Happy Groundhog Day: A Celebration of Same-Old, Same-Old

I didn’t happen to have a groundhog on hand today, so I used my own shadow as a proxy to predict the future. As usual, results were mixed: Under sunny blue skies, I entered the grocery store to pick up some fruit, and emerged not three minutes later into a downpour. Shadow, then no shadow. So spring around the corner, or six more weeks of winter? Where I live, in northern California, winter and rain have become obsolete concepts, replaced by “God, how can we bear this 40-degree temperature?” and “atmospheric rivers.” So I guess today predicted Sprinter and Wing, and lots more of it. Which is not that surprising, since the daffodils are out while the creeks run high under cloudy and blue skies. Per usual.

Per usual is the point of why Groundhog Day is one of my favorite holidays, or at least one of my favorite movies. Nothing else quite captures how one day is much like another, on and on. Our routines are both deliriously comforting and maddeningly monotonous. A creature of habit, I quite like it that way.

Groundhog Day strategically falls right as January’s flush of new resolve–“This year, things will really change!”–gets flushed down the toilet. Who were we kidding? It feels good to burrow under the covers instead of rising early to write, and who wants to down a green energy drink instead of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia just when it’s getting to the perfect melty stage? Out with the new, in with the old.

Speaking of old, you may have heard there’s an election this year featuring two old guys who’ve both been president.

One’s a malignant narcissist who tried to overturn the last election and prefers an address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over–Oh, let’s say–a prison cell. The other’s a decent guy who’s gotten a lot of good done despite massive obstruction, a stammer and stiff gait, and some questionable embraces that are not of the sexual-assault type favored by the first and former guy.

The election’s actually a do-over of 2020, only worse, which has a lot of people far more upset than the do-over Bill Murray faced day after day in Groundhog Day. Bill Murray’s plight had a Hollywood ending.

As for the ending of our Same-old, Same-old election contest in November? It all depends on voters whether we’ll be cast back into the shadows or emerge into the light.

The Cruelty of the Forced-Birth Movement

This picture haunts me. It’s of Brittany Watts, a 34-year-old Black woman from Ohio, at a court hearing last month, where a judge ruled she could be tried for the felony charge of abusing a corpse after she miscarried. Such things have happened before, especially when the targets are poor or of color. But there’s no doubt that anti-choice fanaticism in the wake of Roe’s upending contributes mightily to this obscene persecution. Here’s the backstory to this picture of a woman caught in a nightmare.

On September 19, 2023, Ms. Watts had gone to the hospital because she appeared to be miscarrying 21 weeks into her pregnancy. Although doctors recommended inducing delivery of her non-viable fetus, she was kept waiting for 8 hours without treatment while the hospital ethics panel debated her fate. She returned the next day and again left without treatment. Soon after, she passed fetal tissue into the toilet, which clogged when she tried to flush. Upon returning to the hospital, a nurse called the police. In October, Ms. Watts was arrested and charged with a seldom-used law against abusing a corpse despite evidence that the fetus died in utero.

Imagine being denied treatment, miscarrying alone at home, then facing charges that could have resulted in a year’s imprisonment.

Fortunately, a grand jury recently ruled against proceeding with this persecution prosecution. The legal case may be over, but the anguish on Ms. Watts face speaks to the indelible horror of our post-Roe abortion landscape.

And this wasn’t even an abortion! But it did occur in the midst of Ohio’s ugly climate as forced-birth proponents in the state legislature tried (unsuccessfully) to severely restrict, even criminalize abortion. As Wendy A. Bach, a law professor at the University of Tennessee noted in the New York Times, “This is part of an ongoing and increasing trend to use the criminal law to punish reproductive health in this country. . . [Ms. Watts’s] punishment started the moment [the hospital’s ethics board] had to debate what to do with her rather than provide her with medical care.”

The cruelty is the point.

But it’s also backfiring. In state after state, voters of all political stripes are rejecting the wet dreams of Gilead. Abortion rights advocates have certainly capitalized on horror story after horror story of what the loss of Roe has meant: a 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped being forced to seek an abortion in a neighboring state; her doctor facing egregious threats to her medical license, liberty, livelihood, and reputation; a mother and her pregnant teenager facing charges based on their Facebook messages; women like Texan Kate Cox who desperately want their babies but are unable to get the care they need when the pregnancy goes awry; ob-gyns leaving red states because it’s become impossible to deliver quality care without fear of prosecution in the legal morass of abortion bans.

