A Refusal of Connection

We're Not Failing to Imagine Each Other's Lives. We're Refusing To.

I have spent most of my adult life on what we call the left. I have the right opinions about healthcare and climate change and immigration. I vote for the right candidates, donate to the right organizations, read the right books. I understand systemic inequality. I can explain how poverty is structural, how the wealthy rig the system, how capitalism extracts value from the people who create it. I know these things the way I know my own name.

And yet.

I live next to a man with a Trump flag in his yard, and I have never once knocked on his door to talk to him. I can see that he’s struggling,I see it clearly, the way I see everything about how this system fails people. But when I notice his struggles, I feel nothing that moves me toward him. Or rather, I feel something, but it’s not compassion or concern. What I feel is a kind of intellectual satisfaction. I was right about the system. Here’s the proof. He’s voting for people who will hurt him, and I understand exactly why,I can trace the economic and social forces that led him there. And somehow, my understanding feels like enough. Like I’ve done my part just by knowing.

This is what I’ve been thinking about: the gap between understanding something and actually connecting with another person. Between knowing facts and feeling them in your body. Between being correct and being human.

We often call it a “failure of imagination”,this inability to truly picture ourselves in someone else’s circumstances. I’ve used that language myself, written it in essays, said it at dinner parties where everyone nodded in agreement. The phrase makes it sound passive, like something that just happens to people who haven’t read enough books or met enough different kinds of people. It suggests we simply lack something,experience, education, exposure to difference.

But what I’m talking about is not a failure. It’s a refusal.

Here’s the difference: A failure is passive,you tried and couldn’t do it. A refusal is active,you could do it, but you choose not to. A refusal takes energy and constant maintenance. You refuse things that are actually available to you. You refuse invitations, relationships, knowledge that’s right in front of you. And you refuse because accepting would cost you something you don’t want to give up: your comfort, your certainty, the particular story you’ve been telling yourself about how the world works and where you fit in it.

The refusal I’m talking about happens when someone tells you they’re struggling and you feel yourself go cold and distant. Not because you don’t hear them,you hear them perfectly. You might even understand exactly why they’re struggling. You could probably explain the systemic forces that brought them to this moment better than they could. But even as you’re understanding, you’ve already started separating their experience from anything that could actually touch you. You’ve turned them into an example that proves your theory rather than a person standing in front of you asking for something.

This is the refusal in action: You actively build a wall between their reality and yours, even when,especially when,you understand their reality better than they do.

Here’s what I’ve realized: Connection is available to us at almost every moment. Someone tells us they’re hungry, they’re scared, they’re one paycheck away from losing everything. And we could, if we wanted to, feel the thread that runs between their situation and ours. We could trace it back to our own fears, our own vulnerabilities, our own dependence on systems we pretend are stable. We could say: “Yes, I see you, and I see myself in you, and I see that the distance between us is mostly just luck and timing.”

The capacity for this is in us. We’re not missing some special ability.

But we refuse. And we refuse because connection is terrifying.

Connection means acknowledging that their hunger could be our hunger. That the mechanisms that failed them could fail us. That we’re not essentially different types of people,we’re the same type of people having different experiences of the same brutal systems. Connection means giving up the illusion of control, the belief that we’re safe because we’re good, smart, hardworking, or deserving. It means admitting that we’re all vulnerable, all the time, and the only thing standing between us and catastrophe is a set of circumstances we didn’t create and can’t maintain through virtue or willpower alone.

So instead, we refuse. And the refusal becomes like architecture,something we build room by room until we’re living inside a structure that keeps out any information that might threaten it. We refuse to imagine poverty that isn’t somehow chosen. We refuse to imagine hunger that isn’t somehow earned. We refuse to imagine any suffering that can’t be traced back to some personal failing. Because if suffering can happen to people who did everything right, then it can happen to us. And we can’t live carrying the full weight of our own precariousness every morning. So we refuse to feel it.

I notice this refusal in myself constantly. Just last week someone mentioned they were sleeping in their car. I felt my face arrange itself into an expression of concern while my mind was already moving away, already listing reasons why this was different from anything that could happen to me. I have family. I have savings. I have skills. As if these things were permanent features of my character rather than temporary conditions that could change with one illness, one accident, one economic shift I didn’t see coming.

