When my marriage ended, my son was four years old and my daughter was eighteen months old and still nursing. I had no desire whatsoever to go sit in a restaurant and order a drink and — oh my god, are you kidding me — try to have a conversation with someone about where they grew up or what they liked to do on the weekend. My head was not in that game at all.

I was in business with my not-yet ex, the kids lived with me full-time, and all I cared about was making sure they were okay — that they felt secure and happy and loved, and our house was full of laughter and joy. By the time my mom started wondering how I would meet anyone since I only ever worked or was home building couch forts — and it wasn’t likely someone was going to show up on my doorstep in a bow — the divorce had been final for a few years, the kids were thriving, and I had started to think maybe it was time to put myself out there again. So I stuck a toe in the dating app waters.

I made a profile the way you do, put up recent pictures, said true things about who I was and what I wanted and didn’t want, didn’t answer any of the sex questions because wtf, why would anyone tell the entire internet about that, and hit publish. I don’t know how to explain what happened, and I don’t have to if you’re a woman. To be clear, I had never been on a dating app before. I had social media profiles and I’d been blogging since 2009 (back when we blogged), so I was no stranger to being a woman on the internet, or having people “slide into my DMs” in the parlance of the oldish days — but I was not ready for this.

I’ll skip all the messages you can guess, the ones with zero creativity and no punctuation, the dudes who wanted to ride over on their Harleys and head up the PCH for lunch like I’ve never seen Dateline. We don’t have to discuss the men who were way out of my stated age-range (on both sides of the spectrum lol) messaging me at 11pm on a Saturday night wondering if my kids were asleep and if I wanted some company. As though I’d ever allow some guy I don’t know to have my address and come to my house — let alone while my tiny children were asleep in the other room.

Then there were the dick pics, and there were a lot of them. I both do and don’t want to talk about this. I do not get it, that’s the only part worth discussing. Did someone on reddit say this was a good idea at some point? I instantly blocked, because that’s the kind of guy who thinks having a dick makes him special I guess. Why else lead with that? Not even hello, just — bam, here’s my dick — like he’s taking advice from Louis CK.

If you’re a guy, I am kind of assuming you have a dick, and if I want to see it, you’ll know. If I haven’t asked, I do not want to see it. Super easy. I won’t speak for all women, but every woman I know feels this same way, and I know a lot of women. Maybe part of it is we are always dealing with dicks whether we want to or not, so it gets old and boring and — oh yeah, it’s a violation. There isn’t any consent if you whip out your dick in person or online. Just boom, dick in your face. Not great.

Eventually, I went to meet a guy for dinner. He seemed interesting, funny and smart. He even used punctuation. I got to the restaurant first, which was fine — I was early, and he was driving from the other side of town during rush hour. I went to the bar and ordered a glass of wine while I waited. It was a popular place, but not hopping yet. There were plenty of people having dinner outside, and three men a couple of barstools away from me. The bartender was getting ready for the night ahead, moving around, making sure the bar was stocked.

The three guys started talking to me. They seemed like they’d been there for a while, they were speaking more loudly than necessary. I was polite, but not friendly. I am pretty well-versed in the land of dealing with people who’ve had a lot to drink. One of the guys, the one closest to me, came over and put his arm around me and asked why a woman so hot was alone at a bar on a Friday night.

I slipped out from under his arm and slid off the barstool, said I was waiting for someone and was going to the restroom. I smiled the way women do when they don’t want to die — but I was aggravated. His buddies laughed. He said he hoped I was waiting for a hot girlfriend to join me. I said, Sorry, not your night, and went inside. I didn’t need the restroom, I just wanted to get away so I could strategize. My date texted he was stuck in traffic, but almost there. No worries, I texted back. I thought about asking if we could meet somewhere else, but couldn’t think of a place nearby. Plus, I could handle this. I’m from New York City.

I returned to the bar. The three guys were still there, but now they’d moved down the bar right next to where I’d been sitting, and they’d ordered a round of shots. One for me, too. I said thanks, I appreciated it, but no thanks, and asked the bartender if I could be seated. “Oh, come on!” the handsy guy said, “lighten up and have a shot with us. Your date is late. His loss, not smart to leave a woman like you waiting!” The bartender looked at me then, like he was understanding what was going on for the first time.

“Hey fellas, she said no,” he said, “I’ll do the shot with you when I get back,” and he came out from behind the bar, grabbed my wine, and brought me to a table. “Sorry about those guys,” he said, “they’ve been here for a couple of hours. That one guy is a real asshole.” I nodded, sat down, and texted my best friend. Told her what was happening. Had a little more of my wine.

Then the guy came over and sat down at the table like we were playing a game. “Listen,” I said, “I need you to go back to the bar. I’m waiting for someone, this is not cool.” I looked over, hoping the bartender was on his way, but now a man and woman were at the bar where I’d been sitting, and he was getting their drinks. The other two guys waved at me — clearly, they thought this was funny. “Why are you being such a bitch?” their friend asked, and his eyes flashed in a way that was familiar and made my heart pick up the beat. “Your date is really late, and I’m into you. Why don’t you just hang out with me, instead?”

It was clear he wasn’t going to leave, so I got up, but as soon as I stood, everything got hazy and I collapsed back into my chair. My knees knocked together. The room had gone sideways, and everything looked grey. I felt like I might pass out. I gripped the table. I thought maybe I’d stood up too fast — I have low blood pressure, and sometimes that happens. He laughed, reached forward and put his hand on my thigh, squeezed it. “Don’t fucking touch me,” I growled, batting his hand away, but my words came out like one word, slurred together, Dontfuckingtouchme. I sounded like my mom, after a bottle of wine.

He grinned. “Are you okay? How much have you had to drink? Do you need a ride home?” I looked at him carefully. I felt sick. I have no tolerance when it comes to alcohol, but I’d only had a glass of wine, and it wasn’t a large glass. There’s no way I could be this woozy. “I’m fine,” I said, “I just stood up too fast.” I had to focus on enunciating every word.

I got up carefully and looked toward the bar which seemed very far away now, and this time the bartender saw me. I walked toward him unsteadily, trying to find the floor underneath my feet with each step. It was like walking on a boat at sea in heels. I must have looked scared because he walked out from behind the bar and met me halfway, grabbing my elbow. “Something isn’t right,” I said to him, “I think he spiked my drink, I don’t feel well. I’m going to call a friend to come get me. Please don’t leave me alone with him or let him pull me outside.”

“Oh my god,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the guy, “Do you want me to call the police? Do you want an ambulance?”

I didn’t want any of that. I wasn’t positive I was right, all I wanted at that moment was to get away from the whole situation and get back to my house. I sat down at the bar and texted my best friend, asking her to come — not the kind of thing I’d ever done before. The bartender got me some water and called the manager over. The manager went to talk to the two guys still at the bar — their friend had gone outside. Apparently they apologized their friend had “bothered” me, settled their tab in cash, and took off.

My girlfriend pulled up in front of the place as my date was walking in. By then I felt certain something had happened — either that guy put something in my drink, or I had food poisoning from something I’d eaten the day before — though I hadn’t eaten anything my kids hadn’t eaten, and they were fine.

I told my date I was sorry, but obviously I needed to reschedule. He said it went without saying, and helped me into my friend’s car. He asked my girlfriend if she could stay with me overnight. She could and did. They exchanged numbers and he asked her to keep him posted.

I went home and vomited violently all night, until it didn’t seem possible there was anything left. I had a blinding headache for 18 hours. I had tears streaming down my face from exhaustion and from my stomach cramping like it was in some kind of vise grip. I was pale and shaky and miserable. Much of the night was a blur. When I wasn’t vomiting, I’d pass out again on the cold bathroom floor because I needed to be near the toilet. My girlfriend told me things in the morning I did not remember at all, and still don’t. I came out of the bathroom naked at one point and told her it was because my clothes hurt and my skin needed to release the poison.

The poison is everywhere. I think it’s important we all realize this now. When the Swalwell stuff started coming out I was dismayed like everyone. Disgusted. Especially when I saw his video denying the allegations, saying this was happening because he was the Democratic front-running candidate for governor, and he would fight back legally if necessary.

There was something about the way he was squinting, rocking his body forward for emphasis, like he had to use momentum to get the words out, and the way he was breathing — that shallow chest breathing. It was all the body language of a caged narcissist. A man who can’t quite believe it’s over, who thinks if he says it forcefully enough, he can bend reality to his will.

He must have known what was coming. Maybe he made that video so he could wake up in the same house with his kids a few more mornings, to see them look at him with all that love and trust before their world falls apart because he turns out to be an absolute monstrosity. Allegedly. I put that there for my own legal protection, not because I have any doubt.

People challenging the women who’ve come forward have no clue how hard it is to step into the arena and accuse a man of assault, especially when time has gone by. Not that it’s easy at the time, either, especially when he’s a powerful person and you are not — like a big-time congressman, and a twenty-one-year-old staffer.

There is no good time when every time a woman comes forward to say she’s been assaulted, people doubt her, men and women alike. They want to know how much she had to drink. Why was she having drinks with the guy if she didn’t like him. What she was wearing. Whether she said no.

Also, why did she keep working for him after it happened, if it wasn’t consensual?

When you are in your early twenties right out of college and you get your dream job as an intern working for a congressperson or a senator or an ad executive or a novelist or an attorney or a spiritual guru — and this person you admire so much is paying attention to you and making you feel special — and then the interaction starts to get a little strange, but you aren’t totally sure — you probably won’t want to ask anyone, because what if you’re wrong?

You won’t want to say anything to your mom, for example, because she’ll freak out, and if you’re making “something out of nothing”, maybe you’ll mess up a really great break you’ve gotten for yourself. What if she calls the office or shows up or does something embarrassing? Surely it’s all okay. So many people admire the person you’re working for, this is a huge break. People would kill for this opportunity. It must be you, misreading things.

Maybe those disappearing Snapchat messages are not so inappropriate, and maybe having drinks with your boss is a grown-up thing to do. By the time you know it isn’t okay you’re in over your head, and you try to manage the situation on your own, and somehow keep your great job.

Maybe you can just flirt and walk the line, and that will satisfy him. And then one night if your boss slips something in your drink and you end up in his hotel room, well. Is anyone going to feel sorry for you? Why didn’t you say something sooner? Plus, you don’t know he slipped something in your drink, you think you just drank too much — another reason to feel ashamed. You won’t know he slipped something in your drink for years, until another woman comes forward and describes meeting this person for drinks in the same way. You’re too young to know this isn’t your fault, and he — the grown man — is the one who should be held accountable for the real and conscious choices he made. You were prey, you just didn’t know it, and the people around him didn’t warn you.

When two different women said they’d met Swalwell for drinks, woken up in his hotel room the next morning, and felt confused because the “night was a blur” I felt ill. Alcohol alone does not do that.

Lots of people second guess themselves and talk themselves out of their feelings when they’re young, especially women. We’ve been trained to be polite. We’ve been taught no one will believe us or back us up. We kick ourselves for being so dumb, for putting ourselves in a vulnerable position in the first place. Ask me how I know. Do you think we don’t see what happens when women come forward?

