County Fair Rocks!

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Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair may have been a bust, but the Marin County Fair, as always, delivered! The rides are free with admission, and there’s several performing arts stages plus a huge concert and fireworks every night of the fair. My husband and I went on the first day of the fair, which is always free for seniors and kids under 12. It’s a felicitous pairing of freeloaders, since two sisters in line ahead of us for the Ferris wheel were distraught when one of them was too short to ride without an adult. We invited them to share our gondola, and they told us all about Toy Story 5 and where to get free ice cream samples.

The Marin County Fair is an easily accessible and sweet little event in a compact county known more for its artistic creativity than its 4-H kids. Still, our daughters did once upon a time schlepp their guinea pigs to the Barnyard Exhibit for five days to endure heat and fingers poked into cages, but it was not a happy experience (especially for Peanut and Teddy). Rather than repeat their adventures with animal husbandry, Emma and Ally stuck with showing off their creative prowess thereafter.

It was always a special day in our household when the County Fair Exhibition and Registration Guide arrived. There were categories for every conceivable creative outlet, age, and skill level: Dress up your teddy bear, paint a rock, scribble on a piece of paper, write a poem, decorate some fair-themed cookies, build something with Legos, grow a huge dahlia, turn funny-shaped fruit and vegetables into produce characters, submit an art portfolio if you were a high school student. Emma and Ally each entered several contests every year, and came home with armfuls of blue ribbons and cash prizes–$1 to 3 for each entry. The serious money–up to $300–was in the art portfolios, which Emma always won. She’s now a professional artist, and Ally has a side gig to a marketing job selling original watercolor greeting cards on Etsy and at craft fairs. Which is not to say, relative to their expenses, that they are making more money from their art now than they did as kids! The Marin County Fair rewards artists, but society in general? Not so much.

The Fine Arts and Exhibition Hall continues to be our favorite destination, although my husband and I stopped first at one of the community stages to admire adorable 3-5 year-olds with Performing Stars of Marin parade around to the tune of “The Ants Go Marching One By One,” followed by older baton twirlers.

The organization, founded and still directed by the wonderful Felecia Gaston, started out in 1990 as a performing arts program for low-income, primarily Black, youth in Marin City. As a little Black girl growing up in Georgia, Gaston watched little White girls go off to ballet class and desperately wished she could go, too, but segregation made that impossible. Luckily, her family encouraged her creativity and love for the arts, and a move to California brought opportunities denied to her in the South. As an adult living in Marin City, Gaston was determined to help children of color fulfill their dreams, and Performing Stars was born. Today, RIZE Marin, as it’s now called (the new name was announced for the first time at the Fair!), is a thriving community anchor that has instilled confidence and leadership in thousands of low-income children, offering not only its core arts program, but cultural and civic programs as well as critical safety-net services for kids, families, and adults across Marin County. That’s the spirit that radiated from the beaming children on stage, and infuses the whole county fair.

The entrance to the Exhibition Hall was lined with historical photos of 4th of July celebrations throughout the county (MUCH easier to transport and display than previous contests of decorated toilets). Here’s one from 1909 featuring our town, San Anselmo:

Since Marin County is known for its inventions (George Lucas, mountain biking, NIMBYism), the exhibition hall was dubbed “The Hall of Inventions,” with various sections mapped out with giant murals and the year each amazing thing was invented. I focused on the essentials:

Here’s a selection of some of my favorite kid art:

And, of course, the produce characters–sadly diminished from the rows and rows of them when our girls participated (Ally’s kiwi mice family, for example), but still putting in an appearance.

Last but not least, my favorites in the adult exhibits–quilts and bonsais:

Hooray for county fairs!

Happy Summer

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My husband and I were supposed to be hiking in the Trinity Alps this past week, but we canceled due to temperatures soaring into the nineties. We are not averse to hitting the trailheads super early to beat the heat, but when night time lows never make it below 60 degrees, even in the mountains, by definition the heat has already beat us.

So instead we took a serendipitous mini-vacation to the Lakes Basin on a couple of much cooler days. The Lakes Basin is northeast of Sacramento, and is the apex of a rough triangle along with Nevada City and Truckee. As you might gather, it’s flush with lakes, one more beautiful than the next. Although not far from Lake Tahoe, the little-known Lakes Basin is a million miles away from the crowds and hassle of its famous counterpart. We stayed in the small gold rush town of Sierra City, where we were charmed more than 25 years ago by the banks of wild sweet peas lining the roads when we visited with our young daughters. The sweet peas are still there, and the town looks exactly the same, charming us once again.

