I just saw an email with the subject line \u201cGutting the Student Loan Program\u201d and realized that I\u2019m tired of seeing reports about another outrageous thing done by the grifter\u2019s regime that comes with that breathless feeling of \u201cdo you believe they\u2019re doing this?\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course I believe they\u2019re doing this. They\u2019re out to destroy everything good about our government. They\u2019re gutting everything you ever thought was worth having, not to mention things you didn\u2019t realize existed or realize you needed.<\/p>\n
None of the attacks surprise me anymore and I don\u2019t need breathless reports about the latest one. (I think this email is about firing people at the Department of Education, which the Supreme Court just permitted by overturning a stay even though it\u2019s pretty clear that the underlying litigation should be successful.)<\/p>\n
Much more useful is what the people at Unbreaking<\/a> are doing, which is detailed reporting about the ways in which the regime is breaking the government.\u00a0 Looking thoroughly at each bit of destruction is much more useful than spinning outrage, especially since it can provide a way to fight back.<\/p>\n We\u2019re constantly faced with \u201cwhich one of these things is worse\u201d calls every time an issue comes up. But they’re all bad.<\/p>\n Right now I tend to think the fact that the government employs people they claim are law enforcement agents and lets them go out with their faces covered (not for health reasons) and without badges to kidnap people off the street, coupled with the building of concentration camps and the mocking of the people they lock up in them, is the worst thing that\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n But the overall destruction of good government programs \u2013 from civil rights protections to the National Weather Service \u2013 is probably just as important, if not as immediately terrifying.<\/p>\n We do need to know about all the different things being done, but pretending to be outraged about the latest one as if we didn\u2019t see it coming is driving me crazy. <\/p>\n The other thing that\u2019s driving me crazy are all the little bits of \u201cgood news\u201d shared on social media and in other newsletters.<\/p>\n Now it\u2019s not like I don\u2019t go through the news, looking for signs of hope. But the trumpeting of a bunch of small victories that don\u2019t come close to balancing out the terrible news drives me nuts.<\/p>\n Rebecca Solnit shows how to get the right balance of this in her newsletter Meditations in an Emergency<\/i><\/a>. She often shows how the small things add up, how we\u2019ve got huge numbers of people taking action, where this might go, but she also tells us when things are getting very bad.<\/p>\n But most people just list a few small successes. I agree we need to recognize when we win, but the scales are still tilted heavily in the other direction.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m looking for are the changes that are going to make things shift in the right direction. I do think that\u2019s going to happen though, like Solnit, I\u2019m not sure what it\u2019s going to look like.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that the thing that tips us over the edge and back to regaining our sanity as a country may look like (and even be) a bad thing at first, such as a disaster that\u2019s the one too many.<\/p>\n Or it could be something that teeters on the edge of absurdity and sounds like it was written by The Onion<\/i>, like all the nonsense about Epstein or even the fight between the grifter and his former pet broligarch.<\/p>\n A recent piece by Bill McKibben in The New Yorker<\/i><\/a> discusses the fact that renewable energy is absolutely the future and may even be successful enough in time to help improve the climate change situation. It\u2019s adapted from his forthcoming book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if that will fix anything in the United States in the short term, but it does strike me as very good news at a time when government agencies that deal with climate change are being destroyed and fossil fuel companies are getting big benefits.<\/p>\n Obviously we all need to keep doing something and watching out for the thing that will tip the momentum our way.<\/p>\n In the meantime, let\u2019s stop with the breathless \u201cdo you believe this awful thing\u201d stuff and being overenthusiastic about minor successes.<\/p>\n Just show up where you can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just saw an email with the subject line \u201cGutting the Student Loan Program\u201d and realized that I\u2019m tired of seeing reports about another outrageous thing done by the grifter\u2019s regime that comes with that breathless feeling of \u201cdo you believe they\u2019re doing this?\u201d Of course I believe they\u2019re doing this. They\u2019re out to destroy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1098,516,1097],"class_list":["post-4135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-bill-mckibben","tag-rebecca-solnit","tag-unbreaking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4135"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4138,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135\/revisions\/4138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}