Before I Go

I’m taking a break from writing. Not sure when I’ll return.

Why, you ask?  Too busy with work and life?  Feeling unwell?  Writers block?  

I actually cannot remember a time when I’ve had more time to write. Financially secure, working for a defense contractor for generous pay and benefits, a life complete with the sprawling home worth twice what we paid and the fancy inground pool to lie around and sip cocktails by.  I responded well to another just completed clinical cancer trial and now a medicine-free remission and rising energy level await. Recent binge reading of just about everything has my mind abuzz with compelling new thoughts. My laptop works perfectly, its new lithium battery affording me countless hours free of the annoying tether of power cords. 

So…why the hiatus? 

Our President’s twenty-three minute prime time television address this week left me with a strong urge to harm myself. His stream-of-consciousness recitation of his current eighteen disorienting month reign played like absurd Alec Baldwin SNL cartoonish schtick, something I might turn off even before the end of another cold opener dud. But there was one reassuring takeaway: [He Who Cannot Be Named]  definitely delivered on nearly every campaign promise, a rare accomplishment for any politician. A clownishly inept first term, his failed coup, and then a benevolent justice system that played by the rules and afforded him every undeserved benefit of the doubt, and several lone wolf assination attempts tossed in along the way; none of it brought him down.  

they stabbed it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.  

Like the old saying, what doesn’t kill one apparently makes one stronger. And these tribulations taught  [He Who Cannot Be Named]  many useful and dangerous things, every one of them telegraphed by his cabal well in advance. With notable assists from a Republican party (euthanized one legacy member at a time), a federal government (gutted of most of its legitimate competence), The world’s most capable military (now led by an over-testosteroned, Ryan Seacrest-looking failed amateur), and a supreme court (whose alt-right majority no longer even tries to disguise its fealty to the executive), this president has dramatically remade our republic with breathtaking speed. Masked militias now routinely round up immigrants at gunpoint and terrorize entire cities. Our closest NATO allies have been berated, bullied, threatened and tariffed while global autocrats are actively enabled. Climate restorative policies haven’t been just halted, but put in rapid reverse. War is now waged as a casual global flex, and probably just because someone woke up bored. We watch helplessly as treasured institutions have been defaced and rebranded like so many of Saddam Hussein’s tacky, long-forgotten presidential palaces. And alongside all of it, the startling degree of right-out-in-the-open, unabashed self-enrichment; debauchery that would make even Caligula blush.  

All of it echoes many of the sins of our past. Like the end flourish of a rousing 4th of July fireworks, how jaw-dropping to see it all so colorfully explode up high in the night sky, all at once. Hyperbolic variations of every aspect of the very worst of our shared American history, pulled from the grave, dusted off and held up for the entire world to see. 

Hadn’t we evolved beyond this?  Even if we never succeed at living up to our lofty ideals, ought we not at least keep trying, or at the very least, maybe pretend to? How in the bloody hell did the majority of our voting citizens choose this? And now, even after these last dark, depressing eighteen months, why do 40% of us still enthusiastically cheer out loud with red, white and blue banners and beg for even more…of this? 

Despite every blessed thing I have going in my life, I am at this moment paralyzed by a strong sense of foreboding. With key pillars of our democracy either struck, disabled or destroyed,  [He Who Cannot Be Named]  has one big remaining target now firmly in his crosshairs: our election system. 

With the takeover of a major political party now 100% complete, our federal court system severely poisoned by herds of appointed loyalists, the world’s most capable and well-funded military brought fully to heel, and the “deep-state” (a euphemism for bureaucratic push-back to brazen mis-use) now replaced by a merry band of hapless, complicit no-nothings, the time has come for what many alt-right personalities have been teasing for years: The dismemberment of our election process itself. 

I used to joke with friends about a day when elections no longer really happened in this country. It all seemed just a dark, exaggerated rant from someone clearly off (me). But now I fear that day is actually coming, and in just a few short months. Red states with laws that allow gerrymandering are systematically rejiggering their districts to maximize illegitimate levels of representation, while liberal states scramble to overcome legal hurdles, breaking down their own good-governance guard rails, to “fight fire with fire”. 

With no fact-based precept to attack our election process, everyone knows that getting fewer people to vote becomes the key point of our system's vulnerability. The virulent cancer that supports what is happening today appears to have no active clinical trial, no wonder drug in development to combat its size or its lethality. So, for now with the numerator fixed, the cancer takes aim by attempting to reduce the denominator. The cancerous numerator will assuredly fight through any concocted ritual, poll tax, or administrative obstacle to vote in order to keep itself alive. Reducing the denominator, even by just a small amount, buys the cancer time to survive the only drug proven effective against it: legitimate democratic accountability. If it can just get past the upcoming election cycle, it will get another two years to further strengthen its foothold on its host. 

