For Our Own Good

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about what we can do about the violations of both the rule of law and our cultural norms that the current administration represents, and how people are already fighting back on both fronts. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

I’ve been hearing from a number of friends and acquaintances who usually feel competent at navigating daily life but now find themselves feeling almost paralyzed on a regular basis, due to all the current political and social crises unfolding today.

Any jump in anxiety levels is surely due in part to the fact that groups of people who might not have felt targeted by the government before are suddenly realizing that the administration is happy to commit widespread violence. But my sense is that another big shift is happening for countless people. Many will be familiar with the feeling, but for others, it will be their first experience with anything of this magnitude.

Millions of Americans—consciously or not—are recognizing for the first time that we’re trapped in a horror story. And by “horror story,” I mean exactly that: a specific and very old narrative arc we understand intuitively. This understanding elicits a response that’s logical, even if it’s overwhelming. To understand why it would even matter, consider for a moment the similarities and differences between disaster and horror films. (I’m writing about the trends in both categories, but of course there are outliers in each genre.)

Both kinds of movies tend to feature an individual or group of plucky humans confronted by death and mayhem in highly dramatic ways, pitting the protagonist(s) against something bigger or much more powerful. But the disaster film springs out of physical catastrophe. While that central catastrophe can be caused by human negligence or greed—such as the corner-cutting during the construction in the skyscraper at the heart of the Towering Inferno—the biggest threat in a disaster film rarely results from malice.

Malice, however, sits at the heart of horror. Even in cases where the monster or killer has an origin story driven by a just fury over a past or unreachable foe, horror recounts the carnage it deliberately unleashes as punishment. It is coming intentionally for you. This knowledge provokes dread, which is the dominant emotion in horror.

By contrast, disaster movies are at heart hopeful enterprises—we are kept in suspense over how many of the cast will manage to survive through grit and collaboration. Horror movies keep us agonizing over how many will die.

In both kinds of movies, characters often face their greatest danger in isolation. Yet the alone-ness of the horror movie inflicts a more profound psychological toll. Horror also emphasizes recurrence and exists beyond the timeline of the current story. Today’s violence parallels past tragedy in a cycle that will continue unless the main characters find a way to break it.

With a few marginal exceptions, the disaster movie’s death toll is limited to the cascade of casualties of a singular, specific event. But in a horror film, the cycle of death will continue to expand into future timelines indefinitely, unless the killer is stopped for good.

***

These are just some observations about fictional genres. But they’re also recognizable in narrative reporting about events in our world. Back in 2009, I highlighted “For Their Own Good,” a two-part series on the Dozier School for Boys written by Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore. It ran in the St. Petersburg Times and described the systemic abuse of teen boys in Marianna, Florida. Several former detainees had come forward in middle age to talk about the gruesome abuse and suffering they faced at the school.

But there was an even deeper horror that Montgomery and Moore unearthed. By going back into the archives. they found that the abuses had been going on for a century. At regular intervals, local reporters would be tipped off and investigate. A scandal would follow. And in some cases, cosmetic changes would be made. Then the whole cycle would start all over again, decade after decade. (You can see the whole project, including some devastating photography, here.)

In a horror story, the only hope is that understanding the cycle might make it possible to break free of it. And through the reporters’ incorporation of all that history, political and community leaders in Florida began to see the Dozier School in those terms.

It helped that the series was a finalist for the Pulitzer in Local Reporting the following year. The school failed an inspection. The governor launched a probe, and state authorities and the Department of Justice both investigated. The school was shut down in 2011.

A year later, forensic anthropologists were brought in try to locate bodies buried on the campus. In 2017, the state issued a formal apology to survivors. In 2024, the Florida legislature passed a law setting aside $20 million to compensate the men who had been held at Dozier as minors. By June 2025, the funds had been paid out to nearly a thousand applicants.

The next month, however, journalist Leonora LaPeter Anton, who had been a reporter for many years at the St. Petersburg Times as well (including after the paper’s name was changed to the Tampa Bay Times) wound up writing a heartbreaking narrative for the Marshall Project about the staggering number of men sent to Florida’s death row who were or are survivors of the Dozier School. (Full disclosure: Leonora and I have become friends in recent years.)

Detention at Dozier itself has stopped. But for those who entered its gates as minors in custody of the state, the school’s legacy continues.

***

Most of the arc of disaster movies takes place in the aftermath of the biggest cataclysm. Yet with horror, the movie unfolds with the promise of only more horror ahead, with thin odds of stopping it. And the danger of the world we live in right now—the reason I think so many of us feel such deep dread—is that we have a sense of the horrors being unleashed and how far they might go.

We’ve seen what happens when vulnerable people are rounded up into camps and the rhetoric of hate is used against whole communities for political gain. Society has witnessed what happens when racism is enforced by law, and women are treated as inferior creatures. History books—and even the recent past—reveal the toll when people go without vaccines, and contagious disease runs rampant.

On some level, it’s perfectly normal to feel a deep sense of horror when the deliberate malice and the cyclical nature of our current crises make themselves itself apparent. The call is coming from inside the White House.

If it all feels overwhelming at times, part of the reason is because we aren’t just dealing with recovering from a disaster. We’re far beyond a cleanup on aisle 14. The feeling of dread is a sign that we’re still in the middle of it all. We have yet to break the cycle, and it’s clear now just how hard that will be. But the cardinal rule of horror movies—don’t go into the dark basement alone—holds here. Perhaps the better path is to understand the sweep of history and to join together with like-minded people, which reduces the paralytic power of dread. There are no guarantees, but we already know what evil that’s left to perpetuate itself is capable of.

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