Just questions

Unprecedented sounds weighty but it’s inadequate. Anything now that never was before is unprecedented. These times are unthinkable. Insane. Fucked Up.

We are in month nine of this chosen reign of suppression, ignorance, bigotry, greed. Trump is trumping the Seven Deadly Sins. He and his despicable lackeys are in double-digits before month 10.

I feel a growing, extraneous chaos in our country and it’s hard to not see a correlation. I believe it’s in part fueled by the license to avarice given by our so-called leader.

I also see random acts of kindness in moments I don’t expect. Is it just the contrast I’m noticing? Are some of us moved to meet the celebration of hate with holding doors and helping strangers find lost keys? Maybe we should all hug a Trump voter every day. Surely their shame rises every day and must be eating some alive. Surely, many are drowning in shame, right? Right?

This page today is not for answers – my thoughts, instincts, fears, and hopes for how this will end. Today I have other questions.

I, and likely you, live this odd dual life of appreciating family, friends, fun events, nature, progress, modern marvels of innovation … and then I’m whip-sawed back by scenes of armed, masked men descending on peaceful cities only because they voted for the other party. Autumn gave us jaw-dropping weather and beauty in the Northeast and down in DC we’re knocking down portions of The White House and scheduling UFC fights on the lawn. We’re detaining American born US citizens at Home Depot and on the way to school because of their skin tone. We’re obliterating the American bedrock of the power check of an independent media.

The elected President of the United States lies so often, so openly, so brazenly we no longer bother with corrections. He posts videos of himself dropping shit on Americans who marched in the No Kings rallies. Say that out loud. Write it on a piece of paper or your computer. “The POTUS posted a video of himself dropping shit out of a plane on Americans.” This is our reality. This is America today. We voted for this. That’s how it works. It’s now on all of us. Until he changes that too.

Do enough of us give enough of a fuck?

Millions marched in those rallies this past month, and I am grateful and impressed that they did. I did not. I worried too much, and one worry was that its limits would make me feel worse.

We’ve had enormously troubled times in our country’s past, and the nation has often progressed from them. Innocents and innocence died during those periods, but rights, benefits, and quality of life gains often came for women, minorities, working people. This is so different. This is not the comfortable resisting the progress of the marginalized as if rights are a zero-sum game. This is retribution, revenge, and rejection of progress. This is we’ll put them back down. We’ll manipulate and prey on your failures as someone else’s fault and if you look the other way at everything, we’ll piss on them for you.

Incredible rock bands wrote anthems of angst in the ‘60s that are part of daily listening still today more than 60 years later. Are these times producing anything like that now? Where are the artists writing music that galvanizes us in 2025? Serious question. Am I generationally blind to it and there’s a simmering movement amongst the millennials and Gen Z’s that I don’t hear? Who are the populist voices of these depressing days?

If there’s any, please send. Might make me feel a little better.