These, of course, are the stories that generate sympathy and the will to fight back. My heart breaks for the hardships these people face, and I’m grateful to all who have come forward.

But even though the strategy of amplifying such stories has been highly effective at the ballot box, I’m also ambivalent about the hyper-focus on these relatively rare “sympathetic victim” cases. 

After all, the vast majority of those needing abortions don’t fall into this category. They shouldn’t have to. Failed birth control, no birth control, casual sex, awkward sex, great sex, acquiesced-to sex, immaturity, drunkenness, having other goals that don’t include childbirth are no less deserving reasons than a tragic turn in a wanted pregnancy or becoming pregnant through rape or incest. There are no categories of deserving or undeserving people when it comes to the decision of whether or when to bear a child. Everyone deserves the freedom to choose.

So come November, choose to overturn the cruelty of the forced-birth movement. Vote blue.

Hunting Hunter

Of everything that’s been aired about Hunter Biden, this photo breaks my heart the most. It accompanies a recent New York Times article, “President Biden Keeps Hunter Close Despite Political Peril.” Of course he does. What I find so heartbreaking is the haunted look on Hunter’s face.

From the beginning of learning about Hunter’s history and struggles, I’ve been worried that the witch hunt against him–yes, let’s call it what it is–will break his sobriety, break him. The gun at the center of his indictment ended up in the dumpster because his brother’s widow, with whom Hunter had an affair, threw it there, worried that Hunter would use it to kill himself. I worry about that, too. It’s hard enough to face one’s demons without being the subject of a political party hellbent on destroying you in the most publicly humiliatingly way possible to get at your father.

Yes, Hunter’s done awful stuff. He used his family name to make a lot of money (unlike anyone named Trump or everyone in the history of nepotism). I’m okay with Hunter facing legal consequences, although it’s obvious that he’s been relentlessly investigated and now charged far more heavily than typically happens because Republicans want to create a shitstorm for the President.

I also wish that Joe Biden had told Hunter to stay away from any business opportunities remotely connected with President Obama’s and his own administrations–and certainly to stay away from the state dinner for Prime Minister Modi at the White House this summer.

It’s tough to be a parent of an adult child. It’s even tougher when there’s a history of trauma and addiction. I’ve not dealt personally with addiction in my family, but as a therapist I’ve seen lots of it in my practice. It is one of the most destructive forces I’ve witnessed, and nearly impossible for any parent to know how to respond. Being able to kick addiction–or be the parent of an addict–are two of the hardest and most courageous things I can think of. As a parent myself, I’ve never quite been sure if what I’m doing is helpful or harmful, and my kids haven’t had to deal with any major problems. I can only imagine what it’s been like for Joe Biden and his family.

When I first saw the aforementioned article, I thought, “Here goes, another hit piece.” What emerged instead is a portrait of anguish and an unshakeable loving bond. Hunter is lucky to have such a dad. My most fervent hope is that he has the strength to come through all this without self-destructing.

I also hope that Joe Biden and the country survive the mind-boggling behavior of the Republicans in their quest to hang onto power. After exhaustive investigations, there has been zero evidence of any wrong-doing by the President. Nonetheless, the far-right Freedom Caucus, which holds the U.S. House and its cowardly Speaker hostage, plans to shut down the government and impeach Joe Biden, apparently, as some wag said, for the crime of being a father.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has admitted that the aim of this gambit is to make sure Republicans win big in 2024. She told Donald Trump that she wants the impeachment inquiry to be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden.”

As Adam Serwer says, “The cruelty is the point.”

Paper of Record

My husband and I just watched She Said, the film based on New York Times reporters Megan Twohey’s and Jodi Kantor’s investigation that brought down Harvey Weinstein and turbocharged the #MeToo Movement. We happened to see it on the same day that we’d contemplated canceling our Times subscription at least three times.

The first came when I listened to The Daily’s podcast coverage of the recent discovery of Joe Biden’s classified documents in all the wrong places. The sequel to the 2016 smash hit, “Oh, But Her Emails!,” “Documents!” is part of the breathless reporting that is one-tenth spelling out the differences between Biden’s and Trump’s behavior and nine-tenths implying nefarious intent with far, far more disturbing revelations to come. I suppose the one-tenth part counts among the Lessons Learned by responsible journalists whose hyperbolic coverage of the drip-drip-drip of Hillary’s misused server surely contributed to the mess we’re in now. Unfortunately, the greater Lesson Learned about stoking conflict to gain eyeballs, plus a misguided allegiance to “Fair and Balanced,” still triumphs. At least when Fox touted the “F&B” tagline, they knew it was ironic.