Representative Tony Gonzalez (R, Texas, Uvalde) also lied when his sexual misconduct came to light. He said it wasn’t true, and then he avoided the media and refused to answer questions about it for months while he ran for re-election. He has six kids with his wife, Angel. His family figures prominently in his political persona, he describes himself as a “conservative, religious, family-values man.” Uh-huh.

His personal life became a topic of investigation when a former aide, Regina Santos-Aviles, took her own life. She was married with an eight-year-old little boy. Rep. Tony Gonzalez harassed her, took advantage of his position as her boss, pressured her for nude photos, and sent sexually explicit texts. A second aide has come forward to say he did the same with her. Very family values. Very upstanding.

It’s noteworthy that Mike Johnson and Republicans in the House demanded that Gonzalez drop his re-election campaign when this came to light, but did not require him to resign from Congress — because they held only a 2-seat majority over the Democrats. It’s a game to these people. Once Swalwell resigned, it cost them nothing to do the right thing. That’s why both resignations happened on the same day. Why does it have to cost them nothing before they’ll do the right thing?

Or, to put it another way, why isn’t integrity worth anything?

It should be noted, it was women who made it happen, on both sides of the aisle:

It took the voices of female members of Congress–particularly, Democratic Women’s Caucus Chairwoman Teresa Leger Fernández and Republican Rep. Anna Paulina of Florida–to lead the charge to take out the trash.

“Two Latinas, I would point out,” Leger Fernández told The Independent. She said her leadership was helpful in her push to kick out Swalwell.

“What we had was we had Republicans refusing to move against against Gonzales,” she said. “But we needed the votes, and that’s what both Anna Paulina and I could do is we knew we could deliver the votes for the expulsion, because we needed two thirds votes.”

Still, that is a stinging indictment that accountability comes if neither side experiences political pain or consequences for ignorance or looking away.

Luna–a pro-Trump conservative who nonetheless works with Democrats on legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks to ending nonconsensual deepfake AI porn–sounded even more adamant.

“Both sides on leadership didn’t want to call on them to resign,” she told The Independent as she walked into Johnson’s office while pushing her son’s stroller. “I felt like I was willing to metaphorically shoot the hostage.”

Luna pointed out that constitutionally, Congress has the right to set its own rules. But that lack of oversight and external protocol allows for fertile ground for creeps of all political stripes.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went on ABC’s “This Week” and said, “Every member in Congress knows not to let any young staffer around Swalwell or Matt Gaetz, it’s not a secret there.” Lovely.

Former San Francisco Mayor Wille Brown said he wasn’t surprised because there have been “rumors after rumors after rumors” for years, and, “that’s what Adam Schiff said, and what Nancy Pelosi said.” So it would seem it was widely understood Eric Swalwell and Matt Gaetz were two predators, and you should never send young female staffers to be alone with them, because young female staffers would not be safe due to all the trafficky and rapey things they do.

I saw a video on instagram with a clip of Kevin McCarthy saying all that, and a woman expressing her utter disdain, asking why men do not call this shit out. How it is really ironic the way men like to think of themselves as “protectors” and how pissed some men get over the whole “choosing the bear” thing, but this is why. And this is also why it was infuriating to watch the Olympic Men’s Hockey Team laugh at the shitty misogynistic “joke” of the demented old man in the Golden Oval, because if you laugh along, you’re part of the problem, and if you say nothing, you’re also part of the problem. It’s all the same problem.

But some guy in the comments chimed in with, “How is this not Kevin McCarthy calling it out?” and my head exploded a little. I don’t think I need to explain this to anyone who reads my stuff, but if you’ve been walking around Congress for years knowing some guy is not to be trusted with young female staffers because everyone has heard despicable rumors — like maybe he sends dick pics on Snapchat or she might wake up in his hotel room and not remember what happened, or he seems to like underage girls — and your solution is to warn people with a whisper and a wink?

That is not calling it out. That is upholding the system that harms young girls and women as if there’s not another damn thing you can do about it. Calling it out is calling the po po, or calling your reporter friend or telling the bastard yourself it’s time to quit or you’re telling your buddy at the FBI or walking over to the DOJ. I mean, you’re right there, my god. How is this not Kevin McCarthy calling it out?

Here’s another one. Let’s say you live in France, in a small town in southeastern Provence, and somehow you hear about this website where men drug their wives and rape them and invite other men to come and rape them, too. You don’t decide to become one of the men who does that, you appelez la police.

Turns out that is not a French thing, not that I thought it was. Men drug, rape, and film their wives in the U.K., in the U.S., in Poland, in Canada, in France — at this point I think we have to assume it’s happening everywhere. There are sites set up specifically for this, and coded hashtags, and chat-rooms, and an academy where men can learn how to do it, too. Rape Academy.

Men upload their “content” — videos of them raping their unconscious wives — and there’s a big audience waiting to watch and happy to pay. One of these sites had 62 million visits in February alone, and its core audience is in the United States. It’s a real brotherhood of men who absolutely despise women, who have no respect for them at all. I could cry. I am somewhere between rage, despair, and nausea.

I want to encourage you to prepare yourself if you click on that link above. It’s not that there are pictures or videos or anything. It’s that there are casual screenshots of men telling other men what they gave their wives to knock them out so they can try it, too. The mothers of their children in many cases. The women who tell them where their keys are, and buy the cheese they like, and do their laundry. Those wives. Who usually also work and do the lion’s share of the household cleaning and childcare. Now I am crying. I don’t understand. What is the issue? What is the fucking issue?

I was absorbing/processing all this and watching people here in California scramble to figure out who they were going to support now that Swalwell dropped out of the governor’s race — quick note, how come we’re all talking about how women really need to take over, but not that woman? Every. Time.

I literally watched a woman I know scrunch up her nose and say she didn’t want to vote for Katie Porter because she’s “mean” and she’s probably taking Ozempic. That she’s lost a lot of weight, and now her closeups don’t look good because her skin is sagging, and even though we don’t like to admit it, that stuff matters here in California, wink, shrug! Omfg.

A woman said that to me, a woman. She probably uses the hashtag women supporting women, unironically.

I’ll tell you one thing Katie Porter isn’t doing. She isn’t whipping her dick out or harassing any of her 21-year-old staffers for nude pics as far as I know. She isn’t drugging young interns and assaulting them. I know it’s a low bar, but look at what people do — that’s my point. When the “scandal” of the two Katie Porter videos came out — one where she told a staffer to “get the fuck out of her shot” and another where she almost walked out of an interview — she apologized and said she could have handled the interview better. She’d already apologized to the staffer. I can’t remember the last time we saw a male politician apologize for anything, can you? There isn’t a single candidate who is perfect, but I’m voting for Katie Porter.

We have to stop this thing of saying we want women to lead, but then disqualifying every woman who shows up because of her emails or her joyful laughter or because she’s “mean.” Maybe her interpersonal skills need some work, but I bet I’d be feeling pretty mean, too, if I was surrounded by a bunch of men failing upward all the time, and everyone knew, and I had to keep performing at some ridiculous standard while they could go to Vegas and act like the human embodiment of flesh-eating bacteria.

Anyway, I was integrating the latest shitstorm of news and feeling thankful that at least I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday, because who doesn’t want the golden healing lightning that shoots out of their doctor’s hands while they fly around the room and angels sing? My doctor is a woman and she doesn’t usually show up in robes, but I figured, maybe this was the day. Maybe she’d even tell me to say three Hail Marys and call her in the morning.

But I signed onto Substack in the waiting room, my sweet corner of the internet where at least I know my writer friends are creating essays and poems that will make me laugh or cry or nod or think about something in a different way, and this incredible community of readers will add comments that are so interesting or funny or thought-provoking, that sometimes it’s all the hope I need … and I saw that Andrew Tate had been allowed to join the platform, and not only that, he’d imported his huge email list, so he’d shot straight to the top of the new bestseller’s list.

Andrew Tate, the joke of a man who tells women he loves raping them, and if a woman is assaulted she “bears some responsibility” and women are “inherently lazy” and there’s no such thing as an “independent woman.” The man who said, “I’m a realist and when you’re a realist, you’re sexist. There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist.” Andrew Tate with active, pending, human trafficking cases, and trafficking of minor cases, and criminal charges of organized crime and multiple charges of rape in the U.K. and Romania.

He’s been banned from Meta platforms and YouTube and Tik Tok and Twitter — though Elon reinstated him when he made it X because he loves his bros and he has no problem with hate speech or misogyny. Which is not the same as free speech, in case anyone needed to be reminded. Most platforms draw the line at: Communication that encourages an audience to condone or inflict harm, often by dehumanizing a target group. Like women, for example.

I call him a joke of a man, because when Lucy Williamson interviewed him in Romania with the BBC, he didn’t look her in the eye and own the things he’d said. That’s what a real man would do, right? He’d be calm. What is there to get upset about if you’re just being asked about the things you’ve said and the things you believe? He got combative and tried to talk over her, though, and denied saying those things at all. He said she’d, “found quotes on the internet.” Hahahaha. She did. They were his quotes that he’d put on his own damn site. He folded like the weak little scaredy-boy he is. “I never said that. I never did those things.” He might as well have said, “You’re not my Mommy, you’re not the boss of me, you can’t make me.”

There’s a reason preteen boys are his target audience. They’re feeling as uncomfortable and uncertain as they ever will, and he gets in there and tells them how to be a man. He says “feminism” has ruined everything, and strong women are the reason the world is messed up and unfair. The world was better when women knew their place, and girls know this, deep inside. They like a boy who takes charge. They like a man who tells them what to do and keeps them in check. They like money. They like fast cars. Because they can be bought, see? Like property. Here’s how you make money, boys. Here’s how you get muscles. This is what strength looks like.

But he gets furious and defensive instantly when an intelligent woman asks him to show his work. He can’t handle it. That isn’t strength.

I suppose it was naive to think Substack would be different from any other platform, though there are tons of accounts reporting and blocking him (mine included) and he clearly imported his own email list — it’s not like the Substack community is interested in his toxic waste. It looks like his list is full of bot accounts. I don’t expect he will find many people who will engage with his “ideas” and that is as it should be. No one needs to debate whether women bear responsibility for being assaulted. Some things simply deserve no oxygen, and that’s where I’ll leave this. Perhaps his stint will be short-lived. One can hope.

You know what, though? Women can fix the bigger problem with him. Because the bigger problem is not where he is, it’s that he is. We need some nineteen or twenty-year-old woman with a big social media presence to talk to boys about girls and what they like. Who would know more about that, after all — some 40-year-old man who’s been arrested for hurting girls — or a young woman who was a girl not long ago, and knows how girls think and what makes them laugh, and what they hope a boy will say or do?

I know boys are smart and kind, and if you give them a chance, they’ll listen. I know because I raised one, and he turned into a wonderful young man who respects women and genuinely likes them, too.

We need to get more intentional in so many areas. I think about the fairytales we were raised on, the brave, charming, handsome prince who was supposed to rescue the damsel in distress, the evil stepmother, the banished witch, the mean step-sisters, the fairy godmothers, the lack of representation for anyone who isn’t white in any of these stories, the way — even here — people with money are safe and people without can be taken advantage of, even if they’re kind and they do everything right — unless some magical spell is cast or broken.

