The sun came out! And I hit rock bottom.
Feeling the pain, and acting anyway.
It’s a gorgeous day in Portland—65 degrees. I spotted a woman reading her book in the sunshine on her 3rd floor deck behind a blooming plum tree. The hellebore blossoms get more elaborate each year, and the fragrance of daphne is downright intoxicating.
Simultaneously, I am weeping for what is happening in this country I love so much. Where did we go so wrong? Why are we so hellbent on vengeance? I try to find the best in everyone I encounter regardless of how they present. I do not wish pain and cruelty on anyone.
But my faith in human goodness is shattered as I witness the bottomless cruelty of President MuskTrump—and their apparent glee at the pain they’re causing across the entire civil service as well as those agencies, non-profits and scientific researchers that just got the rug pulled out from under them.
Destruction is easy (especially if you have no heart, no soul, no empathy); all you need is a figurative chainsaw and a few college-age hackers.
Construction—making things, building things—now that’s hard work, and it takes folks who know what they’re doing.
I invited my neighbor, the attorney who works for the Social Security Administration, over for some soup and salad this evening. He has been living in stomach-churning limbo for more than three weeks. He told me that the firing emails have come, confused folks, been retracted—but only kind of, depending on who you talked to, or which tweet you believed (government firings done by TWEET???). Then just this morning his team got another quit or get fired email.
“No work is getting done by anyone in the Federal government these days—I mean, no one knows if they’ll be locked out the next morning!” he said. “Or told they’ll be fired unless they move from DC to the Omaha office, or they’ll be fired unless they move from working remotely in Omaha back to the DC office (where there is no free space). People are sick with anxiety.”
Things are totally horrible at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which affects a whole lot more than the researchers—it’s about ceasing to work on finding cures for the many serious diseases that plague you and me.
From the Atlantic:
The NIH funds more than 60,000 research proposals annually, supporting more than 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 institutions, spread across every state. This system backed the creation of mRNA-based COVID vaccines and the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,” Taison Bell, a critical-care specialist at UVA Health, told me.
In the middle of my super sads, my daughter called. She commiserated and suggested I consider doing what she was doing, which was TAKE AN ACTION, any action. “And if you’re going to write about your sads and mads,” she said, “don’t leave your readers hanging there sad and mad too. GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO DO!”
SOMETHING TO DO
Then she sent me the link to this inspiring article by Garrett Buck, which suggests something for everyone at every level of time, energy, introversion and inclination.
So dear reader, not to leave you sad and mad—I give you instead a beautiful list of 30 actions. Here’s Garrett’s preface to his list:
I wrote this for people who, like me, have spent much of the past few weeks hoping that somebody else would do something bolder in this political movement. We are downtrodden because we’re full of rage and heartbreak, but the polls tell us that our neighbors don’t share those feelings. We realize we’re seeing something that so many aren’t, but we’re not sure how to bridge the gap. We have wished for more bravery from our media, from elected Democrats, from public officials in general. However fair those wishes are, they come with a risk: that we miss the opportunity to be the lonely voice for justice in our own community, the person who makes it a little easier for a second and third and fourth lonely voice to start perking up by our side.
I don’t pretend that all it takes for a social movement to succeed is a bunch of individuals throwing the activist equivalent of spaghetti at so many isolated walls. Nothing I offer here will be enough. And yet, so many of us are waiting for something we can join, which presents a true opportunity to be the first person in your circle welcoming fellow travelers into halting, shaky, earnest action.
Finally, I’m certain that not all of these ideas are applicable to your situation. You’re tired. You’re busy. You’re sick. You don’t have a robust social network. You have anxiety about putting yourself out there. Those are all real. And also, my hope isn’t that every one of these is for you, but that a few might be. And if none fit the bill, what an opportunity: I’d love to hear your idea for what you and others could do.
Enough scene-setting.
Here then are some ideas in list form. Offered with love…
Thirty Lonely But Beautiful Actions
As for me, I’m getting the voter info for the Dems in my building, and as soon as I get it will plan to gather us for soup and conversation… and who knows what then. Let me know in the comments if any of Garrett’s ideas inspired you to take some kind of action, or any other ideas you might have.
PUT YOURSELF IN THE WAY OF BEAUTY
Signs of Spring. Today a patch of delicate crocus.
Another great "do something" substack is Chop Wood/Carry Water.
Husband and I are taking an impromptu trip to the beach today. Eager to kick the concerns out of my head for a bit.