Social & Political

Mental Health Monday – World on Fire Edition

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I don’t even know what’s specifically happening today. I do know that if I go on Threads or turn on the news, I’m going to get a migraine, and I don’t get migraines.

How do we cope with the world around us?

In addition to all this *gestures wildly*, on Tuesday we lost power. It remained off for over twenty hours. No internet, no electricity, no heat.

Our work plans were cancelled. Our dinner plans were cancelled. My daughter’s day off plans in front of Netflix from her cozy bed were cancelled. Fridge barricaded from the kids. Sweaters on.

Our country is at war, our economy is tanking. Gas prices are ridiculous. We have ICE agents in our airports “helping” the TSA, and by helping I mean tackling and detaining folks waiting for their flights. We have airplanes crashing because air traffic controllers are overworked and understaffed. Our government is doing everything in its power (and beyond that) to destroy what we’ve grown and built over the last two hundred fifty years.

We may never recover from this.

The President of the United States posted this week about a combat, Purple Heart receiving veteran, lifelong public servant, and former director of the FBI when it had some prestige that he was glad he was dead. Not condolences for the family. Not we had our disagreements, but I wish his family well. No. Glad he’s dead, good riddance.

His Cabinet lies under oath every time they come in contact with a Congressional hearing.

I’m appalled. I’m repulsed. I’m disgusted.

And I know I’m not the only one.

There is little I can do individually except make my anger, distrust, and contempt for this corrupt administration known. Feckless Republican cowards have let him get away with this treason for too long. They all need to go.

I know how all of this is affecting my mental health. I can only imagine how it affects yours.

Here are some of my thoughts and suggestions for getting through another day:

  1. Breathe.
  2. Turn off the news. Just let it go for twenty-four hours.
  3. Be gentle with yourself. If you simply want to sit and stare at the four walls for ten minutes,  sit and stare at the walls for ten minutes.
  4. If you have a porch or balcony, sit on it and watch the neighborhood around you just be. Take that time.
  5. Do something comforting. It could be reading a chapter in that book, eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese, buy some flowers from the supermarket, sing a song from your childhood.
  6. Do one thing every day that is unrelated to the world that gives you comfort. Just one thing. Keep a journal or diary, and you’ll create a go-to for yourself when you need a reminder of distractions that work.

Freedom of Information Day | American Association of School Librarians

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The following link will take you to the American Association of School Librarians where they have several resources on why this day is so important, how to send the government your FOIA requests, and other historical background and helpful information.

Freedom of Information Day Information

To request information, go to the government’s website and it will tell you how to make your request.

(c)2026

International Women’s Day

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As International Women’s Day comes to a close tonight, I wanted to do something different besides railing against the patriarchy or calling out the magnificent women who are and should be our role models. Here are some of my favorite women authors. Hit them up on Google and at your favorite bookstore or library!

Read a Book!

  • Louise Penny
  • Hillary Rodham Clinton
  • Suleika Jaouad
  • Connie Willis
  • Sharon Kay Penman
  • Joan Chittister
  • Anne Frank
  • Heather Cox Richardson
  • Elizabeth Peters
  • Madeleine Albright

Travel – Seneca Falls, NY

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Today is the third day of Women’s History Month. Typically, there’d be a proclamation from Washington, Congress and/or the White House, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that. It was clear last week when the Olympics closed for this year that the White House would only be acknowledging the white men on the men’s hockey team. Yes, they did win the gold medal, and should be congratulated, but (or is it and) the women’s hockey team also won the gold as did ten other US athletes or teams. I will say that the last time that the men’s hockey team won the gold was right here in New York forty-six years ago. They were truly a ragtag team of true amateurs. I wasn’t even in high school. The women’s team, on the other hand competed in their first Olympics in 1998, and have won a medal in every Olympics they participated in.

You may think from that introduction that this is going to be a diatribe against misogyny, for Title IX, against discrimination, for DEI (which benefits everyone), but it’s not. It is, however, the world we live in currently with Congress and the White House attempting to take women back to their dark ages. We will not let them. We are not going back.

I begin this Women’s History month with that declaration: we are not going back. We are 50% of the world. We are equal. Even though we’ve earned it, we do not need your respect, but we will not be mocked.

One way to commemorate and celebrate women is to support their spaces and we can do that by using our time and our dollars and visiting some of those spaces.

We have traveled to Canada yearly for the past several years, and each time we’ve driven west towards Niagara Falls and the Rainbow Bridge, we pass a sign on the New York State Thruway that declares the Women’s Rights Historical National Park, and every time I see that sign, I say (out loud), I want to go there one day. And maybe one day, I will.