The refusal protects us. That’s why we do it. If I really let myself connect,if I really let myself feel that their homelessness and my having-a-home are two points on the same spectrum rather than two different universes,I’d have to sit with the vertigo of knowing that everything I think makes me safe could disappear. The job could disappear. The health could disappear. The people I count on could disappear. The cognitive ability I’m using right now to write these words could disappear. And then where would I be?

So instead I refuse the connection. I make their experience foreign, exceptional, the result of specific circumstances that don’t apply to me. I turn them into a different category of person,the homeless, the hungry, the struggling and in doing so I protect myself from having to feel how easily I could be them. How easily I could be anyone.

This is not the same as lacking imagination. I have plenty of imagination. I can imagine elaborate scenarios, fictional worlds, complex emotional situations that have nothing to do with my own life. What I refuse to imagine is continuity,the connection between their story and mine.

I refuse to imagine that the person sleeping in their car and I are part of the same story, moving through the same world with the same basic needs and the same ultimate vulnerabilities. I refuse to connect their hunger to my hunger, their fear to my fear, their body to my body.

Because bodies are where the real connection lives. Bodies get sick, get tired, get old, get hungry, break down. Bodies need things: food, shelter, medicine, rest. Bodies are vulnerable in ways that can’t be overcome through willpower or positive thinking or hard work. Bodies are the great equalizer,the place where all our stories about being different from each other fall apart.

And so we learn, very early, to disconnect from our own bodies and from other people’s bodies. To live in our heads where we can maintain the illusion of control.

The refusal of connection is a refusal to live in the body, to acknowledge the body’s needs and limitations and absolute vulnerability. It’s a refusal to see other people’s bodies as fundamentally like our own,requiring the same food, the same warmth, the same care. When someone tells me they’re hungry and I refuse to connect, what I’m refusing is the knowledge that their hunger is the same as the hunger I would feel in their circumstances, that hunger is not a moral condition but a physical one, that bodies don’t care about your character or your work ethic or your voting record. Bodies just need to eat.

But if I accept that, if I really let that connection happen, then I have to accept that the distance between their body and mine is not a distance of kind but of degree. And then I have to ask myself what I’m doing about that distance. Why am I on this side of it and they’re on that side. What choices,mine, ours, society’s,maintain that distance. And those questions are intolerable. Those questions implicate me. Those questions require action or at least acknowledgment of inaction, and both are painful.

So I refuse. And the refusal, I’m learning, is not just about protecting myself from their suffering. It’s about protecting myself from my own. Because if I connect to their hunger, I have to connect to my own hunger,not just physical hunger but all the ways I’m hungry, all the ways I’m vulnerable, all the ways I need things I can’t provide for myself. I have to acknowledge that I too am dependent, that I too live at the mercy of systems and other people, that the independence I pride myself on is mostly fiction.

This is what I see in my neighbor with the Trump flag. And I’m trying,really trying,to understand that his refusal isn’t stupidity or moral failure. It’s survival. It’s the same mechanism I use, just pointed in a different direction.

He refuses connection because connection would mean admitting dependence, and admitting dependence would mean giving up the story he’s built his entire identity around. And that story,the story of the self-sufficient man, the provider, the one who takes care of his own,isn’t just ego. It’s all he has left. When your back is going out and you can’t afford the surgery, when your wife is cleaning other people’s toilets, when your kids’ school is falling apart and you can’t do anything about it, the story that you’re still in control, still the man you were raised to be, still someone who matters,that story is the only thing standing between you and the abyss.

I watch him work on his truck in the driveway, fixing things himself even when it would be cheaper to pay someone, even when his back hurts, even when he doesn’t have the right tools. And I used to see this as stubbornness, as foolish pride. But I’m beginning to understand it as something else: an insistence on mattering, on being capable, on having some domain where his hands and his knowledge still mean something. The self-sufficiency isn’t just performed. It’s necessary. It’s what lets him wake up in the morning.

His wife cleans houses for people who live in neighborhoods they’ll never be able to afford, and he does construction for people building additions on homes twice the size of his. They see the wealth up close. They see how other people live. And the story he tells himself about why they’re on that side and he’s on this side cannot involve luck or systems or structural inequality, because those explanations would mean his situation isn’t about him,isn’t about his choices, his character, his worth. And if it’s not about him, then he has no control over it.