I don’t know what is going on with far too many (mostly straight, mostly white) men, but I suspect it’s the same poison that’s harming so many of us girls and women, people of color, members of the queer community, anyone who is not part of this club that isn’t even kind to its own members. It’s this patriarchal chest-pounding flag-planting bomb-dropping planet-eating ideology where they are at the top of the food chain and the rest of us are existing in their world and at their mercy and for their pleasure. We are not theirs for the taking, though, and neither is this planet. We’re all just visitors here, and we are all deserving of dignity.

It isn’t normal to want to dominate and harm people, in case that needs to be said. I no longer know what needs to be said. It isn’t normal to take pleasure in hurting people you claim to love. It isn’t normal to get off on watching people suffer. It isn’t normal to treat human beings as expendable — any of them. It isn’t normal to whip your dick out unless someone asks you to do that. It isn’t normal to use up 5 million gallons of water a day so you can chat with your phone, it’s criminal. It isn’t normal to think we can afford to use 32 billion gallons of water annually so Claude can write your grocery list — and that’s the water usage projection for 2028. The billionaires don’t care.

They’re at the very top of this broken food chain, and a lot of straight white men think they’re in the club because they bought a red hat. Meanwhile, they would not even let them mop the floor. Look at the farmers bemoaning the fertilizer crisis. Conservative women who are confused, please note: Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi. You will always be expendable in the Boys’ Club. They don’t even want us to vote, and some of y’all are like, “Oh, no problem, here’s my vote, my husband can do it for the household!” Your grandmothers are not resting in peace, ladies, and your daughters will grow up to loathe you if you don’t get ahold of yourselves. No one wants to live in Gilead, watch the show if you need to. The wives are not safe, either. FFS.

It isn’t normal to join a chat room to learn how to drug and rape your wife, but I guess if the men you listen to are telling you women are the problem and immigrants are the problem and queer people are the problem, and men on women’s sports teams are the problem, maybe you’re so pissed the rage is coming out in all kinds of dark and horrifying ways. It isn’t normal to join a site where you can watch other men raping their unconscious wives and think that’s something to emulate.

It isn’t normal to take advantage of the young people who work for you, or anyone who works for you — if you are someone’s boss, you have power over them and you should not date them. If you can’t handle that, you should not be anyone’s boss. It is not normal to want to have sex with minors if you’re an adult. Get help, and stay away from minors.

Maybe some less obvious things, because I did not know there was a Rape Academy. I am now going to say if you are a man and you have felt upset and found yourself saying “not all men”, I hope now you are starting to understand how dark and bleak things are for women. Please help. I’m really asking, from my heart. Please make your position clear. Don’t let us women be the only people loudly and passionately calling this out. We have been alone out here. We have gotten used to it, but that doesn’t make it okay.

Please don’t laugh at sexist jokes anymore, or even let them slide. Start teaching your buddies today. Your sons, your nephews. Please stop yourself from making the, “she’s nagging me again” [eyeroll] comments. Please stop doubting your female friends’ lived experiences if you have been. If a woman friend tells you someone makes her feel uncomfortable, or something is happening “because she’s a woman” don’t tell her she’s wrong. Vote for women when possible. Don’t rule them out because you don’t like their laugh. Don’t ever vote for a rapist. Don’t ever vote for a man who says he grabs women by the pussy and try to look your daughter in the eye. Ever.

Feminism just means you believe women and men are equally valuable human beings, intrinsically. It doesn’t mean you think women are better. Wanting to be done with the patriarchy doesn’t mean “erasing male voices” which is what a man said to me a while back. It means we make a circle, and men and women (and I am including everyone when I say men and women) are in the circle, no one is on top. The most vulnerable people are in the middle of the circle, being lifted up.

Once Upon a Time there was a princess in a tower.

She liked the views from up there, but it was getting late, so she walked down the stairs and through the forest…

ass/u/me

Nonetheless, I’m going to guess that those of us who grew up with a certain kind of chaos, violence and uncertainty are feeling pretty exhausted right now. If you were the kind of kid who learned to scan the environment, to read the signs so you could see the danger coming and ward it off, duck-and-cover, or cajole it away, what we’ve been going through over the last few days in this country — and globally — feels all too familiar.

There are few things worse as a child than feeling powerless and knowing you’re not safe. There’s nowhere you can go and nothing you can do. You don’t have the means to get yourself out of the situation you’re in — someone else is calling the shots, and no matter what you do or say, or how hard you try, they can destroy you. They can hurt you physically and emotionally. They can obliterate everything you care about.

We are not children anymore. This awful man is not our mom or dad, but 77 million people gave him the keys to the car, and we’re all buckled into this vehicle. If he drives us off a cliff — and he could — there isn’t a lot we can do about it if the people who are supposed to stop him refuse to act. So far they are refusing to act.

It is the year 2026. Okay, so no flying cars like the Jetsons, but we just had people on the far side of the moon, further from earth than anyone has ever been. It is shameful and pathetic that we are still bombing/shooting/killing people to get what we want like a bunch of Neanderthals. Maybe we aren’t using clubs, but is this our idea of evolution — bigger, more technologically-advanced weapons that can kill more people? What an epic failure.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 9 countries combined. We’re a freaking war machine. Why don’t we have a Department of Diplomacy instead of a Department of Defense — let alone a Department of War?

Why would we choose to head further in the wrong direction, led by the wrong people, with all the wrong ideas? A bunch of billionaires in red hats pretending to be Republicans, surrounded by white Christian nationalists spewing wildly misogynistic, racist, bigoted bro-speak, led by an adulterous friend-to-pedophiles and adjudicated-rapist-convicted-felon, suffering from dementia who thinks he’s a king. Fantastic.

I don’t want to go off a cliff with a crazy mad lunatic, thanks! Doesn’t sound fun to me.

I don’t want robots thinking for me, and I don’t want to give up farmland we need to build huge AI data centers — which are using more water (large AI data centers use roughly 5 million gallons of water PER DAY) — and prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels. At least 17 fossil fuel generators that were scheduled to close are delayed or at risk of delay, and there are 20 new fossil fuel projects being planned.

Guess who benefits? I think you know. The billionaires who own the oil companies, and the billionaires who own the AI companies. Guess who suffers first? I think you know. Low-income communities across the country.

When people from these communities start talking about their kids who suddenly have asthma and other respiratory problems, or they start showing up with disproportionate numbers of cancer cases, or they can’t sleep at night because the hum from these data centers is so loud or the light is so bright … no one cares and no one listens until it’s too late and too many children have died. We’ve seen this film before. Do we have to wait for Julia Roberts to win another Oscar before people care…again?

I know a lot of you love your ChatGPT and your Claude, but please, for the love of your kids, or your friends’ kids, please educate yourself about what you are doing. We need to pull it together. I don’t expect other people to feel the way I do about everything, but I do expect people to face reality when it’s shoved right up in their faces.

I’m tired and sad and utterly sick of this ride. I wish there was a pull cord like they used to have on the public buses I rode in New York City as a kid. It was this plastic-coated wire that ran along the windows and you’d pull on it and it would activate a spring-loaded striker to ring a bell to let the driver know you wanted to get off at the next stop.

The driver of the bus we’re on wouldn’t care, though. He’d yell, “Quiet, Piggy!” and drive wherever he wanted. Not that he’s driving anywhere himself, he’s got a driver who can’t afford health insurance or groceries and has two other jobs just to keep the lights on at home.

I know there are people in other countries watching and wondering why we aren’t fighting harder. Part of me agrees, though I’m not sure everyone understands what we’re dealing with here. If we want to fight — but also keep it legal and constitutional — our options are limited.

We’d need Republican senators to find their morals and ethics, and it seems they lost them a long time ago. I’d love for them to prove me wrong, but what is it going to take? The president openly threatened to commit war crimes with our military on Easter Sunday. His “tweet” was so off the rails I thought it was fake when I saw it. Me. A person who thinks this man is absolutely unhinged.

I went to verify it because I could not imagine he’d hit “post” on something that vile and openly in violation of Geneva Conventions — let alone an on-the-record threat to commit genocide. You don’t go after civilian infrastructure — power plants and bridges? But it was real. He said it. He doubled down on it the next day. He said, ”A whole civilization will die tonight.”

He gave his deadline of 8pm, like it was some kind of reality tv show, and I guess it is. We’re all extras in his reality tv show now, because of 77 million people, in a country of 340 million.

It’s true, we have choices. Those of us in despair could go to the Capitol like a bunch of wild animals and attack capitol police officers with flagpoles and bear spray, and bring a noose and scream for Mike Johnson and break down doors and make our way onto the Senate floor. We could defecate there, and rub feces on the walls. We could run through the halls looking for Nancy Mace’s office, we could demand that this lawless administration be removed, or try to remove them ourselves.

Here’s why that will never happen. The MAGA people who support the current president do things like that, and/or turn a blind eye when their fellow MAGA “compatriots” do. If they weren’t there that day being violent and breaking laws, they defend what happened, or they are absolutely silent on the events of that day. It is very strange, because they are the exact same people who will comment under posts about Liam Ramos and his family, and smugly declare they are getting what they deserve, because they broke the law. Even though they broke no law.

People who do not support this president would never attack the Capitol building of the country we love. I felt sick to my stomach watching what happened that day, I watched with tears in my eyes and my hand over my mouth. My heart raced. We would never attack the capitol police. But you know if we did, ICE would shoot us on the spot, and the supporters of the president would say we got what we deserved and you can’t break the law, shrug. We should have stayed home minding our own business. They’d laugh at our friends crying their lib tears. They’d say we should have thought about our kids, not realizing that’s why we were there, risking our lives in the first place.

What do you do with that kind of hypocrisy and heartlessness? What do you say when people like that throw a little salt at you by professing to be “Christian”? You can’t be pro-life and also support a man who just threatened to wipe out an entire civilization, but if you’re too blind to see how that math doesn’t math, I can’t help you. If you say you’re a Christian who believes in God and thinks Jesus is the son of God, why do you imagine God only cares about the white babies? How do you not know that Jesus was brown? Why don’t you realize Jesus would throw himself in front of every ICE agent with a gun to save every child? To put it really simply for you — wtf?

I think those of us who can, should be in the streets and not just once every few months. I think we’ve passed the breaking point now and we should stop trying to go on with our normal lives. There’s nothing normal about any of this. I think we ought to be at state capitol buildings and our senators’ offices and anywhere and everywhere we can be. I think anyone who can go to D.C. should do it.

I think we absolutely keep it nonviolent because I don’t think they’d hesitate to shoot us, sorry to say. They’ve made that clear. I believe in nonviolence, anyway. The only time I’d change that stance is if you came for my kids, or anyone else’s. All children belong to all of us — the grown ups in charge — and I’d put my body in front of anyone’s baby. I’d do it without thinking and without hesitation, and that’s not a flex. That’s a normal baseline of humanity.