Later that day, I moved onto the Times Opinion section, only to be confronted with a column by Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s notorious campaign manager, counselor, and coiner of “alternative facts.” Why the Times would give over precious inches to a known liar and political hack was beyond me, though I shouldn’t have been surprised since that’s a fair description of what has happened to our political discourse in general over the last many years. But I would not let Kellyanne off the hook: “How’s your marriage? And your daughter?” I unkindly asked her in my mind.

As I complained to my husband about these journalistic outrages over lunch, he added a third reason to quit the Times: “They’re going after us because we both use the same log-in to read the paper. I’ve explained that we’re in the same household, but they say ‘It’s just one user per subscription.’”

That evening, which was Takeout and Movie Night, we streamed She Said. It’s a good, though not great, movie, and one well worth seeing for the importance of the story alone. And also for the décor of the New York Times: chic red walls, bright and airy workspaces, a stunning cafeteria with floor to ceiling windows.

But the aesthetics are nothing compared to the paper’s unlimited resources, including sending the intrepid reporters overnight to London. Given that no expense was spared, I couldn’t help but wonder why the Times never sprang for a couple sets of Bluetooth headphones so the reporters were not constantly on speaker phone as they walked down streets or made dinner while passersby, husbands, and kids freely listened in. (Then I realized that this was a cinematic device designed to allow the audience to hear all, not half, of the conversations with vital sources. Duh!)

Best of all was the unstinting support of everyone at the Times. While poor Ronan Farrow had to go, beggar-like, to the New Yorker, after NBC News squelched his simultaneously exploding bombshell investigation, Twohey and Kantor had a whole army of senior staff behind them. Their editor, Rebecca Corbett, not only dispensed hugs, keen advice, and chocolate almonds freely throughout; she also knew that the pursuit of a good story could cure post-partum depression. Executive Editor Dean Baquet personally and hilariously ran interference with Harvey Weinstein himself. In contrast to the workplace Weinstein turned into a house of horrors, the New York Times came off as the best employer in the world. It was hard to even recall that just last month, labor unrest roiled the Times, and those sympathetic to the workers were encouraged to eschew their Wordle addiction for the day in solidarity.

Still, the Times did good, does good, and no doubt will continue to do good, especially if they ever get over their fetish for interviewing MAGA enthusiasts in diners. We’re likely never to quit them (of course, they may boot us off first if we continue to share one subscription in our household of two). In honor of this exasperating, brilliant paper of record, I even played Wordle for the first time ever yesterday.

As for Weinstein? Well, RIP Harvey–rot in prison.

Midterm Musings

“The red wave is the ketchup dripping down the walls of Mar-a-Lago.” – From a Facebook Friend, 11/9/22

This is my favorite take on the 2022 midterms.

I also like the results, except for this bummer: More than a week after the election, the Republicans finally secured their 218th seat to win the House majority. Good luck with that, Kevin! Watch out for the ketchup stains on your trouser cuffs. Or maybe it’s blood from your backstabbing caucus.

Except for losing the House by a hair thanks to gerrymandering and New York’s apparent new status as a swing state, it was a good night for Democrats and their pro-choice, pro-democracy, anti-lunatic allies. Yes, of course, we had an assist from the Supreme Court and Donald Trump. Yes, of course, we still face enormous peril. But it’s time to break our doom and gloom habits even while remaining clear-eyed. This is a moment to celebrate. I’m reminded of the famous headline following the 1968 Harvard-Yale football game, in which Harvard, trailing by 16 points, evened up the score in the last 42 seconds:

Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29”

Given the momentum and the fact that who controls the Senate is no longer an issue, the chances of breaking the 50-50 tie there by re-electing Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s December 6 run-off are good. Go Warnock! If you’re looking for a way to support grassroots groups on the ground ready to turn out every last vote for him, check out Airlift’s portal to the Georgia Alliance for Progress.

Of course, the House isn’t quite tied, and my wish that it could all have been favorably decided by Lauren Boebert going down is not to be. Still, I don’t think endless investigations of Hunter Biden will prove a winning case for Republican governance.

