More ICE Killings: 10 Tools for Staying Human in the Face of Cruelty and Danger

Last night I held my wife in the kitchen while a video of the memorial vigil for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo played. Today, another man was murdered by ICE agents in nearby Biddeford, Maine. Frankly, we are scared. We just canceled plans we had this week to visit nearby Portland, Maine.

I wrote recently about the fear of living in a country where 77 million voters elected a man who openly hates families like mine. Fear of the men in our little rural town who walk around in their red MAGA hats and carry guns openly on their hips. Fear of the militia training school nearby with classes for urban sniping, coordinating assault teams, and door breaching practices.

My wife is an immigrant, here legally. And it’s clear that “legally” is a category under sustained, deliberate attack and frequent revision. Green card and visa pathways are being rewritten in real time. The stated policy of the regime is to generate so much fear that immigrants - legal or not - choose to flee the country. They call it ‘self-deportation.’

We are running the calculation that a lot of families are running right now. Will we be forced to leave? Should we leave voluntarily before we’re forced? What does waiting cost us? What does leaving cost us?

I hold all of this while also holding everything else. A boa constrictor keeps arriving in my dreams. Wrapping itself around me. Slow, continuous tightening where my breathing gets harder with every new squeeze.

I don’t have a single approach for dealing with this. I have tools that help me stay upright when the ground heaves and shakes.

I’m sharing practices I reach for when I need footholds. Start anywhere.

When total avoidance and checking out starts sounding reasonable, I have a prayer that interrupts the spiral.

The Defiance Prayer, by Paul T. Shattuck

Please grant me Audacity to choose values and goals worth fighting for;

Persistence in the face of failed attempts;

And the Wisdom to know the difference between acceptance and giving up.

Audacity to choose means defining what you’re building, not just what you’re resisting. Persistence means measuring yourself by showing up, not by winning every round. The wisdom to know the difference—not between what you can and can’t change, but between acceptance and giving up. You can accept how hard this is and still choose your next move. Giving up is when you let the fear make that choice for you. Acceptance is maintaining a clear-eyed reckoning with reality that keeps you moving

This is what I reach for when I’m trying to stay human and not give up.

I recorded a 12-minute guided practice for meeting overwhelm, scattered activism, and cynicism with self-mercy instead of judgment. It’s designed for moments exactly like this—when you’re breaking and you need a way to befriend yourself instead of punishing yourself for struggling. It’s been downloaded nearly 7,000 times in the past few months and people tell me they find it very grounding.

You can listen now, or bookmark it for when you need it. Come back to it as often as helps.

That prayer and practice are what I’m reaching for today. Here are other resources I’ve been combing through—frameworks and tools I’ve written before that readers have told me help when everything feels overwhelming.

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Start anywhere. Use what lands. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s staying operational.

Staying human is how you build and protect what matters. There is an ancient tug of war between forces of cruelty and our capacity for care. Staying human is what you do to keep the manmade ocean of cruelty from flooding what we’ve built. Not once. Not in a decisive final battle. You cannot vanquish the ocean. You work every day, in the specific conditions of your specific life and community. You remember that the most important strategy in a tug of war is to never let go of the rope and to pull together.

Bite-sized tiny moves live in the terrain between hypervigilance and retreat. They keep us agile and motivated. Easy to skim, easy to use, fast results.

Cycling between overwhelm, cynicism, and scattered activism is exactly what Trump wants you to do. Here’s how to recognize you’re stuck and then move from reactivity to strategic engagement.

Calls to group action multiply as your energy for loud participation falters. But what if your quiet strength is exactly what this moment needs?

My workbook Staying Steady gives you practical tools for interrupting overwhelm and building capacity under authoritarian pressure. It’s designed for moments when you’re too depleted for theory — short practices you can use in five minutes when shame, paralysis, or fog take hold.

There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.

A guided audio practice to interrupt the scroll and meet yourself with mercy. Systems that trigger you are big -- and shame just does their work for them.

When you carry this alone, shame grows and capacity shrinks. Isolation is their strategy. Connection is ours.

We don’t have to have answers today. We just have to not be alone with this. Find your people and hole them tight.

Join me for a Live Video on Substack where I’ll talk about all of this and take questions from paid subscribers. Thursday, 7/16 at 8:00 PM eastern.

In solidarity,

Paul

Remember: Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.

40+ years: community organizing, systems analysis, world-renowned policy scholarship, university professor, building community-based programs, contemplative practice and teaching. MSW, PhD. Recovery. SA survivor. Queer. Married to an immigrant. Struggling with aging and health issues in our crazy health ‘care’ system.

I was fired right after the 2024 election for refusing to shut up about Trump targeting federal workers. I launched this blog soon thereafter. It’s my way of pitching in, standing in solidarity with you all, doing my part to help build a progressive future rooted in things worth fighting for: justice, equity, security, and care.

Not writing from safety—figuring this out from inside the same fight you’re in.

I also do coaching and consulting with activist groups, nonprofits, and universities doing good work in the face of Trump’s cuts and attacks. Contact me to learn more about my services.