Making phone calls to our reps and boycotting Amazon and Target? Yeah, that is not enough. I know very well “getting out in the streets” is not going to be possible for everyone. It’s not like I can be in the streets every day, I have two kids to feed and a business to run and a book I’m finishing and a dog to love and bills to pay. I get it. I’m saying, as much as possible. As often as we can.

This president is not well. Anyone pretending otherwise at this point is willfully putting themselves and everyone else in danger. Just a real quick recap, since he’s now declaring “victory” and his merry band of soulless enablers is backing him up:

The Strait of Hormuz was open, and ships from all over the world passed through with no issue until this president decided to go to war with Iran without provocation, congressional approval, or the will of the American people. He just did it.

It has cost America — meaning us, the American taxpayers — $47 BILLION dollars so far, and that is not including the estimated $8.4 to $10 billion more Americans have spent on gas since February 28th because of this mess. American bombs have killed 170 Iranian school girls, and thousands of civilians in Iran and Lebanon. At least 13 U.S service members have died, and another 381 have been seriously injured. There are unconfirmed reports that those numbers are much higher. There is no regime change in Iran — the people who have taken over are more radical than the people who were in power before.

So what is this “victory”? In exchange for the very fragile two week ceasefire, the man who managed to get the Strait of Hormuz closed — throwing the entire world into a state of economic disarray while accomplishing nothing but death and economic mayhem — has now agreed to work with the 10-point plan Iran has drawn up to reopen it.

Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz, but now all ships passing through will pay $2 million each to go toward repairing the damage the U.S. just caused. All primary and secondary Iranian sanctions will be lifted. The U.S. will withdraw from the Middle East. There will be an end to the attacks on Iran and its allies, and a release of Iran’s frozen assets.

My god, the winning! What’s next, gonorrhea for everyone?

There are some people who are making a lot of money off this war that is costing countless lives and billions of American taxpayer dollars, though, and everyone should be very clear about who they are: Jared Kushner is making billions for Affinity Partners, Vladimir Putin is a lot richer than he was five weeks ago, and America’s Top Oil Executives are raking in the dough.

No affordable healthcare for Americans, no childcare, no Medicare or Medicaid according to this president — the federal government shouldn’t be expected to provide any of that. More Billions for Billionaires. That should be the name of his show.

He can’t say he’s putting our military at risk and killing Iranian school girls and thousands of civilians because it’s good business. That’s too dark and evil, and anyway, this whole thing spiraled out of control. It was supposed to be easy, like Venezuela. It wasn’t supposed to affect his ratings.

He’s got midterms to rig, and he can’t rig them if his ratings are lower than they’ve ever been. It has to look plausible, and now there is a bipartisan conversation in earnest about the 25th Amendment. The Democrats just tried to pass a war powers resolution, and of course the Republicans defeated it, instantly. People are talking about Article II, Section 4 which allows for the removal of the President, Vice President, and all civil Officers upon Impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. They meet the standard, but who’s going to enforce it?

A quick lesson about the 25th Amendment and why I don’t hold out a lot of hope unless we, the people, get so loud our representatives have no choice but to listen. The VP and several members of the cabinet have to get together and decide their feckless leader has lost it. They undoubtedly already know. Then they have to put it in writing, and the VP has to deliver the missive to the Mad King, and also Mike Johnson.

I don’t think JD possesses the columna vertebralis for that job. I don’t think his legs could walk him to the Golden Oval, but let’s say he managed it. Maybe Peter Thiel holds his hand on the way there and the couch gives him strength. JD gives the man known as “Loser” in Iranian LEGO animation videos this missive, along with a copy for Mike Johnson. JD takes over as president while Loser reads and understands what he’s reading, at which point he could just tell Congress he’s fine — all his doctors say they’ve never seen anyone pass cognitive tests the way he does — unlike sleepy Joe with his auto-pen — which we know he would.

He’d have to put that in writing, but you know he has a Sharpie at the ready. Then the VP, Speaker and Cabinet members can say, yeah … sorry sir, we just don’t think so (in writing), and run for cover. Then Congress has to decide, and vote by ⅔ majority in the House and Senate, whether the President is incapacitated or not, and while they decide, JD takes over again, unless he’s made the mistake of eating anything or leaving the house, lol. So, yeah.

And Article II, Section 4 requires impeachment in the House of Representatives, and a trial in the Senate, presided by the Chief Justice acting as judge — that would be John Roberts who does not hesitate to tell this president what he thinks — but the Judicial branch does not like to get involved in legal matters having to do with impeachment because of our supposed separate but equal three branches of government — which this administration threw out the window long ago. So, I dunno. Neither of those eventualities seem likely, but we can’t go on this way, either.

We need the pull cord, friends. It’s time to get off this ride.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes. Carl Sagan, who urged NASA to have the Voyager 1 turn its probe around and take a picture of earth from space on February 14th, 1990. He thought it was an essential photo, since most of us will never see earth from this vantage point. Although we should, from space, or from right where we are, under the stars:

Can you imagine speaking about yourself like you were the most amazing person ever to grace planet earth — meanwhile you’re just a mean old windbag who thinks Hannibal Lecter was an asylum seeker? Someone pass the fava beans.

This week I read the essay and then talked about lying. It fascinates me when people lie with conviction, or knowingly support people who lie — without a hint of remorse or hesitation.

There are reasons good people might have a hard time saying true things, and I talked about that, too. Ultimately, though, if you want to have meaningful relationships, calling things what they are is part of the deal. It’s also grounding if you grew up with chaos and violence, or spent time trying to make everything okay for everyone all the time.

The truth isn’t always easy, but dealing with things as they are is a lot easier than pretending things are okay when they aren’t — or pretending this president should be compared to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. That was not a typo.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Sending you a lot of love, friends. Happy Easter if you celebrate. Happy Sunday if not. Either way, thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

A year and change ago — which feels like 94 years ago — my neighbor did a project in her backyard. Her backyard is directly behind mine and her street sits higher — two things it will be helpful to know.

She’d come over with her gardener one day and and asked if we could talk in my backyard, explaining that she wanted to replace the fence along the back wall of her garden. The way it was described to me was that some vines over my studio (directly below her new fence) would be “trimmed and cleared away.” Her gardener would come over after the fence went up to remove anything that might land on my side.

No problem. It’s not like she needed my permission to replace her fence, it was nice of her to let me know. We exchanged numbers so they could tell me when they were going to do the work. It was all very friendly.

As it turned out, I was back east when her fence went up, so I wasn’t there and no one texted. It was not the greatest homecoming.

This was a few months after the massive wildfires — so basically, they’d left an outrageous amount of kindling on my roof. As we learned, it doesn’t take much — strong winds, dry heat, and a spark. I was amazed anyone would be that reckless after what we’d lived through, but I thought it was possible my neighbor didn’t know the mess had been left behind.

I took pictures and and texted them to her, and then I called. I was friendly all things considered. Said I’d been away for the weekend, had come back to find this situation, and was worried about the fire hazard. Did she know when the gardener was planning to come by?

She said he was supposed to have cleared everything from my yard, and she’d text me his number. I admit I didn’t love this response. I would have preferred she called him herself and let me know the plan, but who has time to get worked up about “how things should be” anymore? Or “what people should do”?

You can make yourself sick that way.

The gardener — we’ll call him Fernando because that’s his name — picked up on the first ring. I said hi and reminded him we’d met when he was in my yard. He’d been terrific at the time. I explained about all the branches, which seemed unnecessary because he had to know, and asked when he was planning to come by.

He said, “Anything on your side is your responsibility.” I started laughing because I thought he was joking, but he didn’t join in. “Oh. Wait, are you not joking?” I asked after my laughter trailed off into awkward silence, and I realized it was not because we’d lost the signal.

“No, if it’s on your side, you take care of it,” he said.

“Umm, I think maybe you should call Gloria? I just spoke with her and she feels certain hauling the branches away was part of what you all talked about. I know that’s what we said the day you were here.”

“Text me some pictures,” he said. I texted him the pictures I’d taken. “That will be $450.”

“Just so I understand, you want me to pay $450 to haul away the branches that are in my yard because of a project Gloria did, when part of what she paid for was to have the branches removed?”

“Listen! You need to speak to me respectfully!” Fernando yelled.

“I’m sorry, what?” I said. I was starting to wonder if I was being punk’d. “I am being respectful, but there is enough kindling on my roof to start a wildfire, so I’m anxious, and very interested in having it removed as soon as possible. Telling me ‘If it’s on my side it’s my responsibility’ is like letting your dog crap on someone’s lawn and then telling them they should clean up the mess because no one wants to smell it, and someone is going to step in it.”

It’s kind of like … I dunno … starting a war no one asked for, and then when the Strait of Hormuz gets shut down, telling the other NATO countries you’ve been alienating and insulting for months it’s their responsibility to help secure it and get it open again.

Except in the case of the fence, at least they asked first, haha. Maybe I should have been happy Fernando didn’t tell me to “just TAKE it.”

“Grab that fence and cherish it.”

I got someone else to come clear the branches, and Gloria paid for it.

I would think it must feel horrific, shameful and deeply embarrassing to have started a war that has cost about $35 billion dollars at this point — and so much worse, the lives of 170 Iranian school girls and 13 U.S. service members — knowing Americans have spent an estimated $8.4 billion dollars more on gas because of this insanity — while you’ve cut more than half of all federal funding for gun violence prevention and gun violence is the number one reason children die in this country — millions of people can no longer afford healthcare and are struggling to feed their families — and all you’ve managed to do is close the Strait of Hormuz and throw the world into total economic disarray. Spain, France, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland have restricted base access and/or their airspace to U.S. military flights because they oppose the war in Iran. And now you star in Iranian LEGO animation as a guy named “Loser.”

I don’t think I’d be able to leave the Golden Oval.

But not this guy. He just gets up in front of the American people and says the war will be over in 2-3 weeks maybe somehow probably, says that talks are going really well (Iran refutes this claim), now we have regime change (except there is no regime change — the people who have replaced senior leaders are equally as hard-line or more militant, so…) it isn’t a war, but if it is a war we need to be fighting wars because America is large … So we can’t afford to pay for childcare. Because large countries can’t pay for childcare I guess, the states have to do that, shrug — and Medicaid and Medicare, too — and we in America don’t need the dumb Strait anyway, we are completely energy independent — even though we definitely are not. Also, NATO sucks, the Supreme Court sucks, birthright citizenship sucks and mail-in voting sucks even though he just mailed in his vote.

It’s so weird to me, because if I was going to lie to someone (let alone a whole country), I would have such a hard time looking them in the eye. I don’t think I could do it at this point in my life, it is so not the person I want to be. When I was younger, sometimes I would avoid telling the truth if it would hurt a person’s feelings, but I learned along the way that’s a form of disrespect. Obviously you want to say what’s in your heart with as much compassion as possible, but you do no one any favors by sparing them the truth out of pity or your own fear. If it’s a thing that doesn’t need to be said, that’s another story.