A lot of my political activism these days has been with the aforementioned Airlift, an all-volunteer group founded in my home county of Marin in Northern California after the 2016 election. Airlift raises money for progressive grassroots groups who excel in turning non-voters into voters through year-round organizing in key battleground regions. We do the research to make sure donors who are bombarded by a million asks can be sure that they’re getting the best bang for their buck.

I’m pretty busy putting out Airlift’s monthly newsletter and liaising with our two partner groups in North Carolina, so I haven’t done as much phone banking this cycle. Still, during the last couple of weeks, I put in some time calling voters in North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada.

Mostly phone banking consists of lots of “Not Homes,” hang-ups, and wondering when I myself last answered the phone from an unknown caller. Still, there are some good conversations along the way that make it all worthwhile. I spoke to a woman in North Carolina who wasn’t planning to vote because she’s too busy for politics and didn’t even know the election was a week away. After ascertaining that she didn’t like the overturn of Roe or what the Republicans were doing, I convinced her to vote, and we made a plan for her to go to an early voting center before work the next day. .  

Another woman in North Carolina said, “We’ve got to stop the hate.” Someone else told me, “I don’t believe the polls. The women are with her [Cheri Beasley].” Sadly, they weren’t quite sufficiently with Cheri in North Carolina. But they did prevent the return of a GOP supermajority in the state legislature, thus preserving Governor Cooper’s veto power over further abortion restrictions and other right-wing legislation.  Pro-choice swing-state women–and men–were most everywhere else.

In Arizona, a woman said she used to be a Republican, but is no longer because “now they’re just peddling lies.” She confided that she’s lost friendships over it, and it breaks her heart.

Responding to my asking if we could count on his support for Mark Kelly, an Arizona man replied, “I would rather vote for a week-old tuna sandwich than for any Republican.”

Sometimes phone banking is cause for full-on belly laughs.

Speaking of which, here’s a hilarious note to close out my 2022 Midterm Report:

Missing My Mother

It’s true that my stay-at-home mother was known for her disinterest in cooking and housekeeping. It’s also true that in 1973, I, her youngest child, was a senior in high school who required little hands-on care. Still, I don’t know how my mother managed, well before streaming or even VCRs, to stay glued to the television for all 51 days–sometimes up to 6 hours per session for a total of 237 hours–of the Senate Watergate Hearings.

My mother’s on my mind because today would have been her 99th birthday, but also because last week I watched the last hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack of the U.S. Capitol. There have been 9 live hearings, most lasting 2-3 hours each. You can stream them for free at any time on many different platforms. I am no match for my mother: Even though I am recently retired with a lot of time on my hands and few obligations, I managed to catch only about four hours in real time. (I eventually watched most of them after the fact.)

Apart from streaming, times are different. Up to 80 million people—three out of four households–watched at least some of the Senate Watergate hearings. As the New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote on the eve of Trump’s first impeachment trial, the Watergate hearings were appointment TV, a collective experience that no longer exists.

In contrast, twenty million watched the first of the January 6 hearings, 18 million the last. Lots of people, especially Republicans, tuned them out altogether, and the hearings are not expected to make much difference in next month’s midterm elections. Almost all congressional Republicans have consistently denigrated them.

In 1973, the vote in the Senate was 77-0 to establish the Senate Committee. For our latest constitutional scandal, following Trump’s second impeachment acquittal, an independent commission in the mold of the 9/11 investigation was recommended. The House approved such a measure 252-175, with 35 Republicans joining all Democrats. Senate Republicans blocked the commission’s formation by filibuster. This left only the House to pursue an investigation through the formation of the January 6 Select Committee. Only two Republicans—Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger–joined all Democrats in voting to proceed, and have thus been driven out of today’s GOP. As I said, times are different.

What’s not different is how much I miss my mother in times of political turmoil and great national consequence. Even though I am glad for her sake that being dead for a long time means she’s missed a lot of truly horrendous stuff that probably would have killed her, how I wish we could have watched the January 6 hearings together, or at least texted back and forth across the country!

I imagine starting January 6, 2021, by sharing our joy that both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had won their run-off races in Georgia, flipping the U.S. Senate blue. My mother would have loved that. But at least she was spared witnessing Trump’s “wild” rally as it descended into violence.