It was a great respite. especially since it was the peak of wildflower season. We could all use a respite from this sorry old world, so please enjoy vicariously a couple of hikes we took!

Long Lake-Bear Lake Loop

Sierra Buttes Lookout Trail

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered (at Last!)

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You may have heard something about the California governor’s race, the tedious drama spanning several months during which a state lopsidedly Blue might have no Democratic candidate on the ballot to replace termed-out Governor Newsom come November. That’s because California operates under a top-two primary system in which all wannabes of any party compete on the same ballot to secure one of the coveted slots for the general election. Republicans happened to have only two quasi-serious contenders, while Democrats had eight. When Democratic state party chair Rusty Hicks called for low-polling candidates to drop out, his pleas were met with rage rather than compliance, especially since it just so happened that all of the low-polling contenders were people of color and/or female. Eventually, two Democrats withdrew from the race: frontrunner Eric Swalwell, whose political future evaporated in the heat of credible sexual harassment and assault allegations, and Betty Yee, the former state comptroller with a sterling reputation but without charisma or money. Both their names still appear on the ballot.

So do 59 other names, because California is that big and that stupid, at least in terms of how little it takes to run for governor: minimal paperwork and residency requirements plus less than $5,000 in filing fees OR a minimum of 6,000 verified signatures. A penchant for pranks is optional. One of the candidates is Barack Obama. If only! Unfortunately, it’s not the Barack Obama, who would win in a landslide.

Since political reporting largely consists of covering the horse race instead of issues, Californians desperate to get a feel for the candidates were treated to a series of cage fights debates to help them decide. Perhaps these dismal affairs served some purpose: Widespread exposure to Republican Sheriff Chad Bianco dampened his appeal. In prior polls, Bianco–a fire-breathing MAGA lunatic best known for seizing 650,000 ballots in March in response to yet another fringe allegation of 2020 election fraud–consistently grabbed one of the two top spots alongside Hilton; now he comes in 3rd at best. Still scary, but a big relief to Team Blue.

Speaking of scary, Trump-endorsed Steve Hilton poses an ongoing threat in that he oozes charisma and charm and cloaks his MAGAism well by sounding as reasonable as a Fox News contributor can. Sunnily optimistic and smooth-talking, he reminds me of Reagan, with the added bonus of a British accent. Hilton, a fan of Maggie Thatcher and Brexit, lived in England until 2012 and became a naturalized US citizen in 2021.*

It’s likely that the top Democratic vote-getter—probably former Attorney General and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra or billionaire Tom Steyer–will square off against Hilton in November. It’s been a season of strange bedfellows: Jodi Hicks, head of California’s Planned Parenthood, quipped on X, “I had a fever dream that in California socialists were supporting a billionaire [Steyer] and MAGA was supporting an immigrant. So weird.” Even in very Blue California, Hilton’s charisma and the fact that solid Democratic control for the past 16 years has not made much of a dent in California’s problems make him a formidable opponent.

That’s why my own strategy has shifted from voting for the top-polling Democrat (usually Becerra) to the second-polling Democrat (usually Steyer). It could be just wishful thinking that Democrats might occupy both top spots, but it’s not impossible. With Bianco’s numbers dropping, it’s been clear for weeks that at least one Democrat will be on the ballot in November.  (Alas, voting for my actual favorite, Katie Porter, feels like a luxury we can’t afford, especially since she’d have a much tougher run as a woman who fairly or unfairly has a reputation for temperament problems against Hilton than either man.)

So, in the end I voted for Tom Steyer, the billionaire who wants to tax the rich.

In 2013, Steyer also founded NextGen America, whose mission is to educate and empower young people to organize, vote, and lead. Steyer’s priorities are affordability, tackling income inequality, fighting climate change, and standing up against Trump/MAGA and the corporate oligarchs warping our democracy and threatening our future.