When my kids were little, I remember teaching them how powerful words can be — how they can make people feel so loved, safe, and understood, or they can make a person feel hurt and alone. I taught them the mindful communication concept often attributed to Rumi: Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates — Is it true, is it necessary, is it kind? Somehow my son thought one of the gates was, Is it funny? But that’s because he’s my kid. I happen to think that’s a legit gate.

I can’t imagine a worse job than getting up in front of the entire world and saying a bunch of things you know are absolutely not kind, true, necessary, or funny, but I guess this president is stuck — not that I believe he cares. I think he cares about losing face. A narcissist will never admit they’ve made a mistake, it’s in the handbook. They don’t say they’re sorry, either — if something goes wrong it’s always someone else’s fault.

Then there are the people who will bend a narrative to make it fit their worldview, no matter how far they have to bend it. I don’t know if you heard about the anesthesiologist who allegedly tried to throw his wife off a cliff in Maui for having an “emotional affair”? Swell guy. He has two older kids from a previous marriage and two young sons with his wife.

After a year of therapy spent working on their relationship, he took her on a birthday hike in Maui and brought syringes full of a heavy sedative. I guess it was that, or a bottle of water. When he allegedly failed to launch her off the cliff, he hit her on the head with a rock multiple times and was only stopped by two hikers who heard his wife screaming for help.

Then he called his nineteen-year-old son and told him to take care of the younger kids. He told his son he’d tried to kill his wife — the boy’s stepmom — but had not succeeded, and now he was going to take his own life. His son told him not to do that.

Somehow this man is pleading Not Guilty, and saying his wife attacked him, and he hit her in self-defense, and I don’t know what possible reason he’s going to come up with for bringing sedative-filled syringes on a hike — but I’m sure he’ll come up with something. He seems very sad in court, but it’s hard to say why. Is it because he’s probably spending the rest of his life in prison? Sad his children will know this is who their dad is?

He’s saying his wife grabbed him by the testicles and wouldn’t let go, and he hit her in self-defense — with those pesky pre-filled syringes in his pocket. Then he called his son and said he tried to kill her, but now he’s saying his son misunderstood that part.

His kid got up and testified as to what happened. Didn’t sound like there was any room for misunderstanding.

People in the comments were saying some wild and terrifying things. She provoked her husband by having an emotional affair. I see. So … it’s okay that he tried to murder her? Really trying to wrap my head around that, and wondering if the same rules apply if a woman tries to push her husband off a cliff for exchanging flirty texts with a coworker. Is that where we are? If people are sending too-familiar texts, have we decided as a society that the appropriate punishment is death by cliffside hike? Or is that just for wives?

Then there were comments about the poor son who was going to have to live with the guilt of having betrayed his father for the rest of his life. No. No he won’t. He did not betray his father. His father betrayed him by putting him in that horrendous position. His father betrayed the entire family by not managing his feelings in a normal, rational way. Get a divorce, man. I am truly starting to feel men are too emotional to be holding down important jobs.

Oops! Not all men.

There are a lot of people out there who love to throw stones, and are certainly not thinking about the three gates before they speak. I saw a video of a woman named Karen who has an instagram account for her company, Rapha Farms. They make Goat Milk Skincare but I started following the account because baby goats are pretty much the antidote for everything. She said recently someone had commented that her house didn’t look very clean. Y’all. She is running an entire business out of her kitchen, but she didn’t even say that.

It turns out her daughter died eight months ago. Her voice broke when she said it, and I was crying with her in 0.5 seconds. She didn’t offer this in an angry or defensive way, she shared it as a reminder that you never know what anyone is going through. Ever. It’s a safe bet almost everyone is going through something. She said when her kids were little and they wanted to go swimming or read a book, she always let the cleaning wait, and she never regretted it. I was sobbing by the time she was done.

People like Kristi Noem really ought to take a page out of that book, though I don’t hold out a lot of hope. She has caused so much pain and suffering for so many people. Countless people, and so many of them in the LGBTQ community. She has made life miserable and less safe for transgender kids everywhere. She is loudly and passionately opposed to same-sex marriage. And look what happens, friends. Her own husband must have been in pain all these years, in his own personal hell, living a life of secrets and feeling like he couldn’t share his feelings with his own wife, who claims to be this “traditional family values upstanding Christian woman” — meanwhile she is sending human beings to exist eighty-people-to-a-cage.

It doesn’t work that way, though I know anyone reading this already agrees with me. You can’t claim to be a good and decent person, and also hurt people, and lie and cheat and shoot puppies because you have no patience or empathy or decency. It’s always the people who are screaming the most loudly about how other people should live who have the most work to do on themselves. Always.

You can’t lie and be a mouthpiece for the most despicable human beings doing the most horrific things and think that’s somehow going to be okay. Bye, Pam Bondi. May the suffering of every Epstein victim you did not serve haunt you in your sleep for the rest of your life. Notice it’s the women being thrown out of the club first, to no one’s surprise. No one like me, anyway. Conservative women always think proximity will keep them safe, but the shark will always eat your face when you stop being useful.

I may have started this essay by asking what would happen if we all started stating preposterous things as if they were true, but there are plenty of people doing that these days. Even if there weren’t, there are those of us who grew up being told that our perception was faulty, and what we thought was happening was not happening — we were overly sensitive or dramatic. For people who relate, calling things what they are is grounding. Naming the monster takes the power away from it. It’s reassuring. It makes you feel sane and calm, even if the truth breaks your heart.

It’s okay if your heart breaks — it’s the hardened heart you have to fear. A hardened heart can lie with impunity. An open, loving heart is strong, it’s meant to break, and heal, and break again. If it wasn’t meant to do that, none of us would still be here, shining away, fighting for the world to be better than this.

I

Anyway, I found the stats, but then I was like, I have no clue what a good number of downloads would be for a podcast episode in the first 7 days, so these stats don’t help me. Then I remembered Google, and it seems like I should keep doing this, apparently. So thanks to those of you listening to me spouting off about this crazy time we’re living through, and I hope it makes you feel less alone if you feel alone sometimes, because I know I do. There are days I feel defeated, and other days I feel enraged — and on good days I feel determined, resolute, hopeful, full of the productive kind of fire, and ready with a side of gallows humor.

Seemed like a good time to say thank you for crying with me, laughing with me and spending some of your precious time with me. I don’t take it lightly. This episode is about cleaning out my childhood home, having a different definition of being “ready to move in three days” than my brother, finding letters from my dad that elicited some big feelings, and letting those feelings flow. It’s also about Sara Bareilles, dead carcasses in strange places, Plato, and why we need to send all the billionaires packing. Sending you lots of love, friends.

These days, there’s just one of my kids in the house and she’s sixteen, and I see the back of her walking out the door with my car keys most of the time. I run to get a kiss and hug and ask questions like, “Do you have a sweater?” As if that might keep her safe from harm, and me, too. Then I watch her location move around on my phone to make sure she gets where she’s going in one piece.

I had to add her as a driver to my car insurance policy recently, so now both kids are on it. I was Googling different discounts to see if there was any way to save, and saw that if they take defensive driving courses it’s 15% less annually to cover them. I texted my son about it. He’s in his second year of college and also works, and I didn’t want to put too much on his plate, but he was ready to take a course anytime. I said maybe it would be fun, and he said he doubted that, but not to worry, he’d definitely do it.

In my head, I thought a defensive driving course would be an in-person course you took with a driving instructor, like when you first learned to drive — only this time it would be more advanced. Like you’d go on the freeways and if someone tailgated you or a truck started veering into your lane — or a pickup truck was in front of you two car-lengths away and a pipe came loose and started flying toward your window Final Destination-style — the instructor would yell, “THINK FAST!”

And then give you feedback or tips based on what you did.

My son said he was pretty sure it was an online course, though, and sadly he was right. I think we can agree my idea is much better. Unhinged, yes, but at least it would be fun.

Fun still matters. Hummingbirds, too. People whose locations you watch on your phone, who carry your entire heart with them wherever they go on the map. Friends you go to bat for, who also have your back.

I was out with some of those friends last night, and we were talking about this feeling like there’s a tear in the space-time continuum and we are straddling whatever the world normally is — and Hades.

For example, I opened instagram a few days ago and saw Sara Bareilles discover decrepit carcasses in a pillar of her house, and dig them out with a shovel into a PETCO paper bag — calmly. Just as I was yelling, “At least get gloves!” she was like, “I should at least get gloves,” so I think we had a Dionne Warwick Psychic Friends moment. As she was shoveling she said, “I watch ‘Alone’ and you have to be tough.” She said it unironically, and I nodded seriously. You do have to be tough these days.

I think she should star on CSI, or get her own spin-off — or head to Congress with her shovel. I’d meet her there in a hot second, I think we could get rid of some decrepit carcasses together.

A rip in the space-time continuum would also explain the video I saw of Melania at some presser in the “East Room” — since her husband demolished the East Wing — with a humanoid named Plato (no doubt rolling in his grave), suggesting everyone should just homeschool their kids, and let robots teach them about critical thinking and “independent reasoning abilities.” Yes! Fantastic idea. Why pay teachers more, or invest in education or the arts or free school lunches or universal healthcare?

Just keep the kids at home and let a robot teach them about reading, writing, arithmetic, classic literature (the stuff that isn’t banned, of course), history (the kind that isn’t upsetting for white children), and also life. Who cares about empathy or having a soul? Who cares about learning to work things out with other human beings? The AI company can program the robot with an appropriately patriotic and decidedly un-woke curriculum, and you’ll have plenty of time to churn butter while your husband does the voting, ladies! What could go wrong?

Funny thing, naming it Plato. It’s true Plato was distrustful of democracy, so I see why they thought they were doing something. Plato believed democracy was vulnerable and could be toppled by the uprising of unchecked passionate group-think — and looking around right now, I’d have to agree. I mean, we had guardrails in place to protect us, but I guess if the group-think is strong enough and the spines of senators are weak enough, billionaires can enter the building disguised as Republicans and that’s how we find ourselves in The In-Between.

Maybe if any of these people had read Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Odyssey — or even Project 2025 — they would have seen it coming, but whatever. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. They don’t believe in education or the arts or even souls, apparently, which is funny for people pretending to be Christian — but who has time to pay attention to details anymore?

Plato distrusted democracy after his teacher, Socrates was imprisoned, put on trial and sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth” of Athens and teaching them to question authority. I must add a footnote here and say Socrates learned his oratory skills from the scant-mentioned Aspasia of Miletus, partner to Pericles.

Pretty sure we all learned about Socrates and Plato … but not Aspasia. Because why teach children about important women in history? Then they might know women are intelligent, important, strong, interesting, just as capable of being in leadership positions, more than baby-making machines, not here to shrink themselves, et cetera and so on.

I think we can feel sure Aspasia won’t make it into the AI Plato curriculum, since she didn’t even make it into ours. And still, these toxic men (and the women who love them) don’t want women — and so many other Americans — to vote or have a voice. They are anti-diversity, anti-equity and anti-inclusion. I spelled it out that way in case anyone wants to ponder how abhorrent it is to admit to any one of those stances. Imagine proudly stating you are against inclusion. Let me please not sit next to you at a wedding, or anywhere.