I, too, was spared live coverage of the unfolding insurrection. My work day of eight back-to-back sessions with psychotherapy clients began just as Mitt Romney shouted, “This is what you’ve gotten!” to his Republican colleagues as the Capitol was breached. I was professionally obligated to be glued to my Zoom screen for the day, not CNN’s live coverage. My information came in snatches from one client after another giving me shocked updates and scrolling through headlines in between sessions.

I followed the news (including Trump’s second impeachment trial for fomenting the insurrection) for days, weeks, months. But the January 6 Committee’s presentation—with lots of live video footage, some of it never before seen–brought it to horrifying life in a way I had missed.

I would have loved to compare notes with my mother. I suspect she would have shared my deep admiration for the January 6 Select Committee members–even and especially Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger (plus, of course, heartthrob Jamie Raskin). To a person they have been dignified, somber, collaborative, and without an iota of grandstanding. They’ve made a compelling, ironclad case for the American people, the Department of Justice, and for history. The Committee’s done so by presenting damning testimony almost entirely from Trump’s own allies–from the hapless January 6 rioter Stephen Ayres to Bill Barr, whose obvious relish in trashing Trump would be funny if it weren’t so maddening. To borrow from Barr’s own twisted interpretation of the Mueller report to protect Trump, the former Attorney General’s turn before the committee “does not exonerate him” from the harm he previously caused.

And hat’s off to the women, especially election workers Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman. Cassidy Hutchinson and Liz Cheney proved that decency still resides within some Republicans. In fact, feeling sustained admiration for Liz Cheney has been one of the most surprise silver linings of the last year. Who knew?

Here’s what I really would have loved to discuss with my mother: In the closing statements of the final hearing, the low-level foot soldiers of the insurrection were depicted charitably (to put it mildly). Cheney spoke of how Trump had manipulated his followers’ patriotism and love of country. Mike Pence was treated as heroic for refusing to be Trump’s devoted lapdog this one time. Many of Trump’s enablers were similarly and generously let off the hook when January 6 proved a bridge too far for them. This is probably smart strategy. Still, I can’t help but envision my mother and I gagging together over it.

Chairman Bennie Thompson said of Trump, “He is the one person at the center of the storm.” True in one sense, but is he really? Per usual, he is both cause and symptom of the dark forces that have been gathering for some time. As the traitors keep reminding us, “The storm is coming.

I miss my mother, but I’m glad she will miss the storm.

Don’t Be Fooled

My heart sank when I first heard about Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. That’s because I thought he might just succeed in tricking people into thinking it was a reasonable idea. After all, before the Dobbs decision eliminated constitutional protection altogether, abortion rights had been slowly eroded for decades by just such “compromises.” Chief Justice Roberts was hoping to preserve a fig leaf of SCOTUS legitimacy by allowing just such a ban to stand in Mississippi without overturning Roe. Plus, a 15-week limit polls well.

I also had to read the fine print to understand that Graham’s proposal did not ensure abortion rights nationwide for the first 15 weeks. Quite the contrary: States would remain perfectly free to restrict abortion at any earlier point, while states with more liberal access would be forced to ban the procedure after 15 weeks. As the saying goes, “Heads we win, tails you lose.”

Still, it’s not unusual for people to react with outrage to egregious proposals before acquiescing to something more in the middle. Graham is trying to quell the intense backlash to overturning Roe by offering something that sounds more reasonable than the draconian restrictions GOP state legislatures are passing right and left.

I myself—staunchly pro-choice my entire life—almost fell for something similar when “partial-birth abortion” entered the anti-choice lexicon in the mid-90s. The descriptions of the procedure were pretty grisly: puncturing the skulls and removing the brains of partially delivered fetuses. It sounded as bad as abandoning newborn infants on Chinese mountaintops simply because they were girls. A steady diet of such horror stories made me wonder who could possibly oppose banning such a practice.

Or so I reacted for a nano-second, until I thought and learned some more. The scary coinage came from the National Right to Life Committee in 1995. The correct term for the medical procedure is “intact dilation and extraction,” a safer method than the prior standard for ending pregnancies after the first trimester. About 95% of abortions occur before 15 weeks, but it’s not exactly like care-free women are casually clamoring to end their pregnancies later on. Some may not have known they were pregnant. Others have been forced to jump through so many hoops already that a safer, simpler abortion option is no longer possible. Most likely, something has gone wrong with a wanted pregnancy, as Pete Buttigieg explained in 2020 at a Fox News Town Hall. Here’s his exchange as reported by Upworthy with moderator Chris Wallace about whether there should be any limits on abortion rights:

“I think the dialogue has gotten so caught up on where you draw the line that we’ve gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line,” Buttigieg replied, “and I trust women to draw the line when it’s their own health.”

