I made it exactly one week with my pledge to take a break from my Point of View columns. But given all the recent events, I couldn’t stay silent. I needed to reach out and gather you all in my arms and tell you:
It’s all right to be scared right now.
I am scared shitless. The non-stop torrent of bad news, as Musk sticks his fingers into agency after agency, stuffing AI into their core coding and demolishing some of them singlehandedly with seemingly no recourse, is truly frightening to behold.
And Trump’s non-stop attacks on his enemies, which include some of the most marginalized and poorest among us (I see you, trans folk, people of color, women and migrants), and his omnipresence in our lives has been nothing short of overwhelming. These last three weeks have been an unending assault against everything I hold dear, and it has taken on a surreal quality that would have been hard to imagine on January 19th.
How has it not been at least a year already?
I had planned to sit things out for a while, like many of my friends. Let the world spin without me. What’s the worst that could happen? These things will take time, I told myself. I can re-engage when the time comes.
I mean, how bad could it get in a few weeks?
Constitutional crisis bad, apparently. We now have the Executive Branch actively contemplating defying the Judicial Branch, while Congress lays supine before the will of the Unitary Executive.
So we’re all being called back into the game early, when we are still exhausted, frightened and unprepared. That’s the plan – hit the country hard with a seemingly endless series of awful things. Flood the zone. There’s so much bad that some of it – maybe a lot of it – will ultimately get through.
Don’t give in to it. We are not alone. Judge after judge is trying to apply the brakes to the worst of these excesses. Protests are starting up around the country as people gather in their capitals and besiege the phone lines of their representatives. There’s more than one way to flood the zone. And the Democrats are going through the painful but necessary process of reinvention and minority opposition.
So stand with me and find your voice – lets lift them up together. Do it for your trans friends. Do it for the immigrants who came here for a better life. Do it for the Kennedy Center and abortion access and disease prevention and protection from predatory institutions.
Do it for the penny.
But most of all, do it for our democracy.
Fear is a powerful motivator. Let’s take a page from the other side and see what we can do to turn back the tide with a flood of our own.
Love you all.