Links

Begin at the Visitors’ Center and visit the historic houses there that include:

  • Wesleyan  Methodist Church
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton House
  • M’Clintock House
  • Richard Hunt House
  • Amelia Bloomer House

There is also a trail through the area that includes the following sites:

Election Connection: Jesse Jackson (1941-2026)

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When I was in college, so somewhere between 1984 and 1988, I saw Jesse Jackson give a speech. We were in some kind of gymnasium with metal folding chairs, and I can still picture him up at the podium, I was about halfway back. I feel like he was wearing a grey suit. His hair was not as big as in the picture but it also wasn’t close-cropped as in later years. He did have a mustache. I remember a raised fist.

I didn’t remember him as the civil rights icon that he was even then. I only knew him as the Presidential candidate, and I was ready to vote for him.

At this time in my life, I was a pre-law, political science major, and to say I was a political junkie would be an understatement. Every morning I’d wake up and put on the television to the one station we could get in the dorms – ABC for the news. It would be on constantly. Before the 24 hour cable news, my TV was news, news, news even if I wasn’t in the room.

Seeing Jesse Jackson in person was exciting. The room was electric, and his preacher’s voice carried. I was all in. (The photo I chose above is not recent. I wanted one to reflect how he may have looked when I saw him in person.)

He didn’t become president but I think he was more influential as an activist than as a politician. He was one of the OG civil rights heroes, next to John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, James Lawson, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr, often literally.

Rest in peace, Rev. Jesse Jackson. In peace and in power.

Obituary from the LA Times

Wikipedia from Rev. Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign

Election Connection – Top 5 (or so) for the Times

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I find that these are the most important follows. They are the ones I trust, they are truthtellers, and they are important voices for these very difficult times.

Election Connection – Renee Good

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I’m struggling today.

Yesterday and this morning have been very difficult for me; my spoons have clattered to the floor, and the idea of picking them up and beginning again isn’t there yet.

I’ve called this Election Connection because it is connected to our recent past elections and the two future ones in 2026 and 2028. It’s the people.

And it’s also more than the elections and the consequences of an illiterate and ignorant electorate.

It’s that the lack of fundamental thought processing is gone. Media literacy is gone. Impartiality on behalf of our journalists is gone.I’m not sure if we will ever get any of this back.

There are not always two (or more) sides to every issue. Sometimes there is the fact side and the anti-truth side. Good versus evil.

A woman and her spouse were driving home with their dog after dropping their six-year-old off at school. They never arrived home. That trauma will never go away.

I watched in real time as side-by-side, the video of the murder next to the government lying about it, and I was stunned. I truly was. I still am.

Anyone who’s watched the video saw what happened. A woman, trying to follow the direction of one ICE agent and leave was murdered by another ICE agent who then calmly walked to her car, turned around and walked away. Not limped. Not taken to the hospital. Not injured in any way. He walked away.

The federal agents on the scene refused to let a doctor attend to her. The federal agents on the scene refused to allow an ambulance to reach her.

The EMTs had to walk into the scene and them carry her limp, dead body back to the ambulance.

At the same time that her spouse was sitting on a snowy curb sobbing, the President of the United States, the Director of Homeland Security, and other federal officials claimed that the driver was a terrorist, that she attempted to harm the ICE agent. We know this is not true. It has been described in the media as the government gaslighting the rest of us.

I will say it more clearly:

The federal officials, the director of Homeland Security, the President and Vice President of the United States are lying to us. They are, in George Orwell’s words, asking us not to believe what we see, but to believe what they tell us. They are lying. Over an over again.

And this morning, we are being told that the FBI, led by a corrupt, unqualified director will be solely in charge of the investigation; that they are refusing to share any evidence found with the Minnesota State Police or the Minneapolis City Police. We cannot be expected to trust them. Not one iota when they’ve been lying to us as we watched the video of Renee Good’s murder.

We know her name because she was a white, middle class suburban woman, a mother of three.

I ask you to search the internet for the following two names:

Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez (Chicago).

Keith Porter (Los Angeles).

We know of others who’ve died in ICE custody, several not wanted on any charges, not undocumented immigrants. We don’t hear their stories because they are not white suburban women, but men of color, and we should be following their deaths and their stories equally as close.

The first man (Villegas-Gonzalez) was allegedly killed by the same ICE agent that killed Renee Good, at least that’s what Director Noem seemed to say in her press conferences.

CORRECTION: While the ICE agent who killed Renee Good was dragged by a car, it was not Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez who was driving. These were two separate incidents with two different ice agents.