Better to believe he’s been cheated than to believe he’s been unlucky. Better to believe someone took something from him than to believe there was never enough to go around in the first place. At least being cheated suggests he had something worth taking. At least it confirms he’s a player in the game, not just someone the game was never designed to include.

And this is where Trump comes in. This is where the refusal gets weaponized.

Trump understood something that the left,that I,keep missing: people don’t want to be told they’re victims of impersonal systems. They want to be told they’re victims of personal betrayal. Because betrayal at least suggests you mattered enough to betray. Betrayal suggests there was a relationship, a compact, an agreement that someone broke. Betrayal means you were owed something, which means you’re someone who deserves to be owed something.

Trump gave my neighbor a story that let him keep his dignity while explaining his suffering. Not: “The system is rigged and we’re all powerless.” That’s unbearable. That’s despair. Instead: “The system was rigged against you specifically because you’re important, because you’re the backbone of this country, because they fear your power and had to cheat to beat you.”

This is political genius, and it’s evil genius. Because what Trump understood is that the refusal of connection,the refusal to see yourself in the struggling immigrant, the single mother, the laid-off factory worker in another state,that refusal is painful. It’s isolating. It requires constant maintenance. People don’t want to refuse connection. They want permission to refuse connection. They want someone to tell them that refusing connection is not just okay but righteous, that the people they’re refusing to connect with actually deserve to be refused, that their disconnection is a form of strength rather than a wound.

So Trump gave them villains. Specific, nameable villains. The immigrant didn’t just happen to get a job you didn’t get; he took your job. He’s the reason you’re struggling. The government didn’t just fail to provide adequate safety nets; it redistributed your hard-earned money to people who didn’t work for it,to people who are laughing at you, who think you’re a sucker for playing by the rules. The factory didn’t just close because of global economic forces; it was moved to Mexico by people who betrayed you, by politicians who sold you out, by elites who got rich while you got nothing.

Every version of the story puts my neighbor at the center. Makes him the agent rather than the patient. The victim of specific villains rather than impersonal forces. And crucially, it makes his refusal to connect with other struggling people not just justified but necessary. Why would he connect with the immigrant who took his job? Why would he feel solidarity with the single mother getting his tax dollars? Why would he see himself in people who are, according to this story, the instruments of his suffering?

Trump didn’t create my neighbor’s refusal. The refusal was already there,in him, in me, in all of us. The refusal is baked into how we survive precarity without losing our minds. But Trump took that refusal and turned it into a political movement. He gave people permission to refuse connection and call it patriotism. To refuse empathy and call it strength. To refuse solidarity and call it self-respect.

And the rallies,god, the rallies. They’re not just about Trump. They’re about finding other people who are also refusing, who are also building walls, who are also terrified of connection because connection would mean admitting how vulnerable they are. The rallies are gatherings where the refusal becomes collective, where you can be surrounded by thousands of people and still not have to connect, where you can feel the comfort of numbers without the risk of relationship.

My neighbor goes to these rallies and he comes back different,louder, angrier, more certain. And I used to think Trump was making him angry. But I’m beginning to see that Trump is giving him permission to express anger that was already there. Anger at a system that’s failed him. Anger at an economy that doesn’t make sense. Anger at being invisible, disposable, forgotten. All of that is legitimate. All of that is real.

But Trump redirects it. Takes that legitimate rage at a system that considers people like my neighbor expendable and aims it at other expendable people. At immigrants who are just as exploited. At workers in other states who are just as precarious. At anyone receiving government help, even though my neighbor needs that help too. The anger that could build solidarity gets turned into the weapon that prevents it.

I think about him voting to cut food stamps while using WIC. Voting to restrict Medicaid while his wife has a pre-existing condition that makes insurance impossible without it. Voting to eliminate the Department of Education while his kids are in public schools that are already underfunded. And I used to think this was contradiction, but I see now it’s consistency. It’s a consistent refusal to accept the identity of someone who needs these things.

