

This isn’t a private failure. It’s a shared condition.

What’s being described as burnout, in reality, is prolonged exposure to unresolved harm. What’s being framed as disengagement is often the nervous system refusing to absorb any more threat without agency. And what’s dismissed as apathy is frequently the last remaining form of self-preservation available to people who are still paying attention.

Understanding that doesn’t fix the problem, stop the violence, or restore accountability on its own.

But it does do something important.

It breaks the illusion that exhaustion is personal weakness instead of a structural outcome. It returns clarity where confusion has been cultivated. And it reminds people that feeling depleted in a system like this isn’t evidence of a moral failure — it’s proof of awareness colliding with a reality that refuses to resolve itself.

Involuntary violence doesn’t just wound bodies in the streets. It wears down the public’s capacity to stay present, to trust institutions, to believe participation matters. That erosion happens quietly, incrementally, and without spectacle…

Until it feels normal.