I had the chance to get to know Steyer earlier and closer up, when the California Donor Table (CDT), a progressive group of donors who seek to elect Californians of color and others from marginalized communities, unanimously endorsed him, then held a Zoom Q&A with Steyer and invited guests. CDT’s mission was to make sure there was a Democrat who aligned with their progressive values in one of the top two slots, and that said person had the resources to withstand the vicious onslaught Republicans would launch. “Tom Steyer wasn’t on any of our Bingo cards,” remarked CDT’s Endorsement Committee chair. But in addition to having sufficient resources, Steyer impressed everyone with his commitment, intelligence, and breadth and depth of his decades-long involvement and success in California politics. This includes closing corporate tax loopholes, saving pro-environment legislation, ensuring children’s well-being, and criminal justice reforms. Steyer is also widely heralded for his coalition-building capabilities and equitable stewardship. I had worried about his sincerity and management skills, but from this meeting and other sources (Rebecca Solnit’s endorsement is especially detailed and compelling), I now have zero qualms. He walks the walk better than most, and has a fine grasp of the complexities of what ails California and how to fix them.

Still, it’s hard to get over the billionaire thing. It’s the most common thing I hear from my friends, even though they share the same values and policy positions Steyer has long promoted. Another Old (68), Rich, White Guy—seriously? is the knee-jerk response. I feel it some myself.

So when Eric Swalwell’s downfall breathed new life into Xavier Becerra’s flagging campaign, I took a more serious look at him. It’s well past time for a Latino governor (who could also juice turnout for down ballot races crucial to winning the US House), and he has a varied and impressive resume. My husband and I even gave him a little money. I really, really wanted to like Becerra, but have found him disappointingly ho-hum. Even so, he’s regularly the leading Democrat in the polls

That’s why I’m casting my vote for Tom Steyer. It wouldn’t take that many votes for him to edge out Hilton, plus I prefer him to Becerra.  I’m proud to vote for the Class Traitor for reasons both strategic and personal.

I would happily change my vote were their poll rankings reversed. What’s most important now is to vote for a viable Democratic candidate by Tuesday (do not trust the mail at this late date—drop box or in-person voting only, please). And then happily vote for whoever advances to November’s general election.

______

* These facts are unlikely to matter. Of greater relevance is that both Bianco and Hilton have declared they would extradite to Louisiana doctors who prescribe abortion pills for out-of-state women, thus violating California’s abortion shield law in order to uphold draconian anti-choice laws elsewhere. Whatever you think about abortion, shouldn’t the Governor of California uphold our state law rather than Louisiana’s? Remember this one for the fall persuasion season.

In Memory of My Father on His Birthday

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My father was born in Brooklyn 109 years ago today. He only lived for 72 of those years, and I’ve spent almost half my life without him.

I’ve never written about my father, even though I’ve written many times about my mother, with whom I had a close and intense relationship (or, as we psychotherapists like to call it, “enmeshed”). My bond with my father was not the same vibrant technicolor, but we, too, were close. I look like my father, our temperaments are similar, and I share the BRCA2 mutation he passed on to me, something he never knew was part of his inheritance to me, or, for that matter, his inheritance from one of his parents. He died from mutation-linked pancreatic cancer a month after diagnosis in 1990. In 2012, I did not die from a rare and aggressive cancer of the uterus, which is the organ my BRCA2 flaw made its bodily debut in. My father lives on in me in many more felicitous ways, and I honor him today, Earth Day–a fitting marker for such a down-to-earth, life-sustaining mensch.

One of my favorite childhood memories is of walking with my father along the banks of the river that ran through our town, me climbing a tree while Dad stood at its base. This memory captures his steadfastness and stability that have always been at the root of my ability to explore, to climb, and to risk. I could do so knowing there was a solid and safe foundation below.

My father, a brilliant chemist, nuclear physicist, and deputy director of a radiological health laboratory, often took me and my friends to the lab on the weekend, where we raced each other on rolling desk chairs through the corridors, froze pencil erasers in liquid nitrogen, and gazed with mesmerized horror at the grotesque photos of people disfigured by tumors and burns caused by radiation.

As a graduate student, my father worked on the Manhattan Project, and liked to tell the story about how his superiors took the team out to a Japanese restaurant to reveal that they were working on developing the bomb that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like many of that generation, my father convinced himself that their deadly endeavor saved more lives than it cost, and that it was certainly in better hands than the Nazis’. He dedicated his professional life to harnessing the productive powers of the atom, and finding safe ways to mitigate its risk. I am ambivalent about my father’s role in ushering in the nuclear era, but one of the gifts he bestowed was an appreciation for complexity and the necessity of risk management—a skill that helped me decide how to deal with carrying the BRCA2 mutation.

