One Month In: A Reflection

Well, it’s been a month.

When there’s a big news event, I sometimes like to play the mental game of thinking about what it was like before certain words entered my vocabulary. At the height of Covid, I would try and remember my life before I heard the word “Covid” or the acronym “PPE.” It’s like when you’re in the middle of a bout of the flu and you try to remember back to what it was like when didn’t feel awful. This morning, I tried a similar game, but did not find it effective. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t felt “normal” about politics since before 2016. I look at my kids, ages 11 and 15, and realize that they have never known a “normal” election cycle. Between Covid and Trump, they have grown up with the subtle vibe of existential dread in the air.

We’re a month into Trump’s second regime and I felt like it would make sense to reflect. You know, for historical purposes. Over the last few weeks, I’ve felt a whole host of emotions - fear, sadness, frustration, and mostly, rage. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been carrying an unhealthy amount of rage. And despite my best attempts to “relax,” take deep breaths, and focus on the positives, I cannot escape the physical weight that has settled itself on my sternum. I will share Lauren McQuistin’s post, 100 things to support your mental health that aren't go for a walk and drink more water for those of you who, like me, need more ideas for self-care. It’s a daily battle for me.

I’ve also been trying to keep the news into a few different “buckets” for my mental health:

In just a few short weeks, the number of people I know who have personally been affected by the cuts has increased. Three people I know personally have lost their jobs in social service due to cuts in funding, a friend who works at a local Headstart has been on pins and needles, and a friend who works in research at a university has had his funding frozen, so we are not working in hypotheticals any longer.

I’ve been exhausted by the amount of fact-checking needed to even navigate communications coming from Democratic friends. Lots of alarmist memes and infographics are circling social media with gross oversimplifications of the issues at hand. Not only is that annoying, but it’s also dangerous. Two weeks ago Trump signed the “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schools” executive order. This order called for the creation of a plan to tie funding penalties to schools that participated in (what Trump calls) “radical indoctrination.” This is not a law. These funding penalties do not (yet) exist. And still, I have seen many social media posts about schools eliminating programs, DEI work, and beginning the work of changing curriculum. Friends of mine in education are pulling books off classroom libraries and changing lesson plans because of this EO, but this EO is not a law or even a policy yet! When we say “don’t obey in advance,” this is what we mean. And I don’t believe these individuals intend to obey in advance, they are simply confused and scared and that’s exactly what the Trump administration wants.

Yesterday a male coworker entered the office and said, “well, ladies, I think you just lost the right to vote.” He was referring to the SAVE Act, which has not been passed. I know this because the House is at recess this week. He had been listening to a podcast and had somehow gotten the idea that it was already a done deal. Even if (when) it does pass, we can’t be sure it will work the way we fear. It will most certainly be challenged in court. Keeping up with the facts is hard. Parsing out the threats from the concrete actions is hard. But keeping tabs on the accuracy of messaging from our own team shouldn’t have to be part of it. Unfortunately, it is, so stay vigilant. Fact check and use discretion when you click “share.”

We have to keep reminding ourselves that just because he says it or signs it, does not mean it’s the law of the land. A lot of things are being challenged in court and, in a few cases, we’re winning.

I continue to dabble in research that will help me prepare for a future I can’t even put into words. I found the article “Time to Prepare” by J.P. Hill to be a very interesting read. There has been no shortage of comparisons between Trump and Hitler, but this article offers a much more contemporary comparison to the President of Argentina, Javier Milei. You’ll find, when you read the article, that Trump’s first weeks in office mirror Milei’s in striking similarity. It validated what I’ve been contemplating for some time now: that much of this government dismantling is about opening the door for for-profit solutions. I believe Trump’s end game is to stay out of jail and get richer. I believe Musk’s end game is mostly money with a bit of power and retaliation mixed in. Dismantling systems that fund non-profit entities opens the door for companies to swoop in and fill in the gap - for a cost. That was Milei’s focus too. In fact, the event that finally knocked him back a few pegs was a nationwide labor strike. After all, all the power of a nation is in its labor.

