Dear Reader: This is my first blog post in three years. I have so much to say, but I’ve been at a loss for where to start. This is as good a place as any—a handwritten journal entry from a couple weeks ago. I am typing it up to share here.
February 3, 2025, 11:15 pm.
I was really tired this afternoon and evening, but I am now awake. What’s keeping me up is Trump, and Elon Musk.
Trump has been president for only two weeks. We all knew he would do shocking things, but it is still shocking to see what he is doing. I feel a sort of numbness, a deep heart pain. I know others feel it too.
This time is so different from eight years ago. Then, it felt wrong in a different way. Wrong that he had won, that he had duped people into voting for him; wrong because he was unqualified and hateful. This time, he won the popular vote, and he won as a known quantity. He can’t be said to have duped people; the voters knew what they were getting.
There’s no organized resistance now, no Women’s March. We are watching in a sort of numb, helpless disbelief and resignation, full of anxiety but powerless—he has all three branches of government—and hoping he will do himself in, and wondering where we went wrong. It’s really hard to get clarity.
In the meantime, this time Trump is highly organized, blitzing through his agenda so quickly no one can keep up—not the media, not Congress, not the courts. It’s clear he and his team are doing many dubious or illegal things, but there’s so far no mechanism to stop them, especially because Congress is GOP-controlled and doesn’t have a will to. We really might lose our democracy, just as we feared when he first came to power. It really might be that bad.
Musk has shut down USAID already, and PEPFAR—a blow to my gut, the program that could have saved Mama Day—and is now threatening the Department of Education. I turn over scenarios in my mind, trying to reassure myself that they will not come for Ron’s job and thus our healthcare, or that if they do, my Remicade/Inflectra will still be covered by the Oregon Health Plan and I will not get sick. As a chronically ill person, in the chaos I am always aware of this anvil hanging over my head, waiting to drop. Images of great pain and indignity, and trauma for my family, and possibly, if society collapses enough, a terrible death run through my mind. It gives me peace and conviction in one way, though: conviction about finishing my books. About choosing to write them now, just in case.
I try to calm myself in various ways. I was this stressed last time, too, I remind myself. Stressed about nuclear war with North Korea, then about the end of Obamacare. Neither happened. And I still have nostalgia for the pandemic: for everyone being in their homes, for feeling closer to Ron, getting to have him home and hear him teach, not having to wake up so early, sitting on our front porch, gardening together. I was filled with anxiety then too, so much that I couldn’t write for a month. But it worked out okay for us in the end, although his grandma died in her nursing home and his mom couldn’t easily visit her. But we were mostly okay. And I often wish I could go back to that time and tell myself I was going to be okay, because if I could have just turned off my anxiety, it would have been a wonderful, special year in many ways.
So, I tell myself, don’t let your anxiety consume you this time. Things might wind up okay. Worrying won’t help.
But then I think, But we might be losing our democracy. Shouldn’t I do something?
Do what you can do, says a voice. Grow your garden, as Candide said. Write your books. Live your life. Take care of yourself and the people around you. Call your Members of Congress, too, but also keep living your life. Be a part of the good fabric of humanity, caring for each other.
One of the things that hurts so much is the hateful glee with which Elon is wreaking his havoc. The condescending emails to federal employees calling them lazy. The ignorance and disrespect toward government workers. Was it Reagan who started this, or did it predate him? Why do people hate the government so much? Librarians, teachers, public health scientists, firefighters? How is it that politicians, who themselves are inherently egotistical and often obviously selfish and prone to falsehood and exaggeration, have somehow convinced so much of the public that public employees are the selfish, entitled, false ones?
When you become a public employee, it’s usually after a long, quiet, and diligent career. We—I count myself one, after nine years as a state or federal employee—were the good, hardworking students in school, the ones who kept our noses in our books and worked hard, and who cared about making the world better. We were promising students, every bit as smart as the future lawyers and businesspeople who would go on to make millions, but we chose instead to do something nobler and more meaningful. Something for the greater good, even if it wouldn’t line our pockets.
In return, we hoped for a quiet, stable life at least. A middle-class life where we would hopefully own a house and raise a family, where we’d have decent health care and retirement benefits, if not enough money to send our kids to private school. An honest, honorable life doing something good for society and providing a sense of security to our families. That didn’t seem like too much to ask.
At work, we continued doing what we’d done all our lives, working hard and trying to help. Not every single one of us—in every large agency, public or private, there are slackers and incompetents and maddening administrators. But most of us.
Hearing about Elon’s emails and statements and tweets, it’s like he’s living on another planet. He, like so many Republicans in general, seems totally out of touch with what actually goes on in government.
I think what it is is that selfish people cannot comprehend unselfishness. To someone like Elon, it’s unfathomable that a smart, competent person would intentionally work in a job that didn’t pay great. He imagines that the world is made up of people like him, people who are competing with each other to become as wealthy and “successful” as possible. He has no idea that there are other measures of success; his tiny, shriveled, Scrooge’s heart can only see wealth, dollars. He therefore assumes government is made of people less intelligent than himself, especially now that he’s outsmarted them enough to gain access to their systems. He did that by exploiting and screwing over other people till he became the world’s richest man, which, in turn, earned him the respect of Donald Trump, whose selfishness matches Elon’s, so that when Trump won the election, Elon was able to slip in sideways to these agencies.
It was his money. He won the game. He was right, it turns out: money does buy power.
But what is the state of his soul?
I am reading Fatal Discord in the last couple weeks, a book about Erasmus and Luther and the Reformation. I can’t help applying it to today. Luther counseled people to look inward, to form a personal relationship with God, not to rely on the church for salvation. I keep thinking something like: Trump and Musk, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson—all these awful people, and all their soulless lackeys, have none of what Luther taught, what great souls everywhere (I’m not sure Luther was one!) counsel us to seek. Compassion. Empathy. Connection to the Divine. Vulnerability. Joy. Love. Fellowship.
I think: All these federal employees will lose their jobs. Good programs will end, people will lose their health care, immense suffering will ensue. Abroad, people will die, their life-saving medicine withdrawn. In raw terms, Elon and Trump win, still alive, still physically thriving. But Augustine or Luther would say that’s not important, that’s the stuff of this world. What’s really important is their souls. In that realm, the people they hurt will win.
It isn’t just the Christians saying this. The Stoics taught it too, and other ancients, maybe the Epicureans. Focus on what you can control. Happiness comes not from external rewards but from virtue, which leads to inner peace. I’m sure Buddhism says similar things, and probably Judaism and other religions too.
Just as Elon and Trump are wrong in their accounting of “success,” they are bankrupt in their concept of happiness, which I think must revolve around wealth again. The rest of us, the real human beings, are capable of so much more than them. Of family, of friendship, of introspection, of communion, of the joy of learning.
That’s why it is so painful to see them dismantling what we’ve built. They are so very unworthy.