Perhaps my father atoned for whatever ambivalence he had about his role by staunchly opposing the Vietnam War. When I was in middle school, he took me and my older brother to the Lexington Common, where colonial-era Minutemen once mustered and where in 1968 Vietnam Veterans Against the War and their supporters risked arrest by insisting on continuing our peaceful protest past the park’s curfew. It had been a hot summer day when we set out, and we dressed accordingly. As night fell and temperatures plummeted, people in shorts and sandals ran toward the police vans for the warmth of the station where they’d be processed after arrest. My father, brother, and I were freezing, too, but we, along with dozens of other hardy souls, held fast. The sun rose, curfew ended—we had held the Common! It was one of the most exhilarating moments of my youth, enhanced a few years later when my father took me to Washington, D.C., for one of the massive anti-war protests there. He and my mother also worked tirelessly for civil rights, instilling me with the values that motivate my activism today.

My father was also endlessly patient and generous. When my brother’s marriage and business collapsed, my parents gave him love, support, and a roof over his head, and my father taught him everything he knew about physics, chemistry, statistics, and scientific analysis, mentoring the broken former cheese-shop owner into a well-regarded and high-level scientific researcher and writer who rebuilt his life. As my brother said at our father’s funeral, “Dad taught us how to live . . . not so much through words as by the example he set in the way he lived his life. He was kind; he was funny; he was decent; he was caring; and he was gentle. His death leaves all of us who knew and loved him with a great emptiness and cherished memories to help fill it.”

I am so glad my father lived long enough to meet my husband, walk me down the aisle at our wedding, spend time with our firstborn daughter, who was almost two when he died. She charmingly nestled right next to him in his hospital bed, exclaiming, “Camper! Camper!” because she couldn’t pronounce Grandpa. Being with her pleased him so much he rallied for a day or two before succumbing to the cancer. My father bequeathed his signature handkerchiefs to her for her collection of beloved “raggies.” Even as I write this, I have the last of those hankies in my lap, helping me weather a long virus.

I am sorry my father missed the birth of our second daughter, whom we named after his mother—not because any of us, including my father, were so fond of her, but because of the connection to him. He’s missed so much in the last 36 years–our daughters growing up, marrying good men as I did thanks to his example, all of us living full and satisfying lives.

I miss you, Dad. Happy Birthday, and thank you.

Matzo Ball Soup for the Soul

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I’m on Day 12 of a nasty virus, which means I’ve been missing out on things right and left: my Spanish class; square dancing; a production of All My Sons starring Jimmy Smits; my book group, women’s group, and daily walks that keep me sane; No Kings Day; and plans for a more substantive blog post for March. I’ve barely made it up off the couch, and have had zero appetite.

Except for matzo ball soup. Two friends with troubles of their own swung into gear as soon as they heard I was ailing, and delivered big batches of the homemade golden elixir right away. It’s been delicious and restorative, good for the soul.

As is the kindness of friendship.

Women of a Certain Age

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My mother and me, both so much younger!

“Don’t grow old,” my mother unhelpfully advised.

Ever since I was diagnosed with cancer at age 57, there has been nothing I’ve wanted more than to grow old. It’s my aspiration, not something to avoid. I relish celebrating one birthday after another.

I just celebrated another one—my 71st. Although now seen as the younger side of old, reaching this age officially counts as having disregarded my mother’s advice.

Seventy-one is also the age she never lived beyond.

My mother smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and was also at least 150 pounds overweight for most of her life. Even when I was a kid, I remember my parents driving around and around the block to find a parking space right in front of wherever we were going because she couldn’t walk far. In my mother’s later years, she could barely cross the living room without stopping several times to catch her breath, and eventually was tethered to an oxygen machine. The aging process she exemplified struck me as an ever-tightening spiral of constriction, oppressed by living but afraid of dying (and nursing homes).  As my brother put it, “If you wake up every day for 10 years saying that this will be the day you’re going to die, eventually you’ll be right.” When that day finally came, it wasn’t exactly surprising, but it was mercifully quick and gentle—my mother’s heart gave out and she died instantly in her beloved home, her lovely Jamaican caregiver by her side and my brother downstairs.

My trajectory toward old age bears no resemblance to hers. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, am a normal-ish weight, and walk two or three hours every day. I have had no further cancer scares or really any significant health challenges. Although I feel myself slowing down some and am on the list for cataract surgery, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll die anytime soon. Still, it’s freaky to have reached the milestone of my mother’s final age.

I’ve been thinking of her a lot lately, missing her salty humor, her devotion and love despite her suffering. Longevity is not in my genes—my father died when he was 72, and my brother when he was only 65! Aging quickly and poorly was the model I more or less assumed would be my fate, even though I’ve clearly made different choices to alter the outcome.

