Emily Articulated: Overreaction

By Emily Erickson
Reader Staff

I remember the footage of a woman screaming in the streets after the first Trump inauguration. She became a meme — a poster child for “snowflake liberals overreacting.” A few people in my life at the time openly laughed, saying, “It’s just four years,” and, “It’s just one election. Will this even affect us, really?”

But this apathy, this disbelief in the impact of a presidency, stemmed from a fundamental assumption: that a president would operate within the boundaries of a democratic system — one in which checks and balances would hold, and one office’s power was limited to the slow, incremental policy changes we’d come to expect.

Now, nearly a decade later, that woman screaming in the streets looks more like a bellwether than an emotional foghorn — and certainly more than a melting snowflake. We’ve seen the social and political power that can be wielded by a president and the seismic shifts that emanate from the White House to state capitols, to local governments and in our daily lives.

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

At a national level, we’ve seen rights rolled back under the guise of cracking down on supposed threats — each one conveniently embodied by a marginalized group. From the fall of Roe v. Wade to attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, the dismantling of DEI programs, mass deportation initiatives, and now the assault on education and free speech, we’ve witnessed the profound impact of a presidential office (and Supreme Court). With each new headline comes validation that the so-called wailing liberal had every right to scream.

Still, despite a decade of evidence that our reactions are proportional to the weight of what we see happening around us, people say, “Don’t overreact,” and, “Will this affect us, really?” (Even I use this question to stave off a full-on panic spiral.) 

Cut to me, scrambling to schedule an OB-GYN appointment in Post Falls because federal policies triggered local shutdowns of women’s health care services. Cut to my married LGBTQ+ friends, anxiously hoping their legal status will make it through this presidency. Cut to books being pulled from library shelves — works that once celebrated diversity, now deemed too controversial to exist in the public sphere. Cut to crumbling school ceilings, underfunded programs that rely on Medicaid and local government employees losing their jobs. 

But history has shown that political changes at the national level don’t stay contained — they spread outward, shaping our realities in ways that are not only personal, but alarming. It’s a ripple effect, if not an echo chamber, whereby smaller forms of government, organisations of power and the general public mimic federal policies in their own aggressive attempts to reshape the social and legal landscape.

Consider the Idaho Legislature’s attempt to defund its own public education system, mirroring the federal push to dismantle national oversight of education — like a younger sibling mimicking the worst impulses of its elder. Consider the woman forcibly removed from a Kootenai County town hall meeting for her dissent, at the same time the Trump administration cracked down on protests on college campuses.

These moves aren’t random — they are deliberate replications of broader efforts to erode rights from the ground up, reinforcing harmful policies at every level of government. Reflecting on this strategy — specifically as it relates to the arrest of foreign-born student protesters on Columbia University’s campus — Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah discussed today’s political targets as convenient starting points for widespread suppression. She wrote, “For now, the threat is directed at ‘others’: Palestinians, undocumented immigrants, trans people.”

Attiah continued, “For this kind of strategy to work, there must be an intentional creation of distance between human beings, the illusion that they are different from us, and that the weapons we throw at them are from a comfortable distance. This distance is and has always been a delusion — a profoundly dangerous weakness that America touts as strength.”

This distance, beyond being an intentional illusion, also provides a convenient excuse for people to say, “Stop overreacting,” or, “That’s happening to people who deserve it.” But beyond the gross apathy toward the marginalized, that kind of thinking underscores a dangerous propensity for self-deception — one that emboldens oppression while convincing the majority they are safe from its reach. 

Attiah concluded, “The question isn’t if these policies will expand — it’s when.” 

Personally, I wonder what we’ll say in 10 more years, and if we’ll still be afforded the freedom to react (if not overreact) at all.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.