This president and his administration went out of their way to wipe women, BIPOC, and the LGBTQ community from government websites celebrating their achievements because that’s too WOKE, boohoo. How fragile do you have to be to run code trying to wipe all important people from the history books if they aren’t straight, white men? As if we ever have had diversity, equity or inclusion as a thing we could count on.

This same breed of men (and some women) show up in our comments sections. They tell Black writers not to make it about race. They tell women they hate feminists, and writing about women’s issues is divisive.

I wrote about growing up as a girl and then a woman in this world recently, and a man in my comments asked me to write about some good men next time, instead of all the “deviants” I’d mentioned. That was his response. Sir. When there are tons of men demeaning, harassing and/or assaulting girls and women all the time, everywhere, that is not deviance — they are the norm. It’s children, too, not just girls, but I was speaking to my own experience. These men are average. They are common. Deviance happens with the men who are not like that, sad to say — and you failed to be one of them. You might not be predatory or violent (I have no idea about that), but you are no ally. Good men don’t leave comments like that, and they don’t need to be coddled.

Back to Plato — he thought society should be ruled by Philosopher Kings (Our King’s philosophy: “Whatever is Good for Me and the Rest of You Can GFY!”) and he believed certain people were better suited to certain jobs, and therefore belonged in different social classes: Guardians (rulers/philosophers), Auxiliaries (soldiers/warriors), and Producers (farmers/artisans).

How would children be sorted into the correct category, you might be wondering? The education system! Bwahahaha. Kids would go to school and they’d all receive the same education and testing, and the Guardians (philosophers, teachers) would sort them! Kind of like The Sorting Hat meets The Hunger Games which feels like where we are heading if you throw in The Handmaid’s Tale, too.

Grab your magic wand, your bow-and-arrow and your cake knife, friends — the road ahead looks gnarly. See? Maybe you can learn defensive driving online.

If they weren’t smart enough to be rulers (guardians, philosophers), or courageous enough to be auxiliaries (soldiers), they’d become producers (workers, farmers). But I guess the AI humanoid can do the sorting now, assuming MAGA parents continue to be “all in” on whatever King Conman wants to do next. I truly feel sorry for historians of the future, assuming we can pull ourselves out of this tailspin and find our way to a better timeline. How would you ever make sense of this insanity?

“...On January 6th, 2021, for the first time in American history, there was no peaceful transfer of power. Instead, supporters of the former president, a man who refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, attacked the Capitol…”

You realize, of course, these people would sell all of our souls — if they believed in souls — to the highest bidder. That’s not a question. It’s all about money and power.

It’s so weird to me how this president’s supporters will scream about Nancy Pelosi’s net worth and ask how it’s possible when senators only make so much money — but somehow they are totally mum about billions of dollars when the president and his family are cashing in at the expense of the American people.

Why are they not bothered that the president and his family have made billions off crypto currency? Or that the president has not divested from his business dealings? Or that he issues pardons to people who donate to his ventures? It’s all a matter of public record.

Now this president and his family are putting our military at risk as if our military is just another asset they can use to do their personal business. Why not use the military, I guess. They treat the DOJ like their personal law firm.

Even Republicans in Congress are frustrated because they can’t get straight answers about why we’re in Iran, what the goals are, what the timeline is, any of it. Half the time the administration pretends it isn’t a war so they can get around the fact that the president did not have congressional approval or public support (aka he violated the Constitution again). And of course, what are they supposed to say? We’re there so Jared Kushner can make a few more billion dollars? So his partners at Affinity are happy?

I’ll never get the appeal, or what his supporters are getting out of it. Do they just like hearing him bluster about men being men, and “no men on women’s sports’ teams”? When he says his dumb word salad thing about “liberals wanting transgender for everyone” do they think that’s true and that it means something?

Do they believe the lie that “immigrants are stealing their jobs” — and not realize it’s billionaires who are doing that, through AI and a total lack of empathy and ethics — and that it will continue to get worse? Do they want women back in the kitchen? I guess it is the culture wars stuff, because that’s all they’re getting. AI videos of the president shitting on liberals. Seems like they’re pissed about the price of gas, though. Everyone has their hard line.

As soon as millionaires and billionaires started making decisions for the rest of us, we were screwed, and it didn’t and doesn’t matter which side of the aisle they’re on. We need to get dark money out of our government. We need to overturn Citizens United. We need to rethink the requirements for members of Congress and federal officials so they have to disclose all their investments. If you want to be a public servant, you have to be willing to be financially transparent. If you don’t like that, do something else.

“There’s no loyalty amongst thieves” as the saying goes, and that’s the way to think about the people in power. They’re playing a different game. When we’re talking about the president and his family, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel — they aren’t thinking about the country, they’re thinking globally — the global market. The deals to be made. This president has no loyalty to America or Americans or anyone.

He doesn’t care. It’s just another grift, but dang is it a good one. All he ever wanted was to play with the big boys, and 77 million people decided to give him the keys to this castle. In his mind, it’s all leverage, and it’s all for him. The East Wing? He’ll knock it down if he wants to, it’s his now, and the Kennedy Center, too. He’ll slap his name in tacky gold letters anywhere he pleases.

The midterms? Yeah, he’s probably concerned. He doesn’t want to have a bloodbath in the streets, that wouldn’t be good for business, but he certainly doesn’t want to lose control of this cash cow, either. I have no doubt he’ll use any and every method available to him to retain power. I don’t know what they’ll do. Almost every special election is going wildly blue, even in deeply red districts. Even in Florida, in the district that includes the garish Mar-a-Lago where a certain octogenarian spends most of his time. Sorry, sucker. A Democrat won, and that Democrat is a woman. Two things you hate, pass the ketchup!

The blue flipping and winning is no fluke, that’s a rebuke. It also means we are still having free and fair elections for now. What happens next? Maybe we’ll finally march on Washington. I think we should have done that the day Musk entered the Treasury with a kid named Big Balls and his frat-boy friends, because that was the first sign we were totally off the rails. It was even more bizarre that our representatives told us about it on instagram lives from their couches at home because it happened on a Friday evening. That was a five-alarm fire and the people we sent to Washington to represent us could not be bothered to turn around immediately and ask as many of us as possible to join them. We would have. We wanted direction, fire, leadership.

Now we know we have to lead ourselves. We have to “be the change we want to see.” I know a march on Washington is hard. Where do we sleep at night? How do we get there? How do we pay the bills if we’re in Washington and not at work? Who is watching the kids and walking the dog? Who is paying for this trip? How long are we staying? Not everyone can go, but I bet a lot of people could and would. If this war in Iran isn’t stopped, it’s likely going to take care of itself, because no one will be able to afford gas or food or groceries or anything. Food arrives at grocery stores via trucks, and some of the time it gets to the truck after it’s been on a boat.

I’m thinking we should get to D.C. before they create an army of AI robots who shoot us dead and teach our children we were enemies of the state. Maybe we can all start walking there if things get nuts, like the monks did. Maybe people will feed us along the way.

Maybe Sara Bareilles will come with her shovel, and also sing. Stranger things have occurred. I’ve given up predicting, I’m just trying to stay calm, trying to fight back, trying to help every way I can, trying to be kind, trying to give people slack because everyone I know is struggling at least some of the time.

If you can, get out there tomorrow. People saying the protests don’t do anything? They don’t do anything as far as changing policy, that’s true. I don’t believe the majority of people attending protests stop there, and sit on their hands until the next one. Protests are another tool in the toolbox, and they’re good for morale. They make all of us feel less alone. They tell the rest of the world that millions of Americans are not okay with what’s happening here. They help organizers build email lists which may come in very handy one day soon. They show young people that there are adults in the room who don’t want the world to be like this. They are not the be-all end-all, no one action is. But they show that you care, and if good people stop caring, then we’re doomed.

Defensive driving is about predicting hazards. Developing techniques to stay safe regardless of what other drivers do. It’s about learning how to minimize risks and pay attention to the weather so you aren’t caught unprepared. It’s about knowing when to pull to the side of the road because you need a rest. It’s probably about knowing who to call when you need help. I bet we’re all better at it by now than we realize. See you in the streets, friends. Please stay safe. Take a sweater. I’d watch your location on my map to make sure you got where you wanted to go any day.

Don’t give up.

Which is another way of saying that when I arrived last Thursday evening, the contents of the apartment where I grew up were in no way ready to be hauled across the country to their new home Monday morning.

Technically, I guess it’s my amended/blended Family of Origin. My brother and I have the same mom, different dads. His dad is my stepdad, the man my mother met when I was seven, and married when I was eight. I have always called my brother my brother, though.

My mother and father are gone, though very much alive in my mind. I found a letter my dad wrote to my mom as I was cleaning out the desk where she used to sit and pay the bills — and another he wrote to her mother, my Nanny, when my parents were entangled and he was trying to plead his case. I say “entangled” because he was married with two teenagers when he met my mother, and she was twenty years his junior.

There were other issues, too, not that there needed to be more — additional reasons my Nanny would not have wanted her beloved daughter to go down this particular path — but my dad made an impressive effort to acknowledge every one of those objections and concerns by naming them and admitting to them openly. I almost didn’t recognize the man. It made me think he genuinely loved my mother, that he could not face living without her, even if it meant hurting his wife and kids. His wife had polio, just to add a little extra horror to the mix. His teenage kids still needed him. He said as much.

How do you hurt all those people and ask the mother of the nineteen-year-old you then go on to marry to extend some kind of faith in you — and then turn around and hurt her daughter, too, because you can’t keep your dick in your pants once she’s pregnant? With me.

I mean it honestly. Is it that fucking hard to just not stick your dick in someone else? I guess I must be furious. I’ve been packing and unpacking for six days straight and have slept about three hours each night, so I didn’t know that until now, sitting in this gigantic bus flying over the continental United States. He broke something in my mother that never healed, and that fault line went straight through the center of our relationship. Mine and hers, hers and mine.

No wonder she didn’t want my grandma to know her marriage was ending. No wonder she left me at a farm instead of taking me to her brother’s house where I would have felt safe and where I’d been a million times before. I always wondered why she didn’t take me to my aunt and uncle and cousins when she needed to grieve after her mother died and my dad left. My heart hurts writing that. I feel so devastated for my mom. I’m sure she felt ashamed. I wish I could have told her it was my dad’s shame to carry, not hers. He blew up our lives, I didn’t see him for months, and then when I started seeing him again he told me everything was my mother’s fault for being selfish and unwilling to share him. I believed him because I was four.

When I was a little kid, I thought he was the greatest. He loved that I adored him. I guess he didn’t want to muck that up with the inconvenient truth, or maybe by then he wasn’t bothering with it, or it’s possible he couldn’t face himself anymore. I don’t know. I do know he never took responsibility for the pain he caused again. He never said he was sorry when he made a mistake — or even acknowledged it. I guess I can give him credit for one thing — there is no point in saying you’re sorry if you’re going to keep doing the same thing over and over again.

My mom forgave my dad in the last years of her life, though we didn’t know they were the last years at the time. She asked me for his address and said she wanted to send him a letter to that effect. He was ninety-three and living with his fourth wife in North Carolina.