Because Trump’s story only works if my neighbor isn’t like those other people. If he can maintain the belief that his need is temporary, circumstantial, dignified,while their need is permanent, characterological, pathetic,then he can accept help while voting to deny it to others without seeing the contradiction. He’s not on food stamps; he’s using WIC temporarily until things get better. He’s not dependent on government healthcare; his wife just has a pre-existing condition that the system should cover because they’ve paid in, because they’ve earned it, because they’re not like those other people who just take.

The fact that he might not survive without these programs is something he refuses to imagine. And this refusal is so deep, so total, so essential to his sense of himself that he’ll risk his actual survival to maintain it. He’ll risk his children’s wellbeing. He’ll risk his wife’s health. Because what Trump has taught him is that admitting need is admitting defeat. That accepting help is accepting weakness. That seeing himself in other struggling people means accepting that he is one of those struggling people, which means accepting that the story of his life,the story of the man who takes care of his own,is over.

And Trump makes him a promise: if you refuse connection, if you vote to cut these programs, if you maintain your belief that you’re different from those people, then you’re still the man you think you are. You’re still in control. You’re still fighting. The fact that you’re fighting against your own interests doesn’t matter. The fighting itself proves you’re not defeated.

This is the cruelty of it. Not just the policies, though those are cruel. But the way Trump takes people’s legitimate need for dignity and tells them dignity requires isolation. Takes their legitimate desire to matter and tells them mattering requires refusing to see themselves in others. Takes their legitimate anger at a system that’s failed them and redirects it at people the system is also failing.

There’s something almost noble about my neighbor’s refusal, except that it’s not. It’s not noble because it hurts him and it hurts his family and it hurts everyone in his situation who could benefit from collective action, from solidarity, from the very connection he refuses. The refusal doesn’t make him strong. It makes him alone. It makes him exactly as alone as the system needs him to be to keep functioning the way it functions. And Trump, for all his talk about fighting the system, is making absolutely sure that people like my neighbor stay alone, stay divided, stay unable to recognize their common cause with other people the system is grinding up.

What I’m understanding now is that my neighbor’s refusal to connect downward,to see himself in the people he considers beneath him,is mirrored by his refusal to connect upward. He doesn’t see himself in the wealthy either, doesn’t understand that they’re not just better versions of him who worked harder, but people who benefit from a completely different set of rules. He looks at Trump,who inherited hundreds of millions, who’s never done physical labor, who golfs at his own resorts while my neighbor’s back goes out from carrying drywall and sees someone like him. Someone who tells it like it is. Someone who’s being persecuted by the same forces that persecute him.

This is Trump’s most impressive trick: getting working people to identify with a billionaire by making them both victims. Trump the billionaire is supposedly persecuted by the media, by the deep state, by elites who don’t respect him. My neighbor the construction worker is supposedly persecuted by immigrants, by welfare recipients, by a government that doesn’t respect him. The actual material differences between them,the hundreds of millions of dollars, the different worlds they inhabit, the completely different relationship they have to power,all of that disappears in the shared story of persecution.

And this shared victimhood becomes a form of connection, but its connection that specifically forbids actual material solidarity. My neighbor can feel connected to Trump through their shared sense of being under siege, but this connection doesn’t require Trump to actually help him. Doesn’t require policy that would improve his life. Doesn’t require anything material at all. It just requires the maintenance of the story, the shared performance of refusal, the agreement that the real problem is those other people, not the system that’s failing both of them,though of course it’s failing them in completely different ways, ways that Trump has every interest in obscuring.

This is the total refusal: refusing to connect to the people below, refusing to accurately see the people above, standing in this imaginary middle ground where he’s just a regular guy, temporarily inconvenienced, fundamentally independent, essentially different from anyone who actually needs systemic help. The middle ground doesn’t exist. But the refusal requires believing it does. And Trump’s entire political project is about maintaining that belief, about keeping people like my neighbor convinced that they’re in a different category from everyone else who’s struggling, even as they’re all struggling in the same system.

And I watch this and I judge it, which is my own refusal. I refuse to connect to his refusal, refuse to see my own refusals reflected in his, refuse to acknowledge that we’re both protecting the same thing a story about ourselves that lets us feel in control when we’re not in control, that lets us feel separate when we’re connected whether we like it or not.

