This article by Carter Moon originally appeared on his Substack, and is republished here with his permission.

It’s just after 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 7. I’m watching a crew of emergency vet techs stuff a tiny oxygen tube in the nose of my wife’s cat. The cat had suddenly collapsed and stopped breathing a few minutes earlier, and I had rushed her to the emergency vet. They’re doing their best to take an ultrasound wand to her chest and figure out why she’s having such a hard time breathing, but she’s so small and so wriggly they can’t see much. I am positive that this is the end and we’re going to have to put the cat down. It’s three days before my wife’s birthday. The cat has a swollen heart; the sack around her heart is literally too big for the rest of her teeny-tiny body. We’ve known for a year that one day this will be the end of the cat. They need to do an X-ray and run some tests; I numbly swipe my credit card to authorize an absurd charge. There goes our tax return.

As they load our cat into an oxygen cage to help her breathe, I feel bad for checking my phone. But the president had threatened to wipe Iranian civilization off the map this morning and the deadline for his threat is rapidly approaching, so I compulsively refresh all of my apps. I get a work text asking for help with a minor task. I lie and say I’m on lunch but will be back in an hour; if they can ask someone else to handle it for now, that’d be ideal. I’m left to sit next to our little fluffy cat, scared and utterly confused, huddled at the far end of the cage and not registering when I try to tap on the glass and get her attention. I go back to doomscrolling. Journalists I trust say they can’t be positive Trump won’t use a nuke. I am sick and hovering out of my body. My wife is desperately trying to get out of her company-wide meeting to come join me. I’m texting a neighbor to see if she can get a ride. At some point she extracts herself and gets in a Lyft.

She gets to the ER and we sit and wait. A dog comes in more clearly on the brink of death than our cat, so of course the whole team gets pulled into saving this dog’s life. It doesn’t seem to work out. My phone is dying but I can’t help refreshing all my news apps. I feel dirty and crazy for being worried about the life of our cat when I know people on the other side of the world are living under a terror inflicted by my government that I can’t comprehend. The longer we sit there and the more tests are ordered, the steeper the bill becomes. It’s clear the trip we had planned for my wife’s birthday is cancelled. I can’t help but cry a little; stupid, selfish tears about how unfair it is that this is happening to her, that all the nice things I wanted for her this week are ruined. And I cry for all the people I’ve never met whose lives are probably irreversibly changed for the worse today, and I know I’m impotent and useless crying and feeling bad when it’s my tax dollars ultimately responsible for all of this; it’s me and everyone around me responsible for it.

At some point we get word that a two-week ceasefire has been reached; all that dread and terror for nothing. The labs come back and our cat is OK; she’s got a mild infection that probably made it hard for her to breathe, but a two-week dose of antibiotics should clear it up. Her organs aren’t failing; there’s no reason to think she won’t live for a couple more years. We will inevitably have to face the music, but for now, we can go home. Just like how we’ll have to face the cold reality of this war with Iran that will change the global order forever soon, but not today.

So I have to go back to work for the next couple days and act like everything’s normal. Everyone’s on edge in my office, but I can’t tell if it’s just because we’re understaffed, or if everyone’s just as freaked out as I was that the president threatened genocide the day before. Someone is really trying hard to phish our office; someone is impersonating my boss on Gmail and sending scam emails to people. I get drawn into one of the most stressful days I’ve ever had at my job, constantly putting out fires while listening to mid-level executives muse if they can afford to pay an A-list comedian $300k per episode. Whenever I open my phone, I see another video of an apartment in Lebanon being struck by Israeli missiles we paid for. So much for the ceasefire.

I take Friday off for my wife’s birthday; we force ourselves to have a nice day in North Hollywood. We go out to dinner, assuring each other we can still afford it even after the outrageous vet visit. Our Lyft driver to the restaurant is Iranian. He tells us that he’s glad the US started the war and that he hopes the regime is gone soon. He says it’s good that Israel violated the ceasefire and kept bombing. He doesn’t care that gas might be temporarily more expensive for him. I tell him the war is psychotic and will only make life worse for all of us. He says he was just in Iran in December, the first time in 11 years, and couldn’t believe how much the people were suffering. I try to keep my voice measured and choose my words carefully, not wanting to yell at this man who does, after all, have more immediate stakes than I do. But I lose it when he says that Israel is strategic and doesn’t strike civilians; a bark of cruel laughter can’t help but burst out of me. I make myself shut up after pointing out how badly US intervention went for Iraq and Afghanistan.

We get out of the car and I feel gross. I know I was probably a dick for talking to a member of the diaspora like that, he’s got an immediate experience that I don’t have. But I can’t help that my extremities vibrate with anger for the first 30 minutes of dinner.

I try to be present with my wife for the rest of the weekend. But every time I peer into my phone a new unbelievable story unfolds. ICE shot and nearly killed another man in California; it barely seems to be penetrating. Melania Trump came out of nowhere and said everyone should really stop saying she was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, thankyouverymuch. Here in LA, 7.7 TB of sensitive case data were stolen from the District Attorney’s office, apparently because they were too lazy to figure out how to encrypt them properly. In Indianapolis, a city councilmember who supported a new AI data center in the city had his home shot up. A guy threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house and was apparently ready to attack OpenAI’s headquarters too. And most intense of all, a man in Ontario, California filmed himself burning down the toilet paper warehouse where he worked, saying, “If you’re not going to pay us enough to fucking live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this.” He’s already a folk hero on the internet.

These can feel like discreet events, except for the fact that they’re happening so closely together. There’s an acute sense of acceleration to everything now. Nothing feels solid; the price of gas causes a knot of dread every time I drive past a gas station. Everyone is living on a knife’s edge of not being able to afford the essentials of life, prices only able to shoot even more wildly out of control. Something that keeps me up at night is knowing that Americans, already a fearful, distrusting, and isolated people, will become even more paranoid and fascistic as life becomes even more precarious. I’m picturing people who can no longer afford to drive or pay for Netflix, but they still have guns and their Ring cameras, just waiting for someone even more desperate than them to cross their threshold. Those are people who will need a politics of solidarity, a class analysis that can explain how and why things got so bad and who is actually responsible. But I fear that anyone who comes along with that message will be drowned out by the voices of people like Tucker Carlson, fascists who are correctly reading the writing on the wall and abandoning Trump so that they can regroup. I think it’s important in moments like this to remember that there’s not really a coherent master plan; there’s no one plotting for this shit to play out this way to take advantage of. There’s just addled, white supremacist grifters with access to capital who’ve been able to bully their way this far because no one has stopped them.

I needed to write out how this week went because it feels significant. Whatever is developing, whatever horrible next phase we’re hurtling towards, I think I will personally look back and say this was one of the points where it was clear things were never going to be the same again. This fake ceasefire that wasn’t really a ceasefire appears to have resulted in America basically admitting it can’t get back control of the Strait of Hormuz. This means Iran is potentially going to become a permanent global superpower, and America’s ability to control the oil trade is permanently upended. This feels like the moment where Trump stops being able to manipulate the markets for his friends and pretend he has a grand design to end this whole thing quickly. As we live through Events, I think it’s important to put down what happens in a given week as clearly as we can, both so we can process what’s happening in the moment and so we can remember how things felt at the time. Hopefully we survive whatever comes from all of this, and we’ll be grateful we recorded it to explain to future generations how bad it really was.