I didn’t share this with her, but I thought he’d probably shake his head and be dismissive of a letter like that, as if there was nothing much for her to forgive after all the grief she’d given him over the years. She hadn’t, that was his version. Things were acrimonious between them when I was growing up, and when I was little it made pick-ups and drop-offs hard and school events awkward.

There were screaming matches on the telephone, and I’d find my body at one house or the other feeling like there was lead in my stomach and feet, and not enough strength in my knees — but for the most part my mother kept her feelings about my father to herself when it came to direct conversation with me.

I’m not saying she hid her feelings well, I was not confused, I’m saying compared to the amount of grief she could have given him, or the way I have seen some mothers actively try to turn their children against their fathers, he had nothing to complain about, she never did that. And as the years wore on and I got older, there were fewer reasons for them to interact, and by the time I graduated from college, they could be at events together and be social.

I gave her his address because she asked for it, and not long after she said he’d called and they’d had a nice conversation, and she was glad she’d done that. She said it was a long time ago and she didn’t want him to die thinking she was still angry with him. It was a kind thing to do and I said that.

Then she went and died first.

She forgave him years before she died, but she didn’t forgive me until the bitter end when she was in the ICU unable to speak or swallow or walk. And what was my crime? Being the daughter of the man who broke her, or being the reason he broke her in the first place?

The last year of my dad’s life, while the loss of my mother was fresh and raw and constant, I’d go to the assisted living facility where I’d moved him so I could make sure he was okay and take him to his doctors’ appointments and make sure he had his stock of Motts’ Apple Juice and sculpting clay, he’d sometimes forget the way the dots connected and start talking to me about “the secretary” — not realizing he was talking to me about my mother. She was a secretary when they met.

In the last weeks of his life he had anxiety dreams about her, and would wake up distressed, wondering where she was. Maybe there’s something in here about cleaning up the messes we make while we’re lucid and while there’s time, or not spending the tiny amount of time we get absolutely destroying people.

I found another letter in that desk, one I wrote to my mom when I was nine, the day after a night I’d made her very angry. I don’t know why she saved it, and I wish she hadn’t. I apologized to her for making a mess. I said I didn’t think she was my maid, I just didn’t think, period. I was stupid and terrible and lazy and she deserved a better child than me, and I would try to be better. It made me cry, reading it. I thought of so many nights when I tried to avoid her fury, backed up against my wall, arms trying to cover my head and face. It made me want to save every kid in the world who pays the price for adults who have lost the thread.

There seem to be so many of them.

One thing that happened over the last week of packing and unpacking a million boxes and driving 738 miles in a U-haul — through a tornado because why stop with just an insane amount of chaos when you can go for full-on Wizard of Oz pandemonium — is I barely had time to look at the news. I still haven’t, I just got back to Los Angeles.

Last I checked we were still at war with Iran and by day 12 it had cost us $16.5 billion. Terrific. But no affordable healthcare for anyone, no free school lunches, Medicaid is gutted, and Social Security will run out in 2037. Now the president wants $200 billion more to fund the military. I don’t believe there have been any Epstein arrests, correct? Still no?

I read that Cesar Chavez turns out to be another man who abused girls and women. And I saw a clip of the president making a joke about Pearl Harbor to the prime minister of Japan in the Oval Office. The expression on her face is every one of us. Honestly, I’d rather pack and unpack a million more boxes than immerse myself in this timeline. I wish I could pull those of us who feel the same way onto a different one. I know there are people who say this is the one we’re on. This is the work. It’s true, this is it. I guess the question is how we forge a better path.

I am aware the only thing I can control is what I do. I can’t control what other people do, or how they feel or what they want. I know this is impressive, but it only took me eleventy gajillion tries to figure that out. I make an effort to extend the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, and do my best not to take things personally. When people make outrageous choices — like the man who called his wife and put her on speakerphone at full volume to have a lengthy conversation as we taxied down the runway today — I attempt curiosity instead of contempt, and think about what kind of story I’d write about a person who would do something like that, even if it is absolutely bonkers. Sir, this is not a Wendy’s.

I don’t keep lists in my head of ways I’ve been wronged, and I don’t have close people in my life who do, because it’s exhausting. I forgive easily whenever possible because life is too short, and I also make mistakes. I always appreciate a little grace. But I have not figured out how to forgive people who hurt children, or any of the most vulnerable members of our community — especially when it seems as though they take pleasure in it.

There’s a point where forgiveness can be interpreted as permission or complicity, and I will rage against that machine until my dying breath. I’ll do it from the air and from the land, from the oceans, or whilst flying over them. I’ll rage until the cows come home, because rage is good fuel, and all children deserve to feel safe and loved in this world.

It would be inaccurate at best to say “Americans” support this president and the things he says and does, or that “they” are in favor of this war in Iran.

It’s the same in any country. There were a lot of keyboard warriors talking about how the Iranian people felt when I woke up the morning after the president announced Operation Epic Fury. You can’t even put forty people in a room and have any reasonable expectation they will all agree about politics, life, ethics, or where you can find the best pizza, so why would anyone think you could talk about millions of people as if they have one mind? It is a wild and unfortunate pastime.

There’s such a desire to reduce people quickly, to try to sort them into one box or another: the box of people who think like me (check!) versus the box of people I despise and shall now berate or cease to acknowledge. It’s a hashtag philosophy that makes it easy to other people, which is usually the thing the hash-tagger is railing against in the first place. Meanwhile, children are dying.

The world has gone mad when you are only supposed to care about some children dying, and not others. If you can see children dying and go about your business, something has gone very wrong. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism and you are protecting yourself from the trauma of it all, but if you are someone who is affected when some children die, but not others, I would encourage you to please examine that.

Any of us could have been born anywhere. You’re a citizen of your country because that’s where your parents happened to end up, and at some point some number of years ago, some man drew lines on a map and named the place where you live. It’s likely a lot of people died so those lines could be drawn, and if there are resources in your country, we can safely bet some other “leader” of a country with a strong militia has tried to come and take those resources from you in the name of “freedom” lol/sob/wtf.

Sorry to be the one to say, lines on a map are utterly meaningless because none of us own any of this. We’re on a tiny planet in one solar system in a vast universe. Your president didn’t make this planet, and one day soon he’ll die. Your prime minister didn’t make it, either, and one day soon they will die. Your Supreme Leader didn’t make it, and one day soon he’ll die, too. Ashes to ashes.

War and destruction is all bullshit. People posturing, mostly violent, greedy men.

When the time comes, none of the clothes in your closet will go with you. Your house, however big or small? It stays, you go. The tree in your front yard that you call yours? Not yours.

Children are sacred. Love is sacred. The time we get here is a gift, and we should be spending that time in awe. In celebration. Making art, making friends, caring about each other, staring up at the trees, and at night, staring up at the moon and the stars. Holding someone’s hand. Swimming in a creek, digging our toes in the sand. Traveling. And always, taking care of the most vulnerable among us.

War is the most ignorant, vile form of ingratitude and stupidity anyone could ever undertake with the tiny blink of time they get on this gorgeous tiny blue dot, where we have everything we need to survive, if only we weren’t so dumb, and if only we would stop giving power to weak little boy-men who have no clue what they ought to be doing while they’re here.

The gall of blowing this place up when it isn’t theirs. The gall of killing children and acting like it can’t be helped. They didn’t grow those babies or push them into this world, did they?

Meanwhile, children are dying on our watch. It’s well past time we make it stop.

To be clear, I hope young people are trying to have their lives and soak up all the fun they can. This isn’t their mess to clean up. I’m talking about the adults in the room.

I understand it might be a coping mechanism, but I don’t know how to be close to people who want to pretend the ground underneath us is solid. It’s never solid, things can always change in a day, in an instant, no matter how much you plan — but I don’t think it’s ever been less solid in my lifetime than it is right now. I mean that collectively. I often feel like I’m falling through space, trying to figure out what I can gather as I go to try to keep us all safe somehow. I know I wouldn’t be able to do that during normal times and trying now is futile, but not trying feels worse.

A handful of stardust is better than nothing. I’d rather be aware of the precariousness of the moment than in some kind of false reality. Which doesn’t mean I’m having an easy go of it.

I had a tough time starting this essay because I’ve had a tough time since I went to bed last Friday night/early Saturday morning, knowing that the U.S. had started bombing Iran. There may be people feeling anxious now, wondering which way I’m headed. That’s the part that makes everything so painful.

Can’t I just feel utter despair because more innocent people are going to die and already have? More children? More babies? Also, I have zero faith in this administration and its motives. The president sandwiched his announcement of war between a charity event Friday night where he was filmed chatting and dancing — though I cringe to call what he does dancing — and a million-dollar-a-plate political fundraiser Saturday night, where he was on the patio for much of the evening, and said to be in “a jovial mood.”

You send service members to die, you know civilians will die, and you have it in you to be jovial? That is not a leader.

This is the guy who campaigned on “No new wars!” and said he’d stop the “chaos in the Middle East.” Not that I ever believe a thing that comes out of his mouth, but people who voted for him said they were tired of having their tax dollars spent on expensive, long, drawn-out wars in other countries — and wanted us to focus on problems here at home. America First! Remember that?

Remember this president standing in front of a mic and holding up cereal boxes, talking about grocery prices? It was laughable then because he’s never been a guy to buy his own groceries, and it’s laughable now because he could not care less about “kitchen table issues” — or any of us.

The price of eggs has not gone down, it’s gone up, and it’s about to go up more. I never put the price of eggs higher on the list of things that matter to me than ethics or empathy, though. I care about children and women more than the price of eggs, and I’d happily pay more for eggs to keep us all safe. I’d give up eggs altogether if it were that easy. And when I say women and children, I mean all women and children, and I mean everywhere.

Instead of “no new wars” and a president whining because he hasn’t gotten a Nobel Peace Prize (reminds me of the saying “bombing for peace is like screwing for virginity”), now we have a guy who says, “U.S. military service members have been killed. There will likely be more, that’s the way it is.” That’s the way it is?

Let’s go back a minute.

You might remember the case of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in 2022. She was the twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman who was traveling from Kurdistan to Tehran to see family, and was arrested by Guidance Patrols (morality police) on her way, because she was not wearing a hijab. Bystanders reported seeing her being beaten in the police van.

Police denied this and said she was transferred to a department in Tehran for “justification and re-education.” They said she suddenly had a heart problem or a stroke. Her family was informed she was in the hospital hours later. They could not understand how she could be in a coma, brain-dead, because she had been in perfect health. There were published pictures of Amini at the hospital, bleeding from the ear, with bruises under her eyes. Hacked medical scans showed skull fractures and skull trauma; it was clear she had received many blows to the head.

There were protests after Amini’s death, Iranian women on social media started taking off their hijabs and cutting their hair, people took to the streets, and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising was sparked nationwide. Iranian authorities, then led by President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, increasingly used the death penalty as a form of political repression.

At the end of December, 2025, protests erupted over the free-falling collapse of Iran’s currency. Shopkeepers in Tehran went on strike, more people joined, and soon there was a nationwide protest over inflation, mismanagement of funds, lack of social services, access to clean drinking water, air, education, health, housing, sanitation, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and pretty much every right a person needs to live with dignity.

