government destruction – Treehouse Writers

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.) Continue reading “The State of Things”…

I’m very angry these days.

Some people think that’s a good thing, that if people get angry enough they’ll do something.

I think that’s bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.

Back in my karate days, my teacher sometimes tried to make me angry to make me fight better. It never worked.

Here’s the thing: I get angry when I feel like there’s nothing I can do.

Now maybe if you made me angry enough to trigger blind rage, I might act, but I’m pretty sure the resulting action would not be a good thing. In general, people responding out of rage cause a lot of harm, even if their rage is justified.

What I need in order to act is to be centered enough to see options.

And it’s really fucking hard to keep my center these days in spite of forty years in martial arts, because there’s just so much destruction and harm going on and many of the tools we have available are slow and ineffective or – even worse – compromised.

So I’m angry, though I’m struggling to find enough center to do something constructive.

On the “how to deal with the destruction of the United States” front – a major reason why I’m angry – I have become involved with Unbreaking, which is an organization documenting the damage done to our government and the responses to it.

It took me awhile, but I’ve found a niche there working on summarizing litigation in the data security area. I spent years working as a legal editor and reporter, so combing through opinions and dockets is something I know how to do.

Figuring out what’s happening and summarizing it: that’s something I can do. So it helps.

But some of the other things I’m angry about are not directly tied to the current regime destroying most of what actually worked in the U.S. government. Rather, they are things that would exist even if we had responsible leadership in Washington. Continue reading “So Tired of Being Angry”…