And I have succeeded (I hope—my mother made it more than halfway to 72, so I’m not out of the woods yet). Will my aging be a time of expansion or an ever-narrowing constriction as it too soon was for my mother? Luckily, I had some other great models to emulate, such as my in-laws, vital and mostly not caught in a downward spiral until their deaths at almost 97 and almost 90.

Do I have 20 more years left in me? Fifteen? I used to think I’d be lucky to make it to 75, but now I think it’s a reasonable hope that my husband and I will celebrate our golden anniversary when we’re 81. That’s only a decade away.

Dying together at age 85—holding hands in bed as we sleep, of course!—feels like a worthy goal. But 85 is so soon–the closer I get, the more I want to move the goal posts farther away. Will I see my 9-month-old granddaughter graduate from high school and college, or be lucky enough to attend her wedding?  What will it be like to have the years my mother missed out on?

I hope to receive them as the gift that they are, and to make the most of them, for my sake and for hers.

Soul on ICE

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When I first heard of Renee Good’s death, I immediately thought of a conversation I’d had with my brother a couple of months ago. “Stay away from ICE,” he’d warned as we talked about Trump’s escalating war on immigrants. Not because my brother agreed with the crackdown, but because he feared for my safety.

I had been telling him about training as a volunteer legal observer to document ICE activity in my county. Good was also a volunteer legal observer, though she was living in what has become a war zone under siege by Trump’s private paramilitary force while I live in a quiet suburb just north of San Francisco that so far has seen almost no ICE activity.

I identified with Good in another way, too. When I saw the New York Times’s analysis of bystander video that captured the incident, my first thought was that aside from stopping sideways in the middle of the road, Good was carefully maneuvering her car exactly as I do in every busy parking lot I’ve ever been in—slowly inching out, letting people pass, trying hard not to hit anyone, exiting a tight spot as safely as possible.

So much for safety. Now a mother who had only recently dropped her six-year-old off at school, then stopped because her neighbors were in distress, is dead and being demonized by Trump and his enablers despite widespread evidence that Renee Good posed no threat to ICE agents.

My husband’s cousin in Minnesota’s Twin Cities has volunteered for years with refugee resettlement. He reports,

What’s happening here is unbelievable. This is like late 1930s Europe. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are afraid to leave their homes. Restaurants have closed temporarily to discourage ICE raids and to keep customers and employees safe. Some schools have closed temporarily to prevent confrontations with ICE as students are picked up at the end of the school day. People are organizing grocery shopping runs for immigrants who are “sheltering in place.”

The senseless killing of Renee Nicole Good has really solidified the resistance to ICE here. It is truly sad that every day about 60 to 80 people are hauled off to the Minneapolis airport and flown to out-of-state detention centers. My mission is to keep the immigrants who I know off of those planes . . . there is no end in sight to this madness. The number of ICE agents in Minnesota is increasing from 2000 to 3000 so I expect a lot more trouble. It’s like a war between the executive branch of the federal government and one resistant state in the middle of the country that refuses to be bullied.

Refusing to be bullied is the right thing to do, and the best way to put an end to terror. It is also easier said than done, particularly when the bully is not some middle-school kid but the head of a vast and deadly power apparatus with many willing enablers. The cruelty and the chilling effect are the point.

I feel the chill, too. In truth, even though I am not remotely close to any active danger or hotspots, I am scared, and also relieved that I’ve only gotten one text from the Rapid Response Network. I have to fight my impulse to retreat, and strive to channel the spirit of resistance that has only strengthened Minnesotans in the face of real danger. I hope that owning up to my fear and relief paradoxically keeps me in a state of courage, even weak courage.

And so I show up intermittently at local demonstrations, donate money to grassroots organizations, contact my representatives in Congress who already speak out and vote the way I want them to. Standing at intersections with clever signs in the brilliant Californian sunshine while passing motorists honk their approval (except for the woman who yelled “Go Home”) feels mostly like a feel-good exercise of little consequence. But it’s not nothing, and sometimes enlivens my too-numb soul.

