“Make America safe again for the American people,” said Stephen Miller, adviser par-excellence to Donald Trump. MASA. Yes, the same Miller who developed the plan to separate migrant parents from their children during Trump’s first administration. The same Miller kicked out of his Jewish congregation by the rabbi, who said that Jews don’t do things like that. Or anyone else pretending to be a human being.

It’s hard for me to fathom the hate coming our way in the wake of Kirk’s killing. The people I know want all such killings to stop; that’s why they’re usually in favor of some kind of gun control, including our neighbors who hunt in deer season.

Who are the people I know? Someone I made a time to speak with earlier today told me she can’t, she’s bringing food to some senior citizens living on their own. Someone else is housebound, looking out for his ill wife. Another meets with kids during the evenings to help them with their homework. Another friend just canceled her birthday lunch because she has to take care of someone in a nursing home. Some people are planning a community party, others a meeting on how to help immigrant families when ICE comes in big time to Massachusetts.

Not a day goes by without my encountering or hearing about people ready to help. A neighbor offers me a couple of luscious tomatoes, then says she has way too many and is bringing them to the Food Bank. Somebody else is asking whom to call about volunteering at a local after-school program.

The sense I have of Americans is their deep generosity with time, money, and energy, maybe because we know that our government doesn’t provide the kind of safety net others provide, especially to the poor, and sick. And still, we’re hated.

Behind the hatred is manipulation; get people afraid, and you could invoke all kinds of emergency powers. But far stronger is the fear, and there’s a lot of existential fear now anywhere you look. For many, there’s apprehension about what climate change and the destructive potential in AI will bring, to us and our children. Look at all the dystopian books being published, the many movies about survival after the apocalypse, or the current glut of horror films. What do they reflect back to us, if not fear?

Last night was sleepless for me. Back pain mixed with a vague but harsh anxiety.  So many people saying we’re reaching a critical point here, including Barack Obama. I usually don’t get alarmed by hyperbole, reminding myself that too many journalists and media make their money by persuading you that this is the end of the world. I like to invoke the people I describe above, folks who do good things and care about others, who welcome you into their homes and go the extra mile for neighbors, be they farmers who suffered through heat waves or the local immigrant community.

 I think of Esther Tishman and her group’s pilgrimage across the country, a Buddhist chaplain meeting and talking with folks in the very heartland of this country (see Liberty Walks). I thought of my brother, Mordechai Bar-Or, whom I saw in NYC over the weekend, here to work together with a Canadian Muslim woman academic on a joint project (it’s his photo above as the three siblings came together for 5 days in Switzerland, when I was there to teach). He walked out of a CEO job over 5 years ago to engage in peace work, leaving behind good paychecks and Business Class flights to do this on his own.

He finds himself smack in the vortex of tribal loyalties and passions, with his own family legacy of Holocaust and Zionism even as he  crosses the divide, again and again, for joint actions with Palestinian activists, whom he now numbers among his very close friends. He finds himself derided on both sides of the spectrum. His sons have fought in this war, which some of his Palestinian friends castigate; he and my sister fought in past wars, as did my parents, and they want this to end, finally. Break the chain of reactivity, the karma that repeats and repeats. Come to our senses.

But last night, wild and primitive fears appeared. Mordechai told me of an invitation he got from a Pakistani sheikh to come to Pakistan. “I don’t want you to go,” I told him. Just as I told him to urge his youngest son not to join the IDF in Gaza City if he gets called again. In the middle of the night, I opened up the latest issue of the Atlantic Magazine and there, right on the inside, was a full-page ad: “AI gives the American Worker SUPER POWERS.” A red smear slashed the capitalized words.

Who had placed the ad? Palantir. The same Palantir using AI to develop an enormous data base of surveillance for our government, the same Palantir that entered into a multi-million-dollar deal with the Israeli army to help identify potential targets, and the same Palantir whose CEO gets literally billions of dollars as annual compensation.

I put away the magazine and wondered what world I am living in. What happens if all these people saying that we are reaching a critical inflection point in this country are right, I asked the dark. Is it time to organize a powerful, visible resistance to folks like Miller, Bondi, Noem, et al.? And if we don’t, will we feel, as others have in past generations, that we should have gotten alarmed and on our feet much earlier on, while there was still time? When must peacemaking turn into full-fledged resistance—not just one of kindness?

“Be a bridge,” I’ve told myself and others. Enter conversations you’re not used to having, go fearlessly into uncomfortable situations. But is that enough now? What will future generations say about us when they look back to these days, with a dispirited and leaderless Democratic party? Are we still too comfortable? “I had enough of his hate,” said Kirk’s alleged killer. Killing in cold blood is no answer. What is?