Wallace wanted to clarify that Buttigieg would be okay with late-term abortion and pointed out that there are more than 6000 women who get third trimester abortions each year.

“That’s right,” responded Buttiegieg, “representing one percent of cases. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, than almost by definition, you’ve been expecting to carry it to term. We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen a name. Women who have purchased a crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother or viability of the pregnancy that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice. And the bottom line is as horrible as that choice is, that woman, that family may seek spiritual guidance, they may seek medical guidance, but that decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.”

Reporter Annie Renau then observes:

And that’s really the gist of the pro-choice stance. Why would we want the government to be involved in our most difficult medical and moral dilemmas and decisions?

Exactly. Especially the likes of Lindsey Graham and all the other Forced Birth proponents in government. No matter what the reason or stage of pregnancy.

Luckily, Graham’s proposal has backfired. His intentions are clear, and his own party is mad at him for saying the quiet parts out loud as they busily scrub their websites of draconian anti-choice pronouncements.

Don’t be fooled. Come November 8, Roe, Roe, Roe your vote.

The Other Anniversary

“And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”

– Amanda Gorman, 2021 Inaugural Poem, The Hill We Climb

Think back to a year ago. No, not the insurrection, but the day before. On January 5th, both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their Georgia run-offs, turning the U.S. Senate the palest – but still lovely! – shade of blue. Honestly, to most of us, the likelihood of not just one but both of these men prevailing seemed preposterous. But we opened our checkbooks, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work anyway. Their victories felt miraculous.

But of course it wasn’t a miracle at all. It was the determination, hard work, and generosity of everyone – doubtful and hopeful alike – who stepped up. Led by primarily Black grassroots organizers whose persistent movement building had just put the state in Biden’s column, legions of activists and volunteers knocked on doors, registered new voters, phone banked, wrote letters and postcards, texted, and donated hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a result, Democratic turnout, especially in counties with a large share of Black voters, smashed records. As Nse Ufot, head of the New Georgia Project said at the time, “The margins are so small that every action, including your vote, matters and will make a difference. Black voters got that message. Black voters recognized that we need to complete the task.”

Now we turn to the task of securing a better and more progressive future in 2022, “striving,” as Amanda Gorman reminds us, “to form our union with purpose.“

The hill we must climb in 2022 is indeed steep. Yet we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. In the spirit of January 5, 2021, and of the poet, we greet the New Year with purpose and resolve.

*

I wrote this for the January issue of “The Drop,” a newsletter I produce for Airlift, an all-volunteer group near and dear to my heart. Airlift raises money for progressive grassroots organizations in key areas throughout the country. The groups we fund excel at turning non-voters into voters, especially in communities of color, women, and young people–exactly the groups who made all the difference in the 2020 election, and will do so again in 2022.

Recall Madness

Crooked Media’s “What a Day!” newsletter delivered the news succinctly and with characteristic wit: “Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) emphatically slapped down the GOP recall effort on Tuesday, which means it is time to treat yourself to one (1) rare and luxurious sigh of relief. Enjoy!”

I did enjoy that sigh, as well as my Facebook feed filled with people marking themselves safe from California becoming Texas or Florida.

But mostly I feel angry. Angry at the Republican arsonists who keep setting fires we must put out. Angry at the colossal waste of time, energy, and money. Just administering this election cost taxpayers $276 million, and one estimate I’ve seen puts the cost of both Yes and No campaigns close to half a billion dollars. That’s a lot of moola that could have gone to fighting actual fires, or solving real problems instead of forcing us to deal with whatever havoc political arsonists are wreaking.

I’m angry at the anti-democratic recall process, as well as all the other anti-democratic power grabs across the country in the name of “election integrity.”

I’m angry at Gavin Newsom for his maskless French Laundry fiasco, even though every single person I know, including myself, has done something hypocritical and self-serving regarding Covid.

I’m angry with human nature, and our tendency to scapegoat. Sure, Newsom’s done some dumb stuff and can be too enamored of the sound of his own voice, but seriously? He’s to blame for Covid and its ravaging effects on the economy and schools? For the drought and fires? For climate change? He’s actually done a ton of good stuff, as this great piece by Ezra Klein notes.

