The State of Things

I’ve seen a lot of pieces about how things are going a year into the grifter’s second occupation of the White House. Apparently most of the people who said “It won’t be that bad” and called the rest of us hysterical don’t have much to say, though they’re still not admitting they were wrong.

I think they’re mostly the kind of people who never admit they were wrong.

Me, I find things absolutely as bad as I thought they would be after I got that very sick feeling on Election Day. About the only thing that surprised me was how fast so many institutions fell apart.

I don’t just mean the law firms and universities that caved early on. And I was already aghast at where big media – newspapers and broadcast – were headed.

I mean I was surprised that the Civil Service and various government agencies weren’t more robust. I’m not blaming government employees for that – this isn’t the case of people caving. In fact, some of them tried hard not to give in.

There turned out to be a lot of loopholes in Civil Service protection, the most obvious one being probationary employees, a system intended to allow removal of people who didn’t work out, not the firing of people wholesale.

The gutting of agencies by the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) minions happened much faster than I thought it could. A lot of it was likely illegal, but it wasn’t something that could be fought quickly.

Our courts have worked reasonably well, despite the embarrassment that is our Supreme Court, but legal action is slow at the best of times and doesn’t do well in handling the move fast and break things crowd, especially when they are trying to break things permanently.

So much of our government has always worked on the assumption that people would stay within the norms.

The last time I remember seeing government destruction on this scale was when Reagan first took office, and there the norms held to a great degree. Reagan did a lot of harm – harm that led to the current grifter – but he didn’t break all the rules wholesale.

I was horrified in November 2016 and even more horrified in November 2024. I learned my lesson about what happens when unqualified and generally awful people end up in the presidency after the 2000 election. I was angry about the Supreme Court handing the job to Junior Bush, but I said, “Oh, well, how much harm can he do in four years? At least we’re not rioting in the streets.”

We should have rioted in the streets.

On the other hand, despite things being not just as bad as I expected, but even worse, I do think the grifter and his fascist crew are losing. Something has given in the last month or so. I’m not the only person who feels that way. Rebecca Solnit has written about it well. (I find her Meditations in an Emergency newsletter well worth reading these days.)

That doesn’t mean bad things – maybe even worse things – won’t continue to happen. One of the things that terrified me about letting that criminal back into power was the number of people who were going to die. And from the children killed by the closing of AID to all those people dying from the destruction of our health systems to all those killed and otherwise harmed by armed thugs who are apparently paid by the government, people have died.

We’ve also been killing Venezuelans in boats, though we haven’t started the kind of wars (yet) that are the trademark way the U.S. kills people.

Part of the shift in the country has come from the government thugs killing two white, middle class people in Minneapolis who were out trying to help their neighbors and who clearly posed no threat.

Yes, we should have been concerned about all the others who have died, but some deaths bring about seismic shifts. You can criticize this and still recognize it.

But all of it breaks my heart, because I’d truly like to get out of this obscene mess without people dying and I knew and know that isn’t going to happen.

And while I’m starting to believe we’re going to succeed, that doesn’t mean I don’t know more people are going to be harmed and die before that happens. We may be starting to win, but it’s still going to take awhile and there are a lot of terrible people who are going to take advantage of the chaos.

(I am very worried about the broligarchs, especially the ones pushing so-called AI and the network states, people with money who want to see our government destroyed. They’re working on taking over California right now. They don’t have people behind them, but dear god they have so much money.)

A couple of other things have occurred to me. One is that I heard some people taking action in Minneapolis don’t like being called protestors. Others – people like me who have protested quite a lot over the years – have opined that maybe they consider it a slur, that protestors are not people like them, that they are “too good” to be protestors.

But while that could be true, there’s another explanation. What’s going on in Minneapolis right now doesn’t feel the same as a protest. It’s not like a large march – sanctioned or otherwise. They’re not just out to change policies.

The people out in the streets in Minneapolis are trying to stop what is happening on the ground right now. They’re not just complaining about it, they’re acting against it.

That feels different from protest to me, and perhaps even more radical. But I don’t have a better word for it. For a language that has become rich through its theft from so many others, English seems to have dearth of words for describing those who act on their refusal to tolerate abuse.

The other thing that worries me is that once we get these fascists – and again, the word isn’t enough, because they are more than fascists, they are destroyers of so much that is valuable – out of power, we will not do enough to fix the holes in our system that let them in.

The Supreme Court already undermined the provision in the 14th Amendment that was supposed to protect us from insurrectionists – and January 6 was an insurrection. Even if that should be walked back by a subsequent court, we’ve seen how the language can be manipulated.

Our Constitution is not as strong as it should be, and certainly not as democratic (small d, not the party). The Electoral College should have been tossed a long time ago. The Equal Rights Amendment needs to be adopted. California should have way more senators than Wyoming, or maybe we should abolish the Senate and greatly expand the House.

And we should stop having territories. Washington, DC, should be a state. Puerto Rico should be as well, or else allowed to be an independent country. I saw recently that some American Samoans living in Alaska are being prosecuted for voting, because apparently they don’t have the right to vote even though they’re a colony. That’s abuse.

And people who undermine our government should be prosecuted, starting at the top. Our prison system is another travesty, but there are people who really are too dangerous to be allowed out.

Gee, all this and I haven’t even mentioned the Epstein Files, which are about a great deal more than sex trafficking of children, awful as that is. The way that people with money and power – and those who are seeking money and power – are willing to overlook the criminality and abuses of people they consider valuable is another horror built into our system that has to go.

There might be enough in the documents, despite the absurd way they’re being handled, to help in bringing down this regime. I hope so.

Because I want to see them gone. And I want us to rebuild a democracy that is better and more resilient than the one we had.

Oh, and to live long enough to see that.