For the next few months, conservatives still enjoy a majority in both houses, therefore if they stay emasculatedly unified, retain the power to codify eliminating accountability into law. Some within them are for now resisting, but as has been proven time and again, resistance is futile. Further, [He Who Cannot Be Named] is showing just how important this particular war is by launching an attack on another front. DHS is now explicitly threatening blue states, demanding access to voter roles and inserting the federal government in the tactical execution of their elections, or face financial sanctions, armed raids, imprisonment of non-compliant Secretaries of State, the entire kitchen sink.

Worst case scenario, we still have something that looks outwardly like elections, but it functions in reality a lot like what you have where the despot wins every cycle by ever-increasing margins. Where dissent is hushed, Where an oligarchy emerges, enabling the regime by obsessing over their rising 401Ks, distracted by the ability to endlessly entertain themselves, complicit through the simple act of going along, the less fortunate of us reduced to managed livestock scratching through side hustles and running from armies of AI bots through miles of never-ending fulfillment center conveyor belts. A massive lower class, left with whatever health care the rich might benevolently toss their way, fed by a steady diet of state sponsored empty-calorie lies, eventually neutered, none the wiser to the predicament of their remarkably unfree existence. 

I fear this age has brought upon us a dramatic reduction in empathy, and that this somehow enables this destructive path we find ourselves on. As we hand this all off to a generation of influencers, podcasters and Tik-Tok celebrities, how do we see the counter-effort to unlock truth, to mobilize the urgent need to get a hold of ourselves and write this ship?  What are our odds?  Spoiler alert…I just checked Kalshi; all the money out there’s betting against it. 

My amazing daughter just got accepted into Harvard Law School, and her equally amazing boyfriend just landed a coveted job in International Trade. These two young people, exceptional in every way, are the only cure I know for what ails our society. Learned, highly-functioning, empathetic critical thinkers and truly loving human beings, I am in awe of both of them. They serve me every day as an examples of the kind of people I always wanted to be.

Good people are the only cure for what we face today. People like them coming up in the world give aging cynics like me hope. We just need a whole lot more of them than I fear we have.  

I just finished a terrific book of American history, it’s beautiful ending metaphor reminding me of my younger navy days and the arduous focus of navigating the seas. In the days before GPS, there were several ways we figured out exactly where our ship actually was. We took visual bearing lines from multiple known points on a local chart, and triangulating several of them gave what we termed a “fix”. Our surface search radar also provided us triangulateable distance markers from those same points of reference. And then there were other arcane systems like LORAN-C that generated global positioning information back then. These fixes often proved fallible, their accuracy at the mercy of the careful chartmanship of a young watchstander or the proper functioning of an electromechanical machine..  

There was one system that could always be counted on for accuracy, but it proved quite difficult for most of us to master. Celestial navigation (the art of navigating off charts using lines of bearing taken from stars in the sky) was an art as ancient as seamanship itself. It required a trained eye, a knowledge of several known reference stars, and the ability to properly use a sextant (a handheld device like a mini-telescope) that provided the operator lines of bearing against known locations of stars at precise times of the day. As difficult as it was to master this technique (none of us ever really did), the stars apparently never, ever lie. Like truth itself, something in our universe that can always be counted on to anchor our beliefs, given ALL of our technical and intellectual advances, appears to be something that moves further from our grasp every day.. 

I pray for people everywhere that we never completely lose the ability to find truth, that we retain some way to figure out exactly where we are, and where we collectively should be going. 

I will hold my breath for the next 105 days while humanity struggles for a fix.   

*

....The ship of state lurched and reeled. Liberals, blown down by the slightest breeze, had neglected to trim the ship’s sails, leaving the canvas to flap and tear in a rising wind, the rigging flailing. Huddled belowdecks, they had failed to plot a course, having lost sight of the horizon and their grasp on any compass. Progressives leaned over the gunwales, dizzy and disoriented.  On deck, conservatives had pulled up the ship’s planking to make bonfires of rage; they had courted the popular will by demolishing the idea of truth itself, smashing the ship’s very mast.

It would fall to a new generation of Americans, reckoning what their forebears had wrought, to fathom the depths of the doom-black sea. If they meant to repair the tattered ship, they would need to fell the most majestic pine in a dear-haunted forest and raise a new mast that could pierce the clouded sky. With sharpened adzes, they would have to hew timbers of cedar and oak into planks, straight and true. They would need to drive home nails with the untiring swing of mighty arms and, with needles held tenderly in nimble fingers, stitch new sails out of the rugged canvas of their goodwill. Knowing that heat and sparks and hammers and anvils are not enough, they would have to forge an anchor in the glowing fire of their ideals. And to steer that ship through wind and wave, they would need to learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars, together.    - Jill Lepore