He refuses to see that the immigrant picking strawberries for below minimum wage and the construction worker who can’t afford health insurance are in the same system, facing the same exploitation, manipulated by the same forces. I refuse to see that the construction worker who votes for Trump and the nonprofit worker who votes for Democrats are both terrified of falling, both barely holding on, both trying to make sense of an economy that doesn’t make sense.

His refusal keeps him voting for policies that hurt him. My refusal keeps me from building solidarity with him, from finding common cause, from acknowledging that his economic anxiety and my economic anxiety come from the same source even if we’ve been taught to blame different villains. We’re both refusing connection that would require us to feel vulnerable, to admit we need each other, to organize collectively rather than suffer individually.

The genius of the current system and Trump has mastered this,is that it’s convinced both of us that connection is weakness. He thinks accepting help is weakness, so he refuses programs that would help him. I think connecting with people who vote wrong is weakness, a compromise of principles, so I refuse solidarity with people who need it. We’re both isolated by our refusals, both weak when we could be strong, both alone when we could be together. And Trump has built an entire political movement on making sure we stay that way.

Because if my neighbor and I actually connected,if we actually acknowledged our shared precarity, our shared dependence on systems that are failing us both, our shared fear of what happens when those systems collapse,we might start asking different questions. Not who took what from whom, but who built a system where there isn’t enough to go around. Not who deserves help, but why helping each other is treated as weakness instead of survival. Not who’s exploiting whom among us, but who’s exploiting all of us.

And those questions lead to answers that threaten power. Real power, not the performance of power Trump offers. Those questions lead to the kind of collective organizing that could actually change things. And so the refusal of connection isn’t just personal psychology. It’s political strategy. It’s how the system protects itself. It’s what Trump is selling, and it’s what we’re both buying, just in different forms.

I see him at the gas station, the grocery store, the hardware store. Watch him move through the world with a kind of defensive pride that I recognize because I have my own version of it. He won’t make eye contact with the cashier,a teenager with acne whose name tag sits crooked on her polyester vest, whose hands shake slightly as she counts back change. He won’t acknowledge the man asking for change in the parking lot, the one whose jacket is too thin for October, whose cardboard sign says “anything helps” in marker that’s running from yesterday’s rain. My neighbor keeps his head down and his transactions brief and his face set in an expression that says he’s busy, he’s got places to be, he’s not one of these people just hanging around with nothing to do. The refusal is visible in his body language, in the way he holds himself apart, in the two feet of empty space he maintains even in a crowded checkout line.

And I do the same thing with him. I see him in his yard and I go inside. I see his wife loading groceries and I look away. I maintain my own two feet of empty space. I refuse the same connection I fault him for refusing, and I tell myself it’s different because my reasons are better, because I’m right and he’s wrong, because his politics hurt people and mine help people. But we’re both alone. We’re both building walls. We’re both choosing separation over solidarity, and we both have reasons that feel sufficient, and neither of us is actually doing anything that would make either of our lives materially better.

And what does this isolation actually feel like? Not noble. Not principled. It feels like sitting in my living room at night, lights off, scrolling through news of another crisis, another policy that will hurt people like my neighbor, and feeling my chest tighten with something that isn’t quite rage and isn’t quite grief but lands somewhere between the two,a chronic, low-grade dread that never fully lifts. It feels like knowing that the person next door is feeling the same dread, for different reasons maybe, but it’s the same feeling in the same body, and I can’t reach across the property line to acknowledge it. It feels like the specific loneliness of knowing things are wrong and believing I’m powerless to change them, or worse,that I’m powerful enough to change them but too afraid of what that change would cost me.

The refusal doesn’t protect us from pain. It just makes the pain private, individual, unshareable. It turns every anxiety into a personal failure rather than a collective condition. When I lie awake at 3 AM worrying about money, about health insurance, about what happens when my aging body can’t do the work it does now, I’m supposed to experience this as my problem, my fear, my inadequacy. The refusal forbids me from recognizing these as everyone’s problems, from reaching out to my neighbor who’s lying awake with the same fears, from building anything together that might actually address them.