The other day I found inspiration in an unlikely place: a letter to the editor of my local paper by a gentleman named Igor Sill. I’ve read a lot of pieces urging hope, persistence, and a Never Give Up bravado. Mostly they make me feel chastised and ashamed of my despair and wish to retreat. Mr. Sill’s letter struck me differently:

As a new year emerges, there is a natural pause — a moment to reflect on what has endured and to look forward with intention. It is a time to measure not only what was gained or lost, but how we carried ourselves through uncertainty. None of us is tasked with fixing the entire world. Our responsibility is more attainable: to mend the portion within our reach. Any small act that helps another — relieving suffering, restoring dignity, steadying fear — matters immediately. In a turbulent world, one of the most powerful choices available to us is to remain present, do the right thing and show our spirit.

This distinction matters as 2026 begins. Optimism is the belief that the future will be better.

Hope is harder: the belief that we have a role in making it so. Optimism waits. Hope acts.

One of hope’s greatest adversaries is cynicism. Cynicism assumes bad faith and inevitable failure. It can feel sophisticated, even protective, but it quietly erodes engagement. A healthier posture is skepticism: the willingness to question without surrendering to despair. Skepticism keeps us alert; cynicism shuts us down.

We were reminded of that truth this past year through widely shared footage from Australia’s Bondi Beach, where a bystander ran toward danger during a violent attack rather than away from it. There was no plan and no guarantee of success — only courage that was improvised and deeply human.

Moments like this clarify something essential: hope does not originate in institutions alone. It emerges when individuals decide that disengagement is not an option their conscience will accept. Acts of unscripted courage are not anomalies. They echo an enduring truth: Meaning survives when people stay engaged. Hope does not deny hardship. It accepts it and insists that effort still matters.

Hope is not the belief that the future will be kinder; it is the decision to remain responsible for it, even when the outcome is uncertain. As a new year begins, that choice to stay engaged may be the most consequential one we make.

Less than three weeks ago, I said good riddance to 2025. The new year feels even worse. The brave people of Minnesota and Mr. Sill’s words help me resolve not to renounce my true feelings of fear, exhaustion, and despair, but to let them accompany me as I decide to remain responsible for the future, even when the outcome is uncertain. Effort still matters. Disengagement is not an option my conscience will accept.

Good Riddance

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Has it been only a year since the Times Square ball last dropped? It feels like a decade, one characterized more by wrecking balls both literal and figurative. To top off a hard year, Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s 35-year-old daughter, succumbed to terminal cancer just yesterday, although not without leaving us the gift of her grace and her final essay.

But that heartbreak notwithstanding, at last it’s time to turn the page on 2025.

It’s been quite something perusing the commentary this year. Hope is necessary for carrying on, but it’s sometimes been hard to keep despair at bay. First came gentle encouragement to breathe, step back, take care of yourself, but not give up. Then, with apparently too many people following the first three but not the last pieces of advice, sterner exhortations about the treachery of disengagement emerged. Always, there was the cheer brought by brave resisters, small victories, federal judges not part of the US Supreme Court majority, and the good feelings of solidarity that came with the massive No Kings protests throughout the year. Many times, I found solace in schadenfreude, such as the end of the Trump/Musk bromance and MAGA infighting at this year’s Turning Point conference.

Then, after one too many tacky gilt pieces were affixed to the Oval Office and Trump and his enablers did everything in their power not only to strip healthcare but also food from millions of Americans, solid evidence emerged that the tide was turning. Following a promising string of special-election overperformance, in November, we saw stunning widespread electoral victories for Democrats (apparently still hated, but preferred). Finally, Trump’s “plummeting” poll numbers, which declined in infinitesimally tiny increments for months, fell below 40%. I find it alarming that anyone supports this regime, but still, I’ll take it. Just as I’ll take having complicated instead of merely contemptuous feelings toward Marjorie Taylor Green.

It’s been a hard year to sum up, to assess the damage while still finding reasons for optimism. Mainstream commentators are valiantly trying. Just last week in the New York Times, I read back-to-back opinion pieces. One, by UC Professor David G. Victor, began, “On its face, 2025 looks like a year of relentless backsliding in the fight against climate change.” You don’t say. Through some unconvincing jujitsu, Victor attempts to make a case for optimism. Commenters raked him over the coals, which are at least easier to come by with Trump’s avowed resurrection of the deservedly dying industry.

Nicholas Kristof was more honest in proving that he understood his year-end assignment of offering hope without delusion. In Which I Valiantly Try to Cheer You Up took the long view, acknowledging the massive damage wrought by the first year of Trump 2.0 but urging perspective that in the arc of human history, things aren’t so bad and will likely get better.

