I have friends who say they try not to pay attention to the news, for their own sanity. I am a news addict, so I can’t do that.

Somedays I enjoy being informed. Then there are days that are overwhelming and make me want to crawl in a hole. June 14 was one of those.

We were months into the chaos fueled by the election of a man who relishes disruption and anger. The military had been called to confront American citizens in Los Angeles, a step fraught with dangerous precedent.

Masked agents were abducting people off the streets in something that felt more like 1930s Germany than 2020s United States. The seized were not criminals, but hardworking people contributing to our economy. This “policy” is based on a cascade of lies. Those who only know the news from orchestrated right-wing media don’t know that.

On that Saturday, the schisms in our country would be laid further open by the contrast of the Army/Birthday parade and dozens of No Kings rallies. It already promised to be a tense day. Then came news of the shootings in the night of legislators. Minnesota drew an unwanted spotlight. It’s generally not a good thing when BBC News leads with our state.

As we followed the news of a manhunt into Sunday, our country chose right then to bomb Iran. It was a decision based as much on the encouragement of Fox News hosts as any thoughtful analysis of risks and rewards.

All of this at one time was a lot, for our state, for our country, for our world. A line came into my head: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

That line is from The Second Coming, a poem written by William Yeats in 1919. The rest of that verse:

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

Yeats wrote that at a particularly unsettled and violent time. It was on the edge between World War I and the Irish Revolutionary War in Yeats’ Ireland. The pandemic of 1919 added to the turbulence. Yeats wrote the poem while his pregnant wife was near death. She did recover, but all that was in Yeats’ heart and mind.

In Yeats’ world, it was as if everything was spiraling out of control. Life as was known was being upended and no one knew what would follow.

Jump ahead a half century to another chaotic time. I am old enough to remember the Sixties. There were assassinations, race riots, and an unpopular war that was widely opposed and took 70,000 American lives. As in Yeats’ Ireland, life was being upended. Civil rights, women’s rights, voting rights all conspired to give power to the powerless. Society was changing in the moment.

As a kid, I observed these cataclysmic shifts from the living room couch watching Walter Cronkite and heard them on our barn radio tuned to WCCO.

One day was a giant exclamation point to all the furors of the Sixties. May 4, 1970, shook our nation to the core. During a Vietnam War protest at Kent State, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine.

In college, I had a teacher who told this story. He himself was a student on the day of the Kent State shootings. That day, his professor walked into the classroom and wrote this on the board. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Then he quietly walked out of the room.

Now, another half century later, we find ourselves once again in a time of great turmoil and roiling discord. We are more torn apart as a nation than any time since the Sixties. I was a kid then and very much not a kid now. But there are similar feelings. There are more than a few echoes of the Sixties: large protests, assassinations, the military being used indiscriminately.

I started this with our weekend of June 14th. Sometime in there, Yeats’ line of apprehensive poetry came to me.

“Things fall apart.” Are things falling apart? Certainly, for immigrants, government workers, those on Medicaid, the list is long. Again, if you live in the right-wing fog, these are all bad people, or wasteful people, or undeserving people. I guess this makes sense to you.

The rest of us feel gobsmacked by what’s going on. We aren’t sure how this will end, or who will pick up the pieces. People are being hurt. We can hope that rural hospitals and nursing homes aren’t harmed or forced to close. We shall see.

I wish I were optimistic. I’m not. This spiral downward has momentum and lots of levers of power.

“The centre cannot hold.” What is the centre Yeats refers to? Is it our society, our culture, our country? If it is any of those, it is also us. It is you and me. Each of us expanding out from ourselves to our families to our communities.

The problem with moments like 1919 Ireland and 1970 Kent State and 2025 Minnesota is one feels overwhelmed. We are all trying to imagine the horror of being swept away by a gushing Guadalupe River right now. That can be a metaphor for being carried away by changes in the world, like it’s out of our control.

In these times, we do have choices, especially those of us who aren’t poor or refugee or gay or other disadvantaged. Those of us with the wherewithal to stand up to dark forces need to.

A number of churches are doing what they can to protect migrants. This is not without risk, and those priests and ministers are to be cheered. It’s an example of good work.

Maybe there will be a time in the future that we can fix some of what is being destroyed. Programs that helped people around the world that took decades of bipartisan cooperation to create have been thrown against the rocks in a day. For now, the wreckers are winning. Perhaps the builders will have their day again.

Now, maybe all we can do is to love. Love our families, love our communities, love the innocent people hurting. Maybe the centre won’t hold right now. But despair does us no good.

— Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye, where he lives with his wife, Pam.