And my neighbor is lying awake with the same fears, I know he is. But Trump has taught him to experience those fears as evidence that someone has wronged him, that someone needs to be punished, that if we could just remove the right people or close the right borders or go back to some imagined past, he could sleep soundly again. The fears don’t go away. They just get redirected, weaponized, turned into a reason to refuse connection even more aggressively.

I watch it happen in small moments, in daily exchanges that should create connection but instead deepen the walls. On the bus when someone smells like they haven’t showered and everyone shifts away, pulls their bags closer, suddenly becomes very interested in their phones. At the grocery store when the person in front of you is counting out coins for milk and bread and you can feel the impatience radiating from the line behind you, can feel everyone silently calculating how much faster this would go if that person just got out of the way. At family dinners where someone mentions a political position and the whole table goes quiet, everyone suddenly focused on their plates, on cutting their food very precisely, on not meeting anyone’s eyes, on letting the moment pass without having to actually engage with the person sitting right across from them who just revealed something about how they see the world.

These are the tiny refusals that add up to a whole architecture of disconnection. The averting of eyes. The careful silence. The physical distance we maintain even in crowded spaces. The way we’ve learned to be alone together, to occupy the same streets and stores and buses without ever having to actually see each other, to acknowledge each other, to feel anything about each other’s presence.

And the headlines scream at us,another crisis, another shooting, another bill that will hurt the people who need help most and we consume them like entertainment, like information, like something that’s happening somewhere else to someone else. We click and scroll and share and comment, and all of it is a form of refusal. Refusal to let it become real, to let it touch us, to feel our own fear mirrored in other people’s disasters. We turn it into content, into talking points, into evidence for whatever argument we’re already making. We refuse to let it be what it is: a reflection of our collective failure to connect, to care, to build systems that acknowledge our shared humanity.

The refusal of connection is not a failure of imagination. It’s an active choice, made and remade every day, to not imagine what we could imagine, to not feel what we could feel, to not see what’s right in front of us. It’s choosing separation over connection, choosing the comfort of our stories over the discomfort of reality, choosing to live in our heads rather than in our bodies, choosing individual suffering over collective action.

And Trump has turned that choice into a political identity. He’s made the refusal itself into a form of belonging, a way of signaling that you’re one of the strong ones, one of the people who doesn’t need anyone, one of the real Americans who take care of their own. He’s taken the most isolating, painful thing about modern life,our inability to connect with each other, to feel solidarity, to build anything together and he’s rebranded it as strength. As patriotism. As the thing that makes you better than all those weak people who admit they need help.

And the cost of this refusal is everything. It costs us our relationships, our politics, our ability to build a society that reflects our actual needs rather than our fantasies about independence. It costs us our capacity for empathy, for solidarity, for the kind of connection that could actually change things. It costs us ourselves,the parts of ourselves that know we’re vulnerable, that need help, that can’t make it alone no matter how hard we try.

It costs us in ways we don’t even notice until we’re sitting alone at night, doors locked, curtains drawn, scrolling through a feed of strangers’ curated lives and feeling more isolated than humans have ever felt in the history of our species. It costs us in the chronic anxiety that never lifts, the sense that something is deeply wrong but we can’t name it, the feeling of being surrounded by people and still desperately, achingly alone. It costs us in the small erosions of trust,the way we can’t ask our neighbors for help because we don’t know them, can’t rely on community because we don’t have one, can’t imagine collective action because we’ve forgotten how to act collectively.

I don’t know how to stop refusing. The refusal is so deep, so automatic, so essential to the way I’ve learned to move through the world. But I’m trying to notice it now when it happens. I’m trying to see the moment when someone tells me something difficult and I feel myself start to back away, start to construct explanations for why their situation is unique, why it couldn’t happen to me, why they’re on one side of a line and I’m safely on the other.

Because there is no line. That’s what the refusal obscures. That’s what Trump’s entire political project depends on obscuring. There’s no line between people who struggle and people who don’t, between people who know hunger and people who don’t, between people who need help and people who can make it on their own. There’s only temporary circumstances, only luck and timing, only the fiction that we’re fundamentally different from each other when we’re actually fundamentally the same.