All in all, it seems everyone is ready to bid adieu to 2025. Although personally I experienced many joys this year—a new granddaughter, loving and happily married children, several nice trips, and the good fortune not to be in the direct line of fire for any of the atrocities befalling our country, I can’t wait to turn the page. Usually, I like to let the good feelings of the holidays linger after January 1, but this year we hurried to dismantle Christmas.

Into the recycling bin of history you go, 2025. Good riddance.

Onward to 2026!

The Cruelty is the Point

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“The problem,” said my friend, “is that Republicans are willing to let people die, and Democrats are not.”

You might think we had this conversation just a few days ago, after a group of eight Senate moderates brokered a deal with their Republican counterparts to end the government shutdown.

But my friend and I actually discussed this a good fifteen years ago, during another chapter in the long saga of asymmetrical political battle between Democrats, who believe that the purpose of government is to improve people’s lives, versus Republicans, who want to shrink government down small enough so it can be drowned in the bathtub, as anti-tax Republican Grover Norquist famously put it.

Here we are again. This time, starving government isn’t enough. Trump and his GOP enablers have literally been starving people, depriving 42 million of SNAP benefits. Trump wasted no time in exploiting the shutdown to further the rampage he’s enthusiastically executed from the jump of his second term, vowing to use it to “get rid of a lot of the things we didn’t want,” targeting, of course, “Democrat things.”

Apparently, one of those Democrat things is food.

Turns out, plenty of non-Democrats also need food. Who knew?

Unmoved by this reality, Trump refused to utilize an emergency fund expressly meant to feed people during crises, defied federal courts ordering him to do so, appealed their attempts to make him comply with the law not once but twice to the Supreme Court, and threatened to punish states who had made alternative arrangements to keep their residents from going hungry. As a New York Times reader commented, “The past few weeks have been eye-opening. I have never seen anyone work so hard to deny food to those who need help getting it. That will not be forgotten.”

The cruelty is the point. Whatever your feelings about how a few Democrats helped end the shutdown with a whimper instead of a bang, this essential truth remains.  Trump, showman that he is, has merely escalated a long-standing GOP tendency to hurt vulnerable people with his brazen relish for causing harm.

Before Trump was even re-elected, Russ Vought, the Project 2025 architect whom Trump pretended not to know, said about federal workers, “We want to put them in trauma.” Right after the election, Trump rewarded Vought with the powerful directorship of the Office of Management and Budget. Many consider Vought, along with fellow-sadist Stephen Miller, to actually be calling the shots in Washington.

In February, DOGE head Elon Musk wielded a chainsaw signaling the destruction in store for federal workers soon after bragging about “feeding USAID through the woodchipper.” A recent New Yorker article cites a respected estimate that 600,000 people—two-thirds of them children—have already died since the demise of USAID.

For months, Trump and his cronies have been firing federal workers, terrorizing immigrant communities, slashing funding for programs that help ordinary people so billionaires can have bigger tax cuts, and blowing people to bits in international waters, apparently just to get their manly rocks off. But these guys aren’t just dicking around. They’re gleefully taking a wrecking ball to the economy, the rule of law, and, in the metaphor of the century, the East Wing of the White House:

Busy destroying things, blaming others, filing appeals, increasing and decreasing tariffs on a whim, and feasting on the empty praise of world leaders, Trump naturally couldn’t be expected to sit down with congressional leaders to address problems behind the shutdown, like hunger and skyrocketing healthcare costs. He did, however, find the time to brag about his new marble bathroom and 90,000 square-foot gilded ballroom, and to host a Great-Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago:

The grotesque optics only magnify the callous cruelty. Melania’s jacket from Trump 1.0 (at the top of this post) says it all: They really don’t care who gets hurt.

That’s the very problem my friend pointed out so long ago. Ezra Klein, commenting on what led Democrats to end the shutdown, said the same thing, but more nicely:

Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over health care spending, Trump has been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing . . . More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt.

Democrats did not succeed in getting Republicans to extend healthcare premium subsidies as a condition for ending the shutdown (if they had, as Ezra Klein and others have pointed out, they would have saved Republicans from themselves and taken Democrats’ best electoral issue off the table for the mid-terms). But they did succeed in elevating to prolonged national attention the fact that Republicans could care less about the well-being of ordinary Americans and are responsible for skyrocketing healthcare premiums. There’s a whole lot more that can and should be hung around Republicans’ necks, but this was the ticket, and it worked surprisingly well and quite probably for as long as it could. Republicans were never going to capitulate, and had the shutdown and the increasing suffering it caused continued, public opinion on who’s to blame would have switched on a dime from Republicans to Democrats. As it stands, Republicans own the shutdown, the escalating cost of living, the chaos, greed, and indifference to suffering. They own the cruelty.