What’s interesting about Milei’s approach, now one year later, is that it is showing some improvement in inflation, but at what cost? These two articles (Many Argentines back Milei on economy. His war on diversity is more divisive from Reuters and Argentina’s Milei marks one year in office. Here’s how his shock measures are reshaping the economy by the AP) do a good job of summarizing the cost of reducing inflation (hint: it was a very real human cost). It reminds me of similar rallying cries we’re seeing here boiled down into one quip: is the prices of eggs more important than human rights?

I’ve mentioned Victor Klemperer in other posts. His diaries are referenced in Snyder’s book, On Tyranny. I’ve spent some time doing more reading about Klemperer and read some of his work. I’m interested in what life looked like “at the beginning.” Before the war and the camps, what were those weeks like? Did the Germans protest, like we are? I realize it’s not really a fair comparison, of course, because we have so much more access to information these days and dozens of communication options, but I’m looking for historical inspiration anywhere.

Victor Klemperer was a Jewish professor who kept detailed journals of life in Germany throughout the war. Early on, he described how students were deterred from taking his class because he was Jewish, and German colleagues fed these rumors with false stereotypes about Jewish academics. When enrollment dropped, he was fired and isolated from academia. Even his library card was revoked! This was early, 1938, and he wrote in his journal, "how deeply Hitler’s attitudes are rooted in the German people, how good the preparations were for his Aryan doctrine, how unbelievably I have deceived myself my whole life long when I imagined myself to belong to Germany, and how completely homeless I am.”

That quote really stuck with me. Not just because it resonated with my thoughts about Trump’s America: imagine that line, “how deeply [Trump’s] attitudes are rooted in the [American] people].” So many of us have thought this. Most of us have always known there was a racist and sexist underbelly in this country, but I will admit that I was naive enough to think it was a small minority or atleast that people knew it was something to be ashamed of and kept quiet. And yet, as Trump paraded through the nation with increasingly problematic rhetoric, his numbers swelled. As a constant skeptic, I am surprised by my own naivety.

Then, this morning, I was reading an article about RFK's new transphobic HHS website, and I couldn't help but think of how much Klemperer’s quote might resonate with my LGBTQ+ friends and family right now. On the one hand, it felt as if we were making progress as a society, but the rates of murder of transgender individuals would suggest that, just as Klemperer suggested, we were only deceiving ourselves. Our LGBTQ+ loved ones may very well be feeling "homeless" in this country right now.

When I think about the history of this country and the facts I know, I recognize that it is my own privilege that has left me feeling shocked at the blatant hate coming from this administration. My friends and colleagues of color are not. I know my LGBTQ+ loved ones have been steadily nervous since November. And again, I’m not some Pollyanna over here. I believe this country has a lot of work to do in the area of equity, but I guess I thought (hoped?) that when push came to shove, we weren’t really this bad. Yes, systemic racism is real. Yes, it is still dangerous to be transgender in many cities in this country, but we aren’t like the Germans in the 1930s, are we? Are we?

Perhaps, we’ll look back on this time in 10 years and say that we needed this to wake us up and remind us that democracy and equity are worth fighting for. But even I am struggling to hold out hope for any kind of conscious-building at the national level.

So we round out month one having made dozens and dozens of calls to our reps. We’ve seen some legal victories of judges blocking Trump’s overreach. We’ve seen thousands of federal employees lose their jobs. We’ve begun connecting with small groups within our community. We’ve finally given Heather Cox Richardson the spotlight she deserves, and we’re ending each day with news recaps from Aaron Parnas.

Today I’m flooding my social media with reminders that I am a safe space for my LGBTQ+ friends and plan to remain that way because, while there is a lot I can’t do in the world today, I can, at the least, help a few of my loved ones feel safe and seen.