I’m angry with Democrats’ tendency to be asleep at the switch (as they were about the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2016 election) until it’s too late.

Fortunately, we woke up on time this time, with great takeaways about boldness and fighting hard and mobilizing every voter.

California’s easy, though, compared to the rest of the country. First of all, it’s a deep blue state. Second, running against Larry Elder is a gift even bigger than the one Alabama Democrats got in the 2017 U.S. Senate special election, in which Democrat Doug Jones beat alleged child-molester and lunatic Republican Roy Moore.

So enjoy your one (1) rare and luxurious sigh of relief, channel your anger into action, and prepare yourself for the many and worse fires to come.

Twenty Years

Twenty years ago here on the West Coast, the alarm woke me to the news on NPR that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Was it grogginess, naiveté, or refusal to fathom horrific possibility in those first minutes that made me assume at first it was a terrible, freak accident? The second plane struck as I listened. It became clear that we were under attack.

My husband Jonathan was at a conference in Atlanta. We didn’t know when—or how–he’d be able to get home. While our daughters slept, I called my mother-in-law, who hadn’t yet heard the news. When I told her, she said, “This will be the end of democracy as we know it.”

Prescient, my mother-in-law.

It was time to wake the girls for school, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want them to leave behind the blissful oblivion of sleep, of the life they had lived thus far, or explain to them what had happened. I didn’t want them to go to school. I didn’t want any of us to leave the house, ever.

Since it was the beginning of the school year, Ally, 10, had invariably caught a cold—sick, like clockwork, every September. I used that as an excuse to stash her in a quiet corner in my office while I worked a reduced schedule. Emma, 13, painted her toenails red, white, and blue, and went off to school. She soon added to her list of reasons why we should get her a cellphone the ability to call out from a pile of rubble. Ally was more noticeably upset than her sister. She announced she was mad at Grandpa for inventing bombs (my father had been a scientist on the Manhattan Project). When I asked if she was worried about war, she replied philosophically, “Yeah, but I just try to stay out of trouble.”

What I most remember is wanting to hold them close, always, and how incomplete we felt without Jonathan home with us. Somehow he made it back from Atlanta after just two days’ delay. (When he needed to travel to Boston two months later, it was Emma who became distraught.)

We never subjected the girls—or ourselves–to endless replay of the towers smoking, burning, collapsing. We watched very little TV, laying eyes on the horror only once or twice. That was more than enough. Instead I devoured stories in the newspaper, particularly stories of unbelievable acts of kindness and courage.

I remember George W. Bush, caught like a deer in the headlights, reading a story about a goat to school children when he learned of the attacks. I remember members of Congress, joining hands and singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps after the doomed passengers of United Flight 93 crashed their hijacked plane into a Pennsylvania field instead of its intended target. I remember the President saying something decent and good about our Muslim brethren. Then, more alarmingly, he urged us to go shopping, and announced to the world that “You’re either with us or against us.”

A colleague at a conference by renowned trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk later reported that he’d said, in response to Bush’s us-vs-them comment, “I knew then that our goose was cooked.”

Stories of goodness started to give way to a thirst for vengeance, escalating rhetoric and militarism. Only Representative Barbara Lee voted against handing Bush a blank check with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. (She and my mother-in-law are cut from the same cloth.)

We began to bomb Afghanistan. Soon after, our home town became internationally famous because John Walker Lindh—aka the American Taliban—grew up here. Emma was double cast with his sister in their 8th grade theater production. Luckily, John’s sister was able to shine in the spotlight for the first two performances, before the news about her brother broke. At least she was not robbed of that.

Often I post something a bit more hopeful to commemorate what happened twenty years ago, but these days I find hope more elusive. The trauma of 9/11 will be with us for a long time. There are still acts of unbelievable kindness and courage, but bleakness blankets the world. Fear and uncertainty have upended the social fabric, spawning a surveillance state, conspiracy theories, and two disastrous wars. Countless lives are lost and treasure squandered. There’s a clear thread between the terrorists who aimed a hijacked plane at the heart of government and the domestic terrorists who staged an insurrection at the Capitol just this January. 

After the planes struck, it took a while for the towers to collapse. Those planes struck 20 years ago, and we have been in a delayed collapse ever since.