I write from a hospital waiting room in El Paso, Texas, with a heavy heart. A loved one is undergoing a medical procedure. It isn’t a great time.
There’s much to reflect upon.
My life to date.
How precious living is and how we take it for granted.
What I fought for over the past quarter-century.
Was it an ideal or was it an idea? Did I fight for this country to watch it be usurped and frittered away by a megalomaniacal con man and his cohort of spineless toady’s?
Today, it seems so.
In the interest of ‘efficiency’ 150,000 people inside the Federal Government people are losing their jobs. Some of them are friends of mine.
The cuts DOGE has made to date will be permanent.
Our politicians approved the sale of nearly 300 million acres of public lands while cutting the staffs who manage our treasured National Parks.
We fund endless wars.
ICE raids continue uninterrupted. While we are told all the cuts are for a cost savings, Congress increased spending while claiming to lower taxes. That’s not free money. ICE received a $12 Billion US increase in its funding to remove any and all persons deemed undesirable from within our borders, if not sending them to Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. We were told the focus of solving our admitted immigration policy issues would focus on criminals. Now it is anyone Steven Miller decrees are bad. Those who speak out might join them.
Most meet all of this with a shrug. Turmoil is part of life, isn’t it?
Driving along the U.S.-Mexico border I’m struck at the dichotomy of the two countries, how different ours looks to theirs. Isn’t that what our country has become? One of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ or ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘those people’, or any other existential threat manifested as real?
I look across the rocky desert and I am reminded of the desert’s charm. Not a place I would want to live full-time, but there’s something to be said for low humidity and flora that evolved to thrive in the harsh, arid climate. Then I read another headline. Trump’s policies continue to wreak destruction like a thresher on a wheatfield.
Neoliberal greed is stoking the fires of destruction for profit at the expense of public programming (what’s left of it) as the government strips funding for Public Broadcasting. So goes Rick Steves, Sesame Street, and the PBS News Hour. Our dear leaders will tell you what to believe and what matters to you. The now-past Epstein episodes are a salient example. Orwell would even raise an eyebrow.
I lament the Democratic party’s role to this situation. They offered no viable alternatives and now scoff from the sidelines while Senator Chuck Schumer glares over his reading glasses with disapproving condescension.
Then I ponder my own contributions, my culpability. The idea of my military service being noble. I believe the country was and is worth fighting for, but what I didn’t pay attention to was that our political duopoly maintains its own, selfish interests. It doesn’t matter who is in power. Nothing changes. This is what I fought for, or what resulted, and I am sick in my soul.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s $2 a week—less than a beer when you go out and perhaps as satisfying without the caloric deficit—and $80 annually. It really helps me as a writer, and you’ll receive access to exclusive content including advanced project previews and releases. Thanks!
My phone dings. Another semi-successful reviewer of my novel informs me they like the story but refuses to endorse it. Finds it too controversial. Let the bad press begin. Oddly, this is a welcome interruption to my swirling thoughts as I hope, pray, and ask that today pass with positive resolution. It’s hard to focus otherwise.
In another part of Texas, Kerrville as its epicenter, is a flood disaster area. Once again, people bicker as to who’s at fault for weather-related events, warnings, and responsibility for cleaning up the mess. I personally know one person who blames the people living there for their plight. It’s a known flood zone, after all. So caring.
Currently, the death toll sits at 134, many of them children, but it’ll undoubtedly rise. More than 150 people are still missing. I read that a senior member of the National Weather Service, the Federal agency responsible for providing early warnings for catastrophes such as occurred on the Guadeloupe River, took early retirement—and so went all his metrological expertise on that particular area of Texas—at the behest of being fired by DOGE. He wasn’t replaced. You can connect the dots for a chain of custody, but that’s a hypothesis. So efficient.
Efficiency is achieved when you make systems better. Work smarter. Train people to perform their jobs yet more ably with the assistance of technology and improved processes while capitalizing on their experience. The is the opposite of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, over which Christy Noem presides. She directed that any disaster relief expenditures exceeding $100,000 must be personally approved by her.
Awesome.
While the streets of Los Angeles are being patrolled by 2700 Marines (that’s for another installment), my former branch of service with its amazing humanitarian aid capability is earmarked to quell a non-existent civil insurrection.
On the other side of this entire mess is the inaction of the Biden administration to do anything, or very little, in earlier disaster zones (the toxic train derailment in Palestine, Ohio, and the hurricane damage in Western, North Carolina come to mind) due to political infighting. There’s so much blame to go around. Nothing is solutions-focused or based. When the fuck does it end?
Meanwhile, I await the news of my loved one’s procedure I am assured is ‘routine.’ Perhaps for some, but for me it hits close. I sigh.
I tire of rampant, feckless cronyism. I was asked once to consider going into politics. I refused. I want to maintain what little integrity I still possess. I believe in this nation, but don’t agree with its management. And I definitely don’t care for its ‘leadership’. I must believe things will improve, but it might get messy.
In the present, I can do nothing about what is happening within our country, its policies, how my book is received, or what comes next.
No more so than I can affect the outcome of a surgery.
That, perhaps, troubles me the most.
Looking forward to the book.
This post highlights how it is challenging to be at once so powerful (a leader, creative voice, experienced) and powerless (singular, human, flawed).
Reading your posts reminds me that our bonds with like-minded, thoughtful, empathetic people is what gives us power to persevere.