That’s a message we can and should take all the way to the mid-terms. It’s time for Democrats to step away from the circular firing squad and get to work. We have lots more elections to win.

Hola!

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Almost 45 years ago, when I was a social work graduate student at UC Berkeley, I took a year of Spanish, along with my usual classes on community mental health, psychopathology, family and the law. Why not? I was there on campus anyway, and there weren’t so many hoops to jump through back then. I had a massive crush on the teacher, who regaled us with stories of his rum-soaked nights in various Caribbean countries. I took the class with my then-boyfriend’s mother, and remember her saying in class, “Soy muy cariñosa.” (“I am very loving/affectionate.”) This was not my boyfriend’s experience of his mother, but I was not going to get into it, especially in a foreign language.

Since then, I have used my very broken Spanish to communicate with the lovely women who clean our house. Their even more broken English and our elaborate gesticulations have served us well. But as things started ramping up with Trump’s terror campaign against immigrants, I wanted to resurrect my Spanish skills from the pile of rusty flakes they’d become in case I was ever called upon to use my Legal Observer training to actually help my fellow brown-skinned community members.

I was also trying to do what us older folks are supposed to do, which is to stay engaged and learn new things. This seemed even more important as my political dread and anxiety deepened my depression. To counter this, I’d tried my hand at watercolor through community ed, but each class escalated my dread and despair more than the daily headlines I was trying to distract myself from.

When the next community ed schedule emerged, a conversational Spanish class caught my eye. It was only six sessions long, met during dinnertime, and cost about three times what a regular semester-long community college class cost. I didn’t think I’d get much out of it besides hunger and the hassle of night-time driving, but at least it had nothing to do with art! Then I got the brilliant idea of trying something that was more of a commitment, and instead enrolled in a regular semester-long section of Spanish 101 that met twice a week.

It’s been the best thing I’ve done all year (besides becoming a grandmother). The teacher is warm, fun, and encouraging, and moves us along at a brisk pace. Except for the students from bilingual families, most of us sound like garbage disposals grinding down rocks as we try to converse in Spanish, but our teacher is adept at creating a safe and bonding experience. There are a few other gray-haired people in the class, but mostly it’s a diverse group of young people. We range in age from 16-77, from all different walks of life. I sit in the front row so I can see the board, along with three other gray-haired ladies, but a lovely 20-year-old woman from Uganda sits with us, and we’re all diligent about our homework and group exercises. “So you like hanging out with the old ladies?” I ask her. Yes, she does—she misses her elders back home, and wonders about our American culture’s lack of reverence for the aged.

I’m learning Spanish—“iEstudio español!” I told my housecleaners. “Oh, your Spanish is so good!” they exclaimed. At least I think that’s what they said. By the time I speak well enough to be of any use to our immigrant community, it will either be illegal to learn Spanish or we’ll be through this nightmarish time, but I’m loving the process.

As it turns out, the actual grammar and vocabulary, listening and speaking—you know, learning Spanish—is the easy part. I used to be good at languages, and I have a certain amount of muscle memory from 45 years ago. The real challenges have been:

  • Figuring out how to get onto the College of Marin site and register in the first place
  • Figuring out how to log onto campus wi-fi for all my devices
  • Figuring out Canvas, the learning platform we use as well as COM’s webmail and the virtual textbook
  • Figuring out how to do a Google Slideshow so I can submit my many homework projects on famous Latinos, “My Family,” a tour of our campus.

But the biggest and most hilarious challenge is when we’re supposed to identify pop-culture figures and say what they do and where they’re from. Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, Beyónce. I know exactly none of them by face, and others I’ve never even heard of. My one triumph was being the only person in the class who recognized Michael Jordan, of Black Panther fame. When in small groups we had to show an image of a famous person for others to identify, I was mystified by my groupmates’ choices. On the other hand, no one had the slightest idea who my pick was–Virginia Woolf, of course!

Life-long learning—what a gas, as long as it doesn’t involve picking up a paintbrush or night-time driving. Plus, I spend so much time in class and doing homework that my time to fret about the state of the country has diminished. But being around my younger, diverse, smart, and caring classmates gives me a lot of hope for the future.