The refusal of connection is a choice to live in a smaller world, a world where we’re alone with our fears, our vulnerabilities, our needs. A world where asking for help is shameful and giving help is suspicious and we’re all locked in our separate spheres, refusing to acknowledge how much we need each other. It’s a lonely way to live. More than lonely,it’s a kind of death, a death of the parts of ourselves that know how to connect, that remember we’re social animals, that understand we survive together or not at all.

What would it mean to stop refusing? To actually connect,not as an exercise in empathy but as a recognition of fact,that their hunger could be our hunger, that the distance between us is not as great as we pretend, that we’re all bodies moving through the same world with the same ultimate vulnerabilities? It would mean giving up the illusion of control. It would mean acknowledging that we’re all more fragile than we like to admit. It would mean feeling our own vulnerability and other people’s vulnerability as connected rather than separate. It would mean building different systems, telling different stories, being different people.

It would mean rejecting Trump’s story,the story that says we’re safe because we’re separate, strong because we’re alone, powerful because we refuse to see ourselves in anyone else. It would mean recognizing that story for what it is: a con, a grift, a way of keeping us isolated and afraid while the people who actually have power continue to extract everything from all of us.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to stop refusing in any consistent way. But I know that calling it a failure of imagination is letting ourselves off too easy. We’re not failing. We’re refusing. And refusal, unlike failure, is something we choose. We choose it every day, every time we turn away from connection that’s available to us, every time we maintain the walls between us and them, between our reality and their reality, between our hunger and their hunger.

The question is not whether we can imagine other people’s suffering. We can. The capacity is there. The question is whether we’re willing to let that imagination become connection, to let connection implicate us, to let implication require action. The question is whether we’re willing to give up what the refusal protects,our sense of safety, our belief in our own specialness, our story about deserving what we have.

I’m not sure I am willing. But I’m trying to at least see the refusal, to recognize it as refusal rather than failure, to understand that every time I refuse connection I’m making a choice about what kind of person I want to be and what kind of world I want to live in. I’m trying to understand that the refusal costs me too, that the walls I build to protect myself also imprison me, that the disconnection I maintain to feel safe actually makes me more vulnerable.

Because the truth is that we need each other. Not in an abstract, sentimental way, but in a concrete, material way. We need each other to survive, to build systems that work, to create safety nets that catch us when we fall. And the refusal of connection makes all of that impossible. It keeps us isolated, keeps us weak, keeps us unable to see our common interests or build common cause. And Trump’s entire political project is designed to keep us that way,to keep us refusing, to keep us isolated, to keep us unable to recognize that we’re all in the same situation, all vulnerable to the same forces, all being failed by the same systems.

The refusal is not just about them. It’s about us. It’s about all of us, together, choosing separation over connection, choosing fear over solidarity, choosing the comfort of our individual stories over the discomfort of collective reality. And until we stop refusing,until we choose connection instead,nothing changes. We just keep suffering separately, refusing to see that we’re all in the same situation, that we’re all vulnerable, that we’re all human, that we’re all, in the end, the same.

So I’m left with this question: What would happen if I knocked on my neighbor’s door? Not to change his mind, not to convince him of anything, not to show him how wrong he is. Just to acknowledge that we’re both here, both scared, both trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense. What would happen if I refused to refuse? What would I have to give up? What might I gain? And what would it mean if thousands of us stopped refusing at the same time,if we refused Trump’s story of isolation, refused the system’s insistence that we’re all separate, refused to keep suffering alone when we could build something together?

I don’t know. But I think that not knowing is where we have to start. Not with certainty, not with the right answer, but with the willingness to feel the thread that connects us, even when,especially when,that connection is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and completely contrary to the story we’ve been told about how we’re supposed to survive.

I’m writing this because I believe these ideas matter, and I need your help to keep exploring them. If this essay resonated with you,if it made you see something differently, or named something you’ve felt but couldn’t articulate,please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Writing like this takes time: time to think, to notice, to sit with discomfort, to revise until the ideas are clear. Paid subscribers make it possible for me to keep writing essays that refuse easy answers, that sit with complexity, that try to understand rather than simply condemn. If you value writing that challenges both sides of our political divide, that looks honestly at our own complicity, that searches for connection in a moment that profits from our isolation,then please subscribe. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work, to dedicate the hours and energy required to explore these ideas deeply rather than superficially. Thank you for reading, and thank you for considering it.