The government went too far on January 21. It continues to push us to the brink of the end of democracy, the end of civil rights, the end of life in the United States as we know it.

CBS has capitulated. CNN has capitulated. AP News, the NY Times, the Washington Post have all capitulated. Who will be left to tell the true story? When will actual journalists stand up and remember their commitment to unbiased, truthful reporting, of speaking truth to power, of not showing two sides of a single truth?

I hope it’s soon, but I won’t be holding my breath.

Election Connection – Nobody Voted For This!

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(c)2025

On a road near my house, there are two of the same sign directly across from each other. For months now, I’ve been trying to take a photo because I loved and agreed with the sentiment. I finally got that photo, which you can see in this post. Once I got the photo however, the more I looked at it, trying to decide where to use it, and the more I thought about it, I realized that it’s a nice thought, a way to absolve voters, and get them to speak out and stand up. I agreed that even people who voted for the current president didn’t want this to be the outcome. But I’ve only just recently realized that it’s a lie.

“Nobody voted for this.”

That is a lie.

People did vote for this, greedily, happily, with determination and glee at what the other side would get, and indeed “get what’s coming to them.” I don’t have to give them the redemption arc they so desperately crave because the bad things are happening to them, and they’ve suddenly decided that the  monster in the room is actually the monster in the room.

I can’t possibly list all the depraved, petty, destructive things this president and his Congress cohorts have wrought upon us.

Just because they’ve changed their minds because their landscaper was deported or their cousin the farmer is going to lose his farm because of tariffs or your health insurance is going up, like we told you it would, doesn’t mean that you get a pass because you’ve joined the suffering.

What did they vote for exactly if not for this?

They voted for lawlessness, for terrorism in our streets, for pulling people out of court hearings when they’ve immigrated “the right way,” for canceling citizenship swearing in ceremonies when these almost citizens met every hurdle, for “papers please,” for higher taxes, for lies upon lies upon lies, for pettiness that would put a toddler to shame, for misogyny, transphobia, antisemitism, and white supremacy. Yes, even if you’re not white, you voted for white supremacy. You’ve allowed him to denigrate our press, and the press has allowed him to do the same also by ignoring his outlandish and despicable behavior and their complicit silence. You’ve allowed him to call our women journalists names, and ignore the questions he dislikes. You voted for war, and disrespect for our country, our military, and put our citizens here and around the world in danger. You voted for murder and the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving over the Rose Garden because the dementia-addled resident of the White House can’t remember where he is or what he’s doing. His made up grievances are on repeat, his whines are pathetic, his falling asleep at the cabinet table would be cute if it was Grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner sated by the turkey, but not for the President of the United States.

He’s so narcissistic that he needs to deface a national monument, a memorial to a fallen President; yes, it’s sad, even for this joyless man, but it’s also pitiable.

His need to pull himself up by tearing everything and everyone around him down would be sad if he wasn’t also pulling down the future for my kids, for your kids. Will the next generation have a country to be proud of? Will they even have a country? Will we be able to recover from the nastiness he unleashed? Will the White House recover from the sad, gold accents that reduce this once great house, the people’s house to a tacky golf club?

Nobody voted for this.

Lies.

*I* didn’t vote for this. Many of the people reading this didn’t vote for this. But others, there are others who DID vote for this. They’re only upset that it affects them too and not just the brown skinned people they were “punishing” simply for not being white.

But make no mistake – this is exactly what you voted for, and for those of you who didn’t vote because “they’re both the same…” shame on you.

I, and many of us, won’t forget, and forgiveness is a long way off…if it ever comes.

Human Rights Day, 2025

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Today is Human Rights Day, and I’m of a mind to share two quotations:

Women’s Rights are Human Rights. – Hillary Clinton

Trans Rights are Human Rights.

I’m finding it difficult to write about human rights today when the United States is violating them left, right, and center, every which way we look, on the land, in the air, on the sea.

I find it difficult directing you to the human rights watches of Amnesty International and the United Nations, both of whom I’ve respected my entire life and have now abandoned them as they’ve abandoned many of us.

I find it difficult accepting that human rights are a right for all humans when we see so many rights being torn away, stomped upon, and set on metaphorical fire.

Last week, I saw a picture online of a drunk racoon passed out next to a toilet in a public bathroom, a gas station, I think, and that seems to have summed up the last eleven months  of where we are in terms of the world, of our elected leaders here around the world, and of the human rights being taken away and destroyed before our very eyes.

No, I’m sorry, there’s no witty twist, no redemption arc. It is what it is, and it’s a dumpster fire.