“The weight of non-zero”

Garrett Graff writes about “the physical weight” of life under the current occupant:

That heaviness you feel, that drag on your mental health, that drain on your emotional energy and lethargy in the face of world events, like yesterday [Wednesday the 7th], is real. We are all carrying a lot of new weight in the era of Trumpism.

It’s the weight of non-zero.

As it turns out, that simple switch from zero to non-zero — even if it any or all of the above is still infinitesimally unlikely, it is no longer effectively zero. And that tiniest bit of switch, that binary shift from 0 to greater than zero, turns out to be something that we can all feel in our daily lives.

He gives twenty-two examples of the weight of non-zero. This is the twenty-second:

Before last year, if you were a mom, with a glovebox full of stuffed animals, driving your SUV through a peaceful suburb, eager to see your six-year-old child at the end of the day — a wife with no criminal record who had committed no federal crimes, not being sought by any authorities anywhere — a poet who cared about your neighbors — there was, effectively, a zero percent chance you had to worry about being shot in the face by masked, ill-trained, aggressive federal officers who would then pull their guns on a doctor who tried to help you and let you die in the street.

Now that chance is at least non-zero.