Senior state officials labeled protesters “rioters” — hi, where have we heard this before? — and responded with lethal force. Thousands of protesters were arrested and detained, some as young as fourteen. They subjected many of those detained to “enforced disappearance” or “incommunicado detention” which does not sound all that different from what detainees are going through here in the states. In a speech on January 17th, the (then) Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said thousands of people were killed during the protests.

Here in the states, our own wannabe Supreme Leader told Iranian protesters he’d intervene if lethal force continued to be used against them. And this is where I start to lose my mind, because if anyone thinks this president cares about human rights violations or citizens being shot in the streets for protesting, may I please turn your attention to RENEE GOOD and ALEX PRETTI — human beings who would still be alive if this mad fake king had not sent his own private militia to wage war against the cities and states he is supposed to serve.

May I please turn your attention to the number of fatalities that have occurred inside ICE detention centers. May I please turn your attention to the conditions for children inside the ICE detention centers. Does any sane human being really believe this president would ever go to war to help people in another country get out from under authoritarian rule when he is exerting authoritarian rule over the people in his own country?

Two things can be true at once. No one [I know] is going to cry tears because Ali Khamenei is dead — and the POTUS did not send our military to Iran to help anyone. He only helps himself.

I don’t know what the real motives of this president might be, but there isn’t any evidence that Iran was about to unleash a nuclear weapon. You might recall we were told in June we’d wiped out any nuclear capability they might have had. Usually, it comes down to oil, money, positioning and power — not strategic leadership or professional military ethos. If you’re confused about whether this administration possesses either of the latter, allow me to present the Secretary of War and Sad Machismo, in a piece he performed called, “This Is Your Moment” — which they could lift verbatim as a pre-written SNL skit. It is embarrassing.

It could be simple. The president backed himself into a corner with all the military buildup he stationed in the area during the talks between the U.S. and Iran, and when they didn’t capitulate, he wasn’t going to be made a fool. Maybe he hoped this would be the thing to get the conversation off the Epstein files, or it might get his approval ratings up before the midterms. If you think no president could be that self-serving, please refer to the AI videos he posts of himself dumping feces on liberals, or beating up Canadian hockey players. This is not a mature individual with a fully functioning frontal lobe.

Can I not be worried sick because I know there isn’t a plan, this wasn’t done with congressional approval (again) and the people in charge of our government named the mission Operation Epic Fury like it’s a video game? It is to them. We are all NPCs in a game they’re playing, and they don’t care if our children die. We’re nothing to them. Service members, girls at school, who cares? Not them.

How about the very “American” beginning — bloodletting at an elementary school — am I allowed to feel sick about that?

How do we reconcile bombing a girls’ school at the same time we are told about the “high-precision airstrikes” and that they’re using advanced technology — because I don’t know what to do with that. Are they high-precision or not? Did they hit a girls’ school on purpose, or are they so incompetent they’re working off an old map?

We’re dealing with an administration that seems now to be floating the idea that this war is happening because Jesus Christ anointed the president to start this Holy War to set off Armageddon and set the stage for the Second Coming. Someone hold my beer because I can’t, friends. I’m not drinking beer, but maybe I should grab one. Two hundred different service members are reporting this now, that this is the message commanders are urging officers to share with their troops.

Today forty white men and a white woman gathered around the president in the Oval Office and prayed over him. I couldn’t really hear the prayer, but it must have been something like this,

Dear God, please protect this pedophile-protecting, adjudicated rapist who has cheated on all his wives, paid off at least one articulate sex worker with campaign funds, has 34 felony counts, lusts after his daughter, and is already responsible for the deaths of 6 service members and over one thousand Iranian civilians. Please protect him as he avoids accountability for the harm he has caused to so many people, including the woman who says he raped her when she was thirteen years old, while he steals money from the American people, and cheats and lies every day, and allows citizens to be executed in the streets for caring about their neighbors. Please, dear God, help him bring out the very best in himself as he detains all the brown people, and allows men to die in detention centers from infected teeth, and allows pregnant women to bleed out and lose their babies, and absolves detention centers from protecting detainees from sexual assault. Please send him grace as he spews his racist, bigoted views all over the airwaves. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

I mean…good luck to them. I am pretty sure there is no white man in the sky with a ledger, but if there is I promise he wrote down every last one of their names today, and when the time comes, they’re going to have a very short interview before they head somewhere really hot.

I haven’t been okay, because I’m never okay when children die, and I don’t understand why anyone is. I’m anti-war. I’m anti-billionaires unless we’re talking about the kind who give their wealth away to make the world better. I can feel relieved for Iranians who are celebrating, but devastated about everything else, simultaneously.

There are no monoliths and you’ll get into trouble every time if you equate the leader/president/head-of-state of any given country with the people who live there. Just like we are wildly divided here, and of the 342 million of us who live in the states, “only” 77 million voted for the grifter-in-chief, while 74 million of us voted for Harris/Walz and some people stayed home and did not vote at all — and others, still, were not eligible to vote — so it is in other countries.

Which is only one way of saying someone in another country who hates Americans because they can’t stand the president (while understandable) is losing sight of a HUGE segment of our population who cannot stand this soulless skin-bag, either. For example, Tim Weiner, Pulitzer prize winning National Security reporter who said, “The greatest danger to U.S. national security today is the president of the U.S.”

They’re saying “Americans” but not including the tens of millions of us who long for the day when he is no longer degrading the office of the presidency. No longer ushering in the Vegas/Liberace Era of the White House. No longer ignoring Congress, violating the Constitution, running rampant over the three branches of government, Truth-Socialing at the Supreme Court, spitting on our checks and balances, and denying human beings due process. No longer etching his name on every conceivable building and hanging banners of his bloated face on the DOJ, no longer building ballrooms no one wants while people can’t afford healthcare or food, no longer using AI to insult the people he doesn’t like …

… all the while avoiding any accountability for the million times his name appears in the Epstein files or being deposed about any of it — but making billions for himself and his family, emoluments clause be damned. While Republican senators can’t find their spines, and too many Democrats and Independents don’t fight hard enough and billionaires are the only ones winning — believe me when I say, no one can stop you from ignoring us, but you will get the story of “Americans” wrong.

This is why it’s dangerous to comment like an expert about how the Iranian people feel. They, too, are not a monolith. There are Iranian people still living in their country, of course, and Iranian people living in the diaspora. The morning after war was announced, there were Iranian people celebrating because they were out from under a brutal authoritarian regime (though, if history serves, who knows what comes next), and Iranian parents wailing in the street outside the girls’ school in Tehran, trying to pull their daughters from the rubble.

I’m hollowed out by all the death, that’s okay, isn’t it? I’m especially enraged that children keep dying because too many angry, greedy, violent, ancient, authoritarian men have too much power, and there are enough women willing to be complicit that it continues with no end in sight. And yet, if anyone ever pays a price, it’s always one of the women they allowed into the boys’ club. Maybe one of these days those women will catch the drift? You’re never really in, honey. And you’re selling all of us out.

It will always be unfathomable to me that we would find ourselves on a floating rock in a vast universe for a blink of time — a planet that provides all the resources we need if only we’d share — and this is what we do instead.

We’ve gotten to this strange inflection point in the timeline where we are only supposed to extend compassion when the right children die, but I refuse that litmus test. I am devastated when any child dies because the adults around them have lost the thread. I don’t care if that child is in Iran, Gaza, the Congo, Sudan, Israel, or here at home, on a regular school day in the United States. If healthy, curious, trusting children are dying, look around. You’re going to find smug, unfeeling bastards who tell you there isn’t a way to stop it. Nothing can be done. Thoughts and prayers.

The leopard will always eat your face, and it will eat your babies’ faces, too.

We are not protecting children. We are not fighting for girls or women, anywhere. Every marginalized group in the world is in jeopardy. The most vulnerable among us have never been less safe. We’re putting the wrong people in power, here and abroad — parasites and predators instead of public servants — and if we want the endless death and destruction to stop, they all have to go.

It’s hard to win if you’re fighting the wrong battle, and there are no winners in a war.

Rule 602: Attempt to injure or recklessly endanger an opponent:

(a) A match penalty shall be assessed to any player who recklessly endangers or attempts to injure any opposing player or team official.

(b) A gross misconduct penalty shall be assessed to any team official who recklessly endangers or attempts to injure any opposing player or team official.

(Note) All incidents of attempt to inflict physical harm to game officials should be penalized under Rule 601 (e.1).

I was sitting at a restaurant the other day, waiting for a friend. She’d texted that she was running a few minutes late, so I ordered a matcha latte and grabbed us a table. I pulled out my phone to answer some emails, but became aware of the conversation at the table next to me — at which point I only pretended to look at my phone.

“... seems like he lied under oath, Dad, and Bondi, too. They interviewed this woman four times in 2025. That’s a big deal, they don’t waste resources. Why would they delete those files if there was nothing to hide?”

I took a careful peek at my table-neighbors. The woman speaking was probably around my age, hair in a ponytail, dressed in yoga clothes. Her dad was in a button-down shirt and jeans. I knew she was talking about the deleted Epstein files — specifically, the ones where a woman had accused the sitting POTUS of sexually assaulting her when she was thirteen years old.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging, and pausing for a spoonful of soup, “but I doubt anyone can or will prove they witnessed Trump getting his dick wet with a fifteen-year-old innocent, unsuspecting cheerleader —”

“Ew! Dad! That’s disgusting,” she said (my mouth had fallen open in horror), “and she wasn’t fifteen, she was thirteen, and she wasn’t a cheerleader. God! The point was the cover-up. That’s how these guys always get caught, like Watergate. Never mind.”

My friend walked through the door just then and that was the last I heard of the conversation happening next door — but I did notice the daughter looked unhappy for the rest of lunch, and I had the urge to invite her to our table. It isn’t easy being a woman right now, not that it’s ever been particularly easy.

I’ve thought about that exchange many times over the last few days. It’s partly the violent language that came out of that man’s mouth so casually, whilst talking to his daughter no less. It’s partly that he imagined a “fifteen-year old, innocent, unsuspecting cheerleader” — because what is that, except a fantasy in his own mind? No one said cheerleader.

No one said fifteen, either, except all the podcast bros and Megyn Kelly, trying to downplay child rape, and the grown men in Congress seeing if they can finagle how old a child is depending on their needs. If they want to prosecute “roving mobs of wild youth” — the phrase used by the POTUS to describe kids in DC — and let’s be clear, he means Black kids — fourteen is a good cut-off age, apparently. According to him, those kids should understand the consequences of their actions and spend decades behind bars.

More than 93% of youth arrests in DC involve Black children, according to the Sentencing Project, and Black youth are vastly over-represented among children charged as adults.

But — if it’s a bunch of racist, homophobic Young Republicans in a group chat in their late twenties to mid-thirties, those are “kids” who should be given some leeway. I give you our VP, JD Vance:

“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.” Kids. Young boys. Men in their late twenties to mid-thirties.

The hypocrisy is tiresome and insulting. These same men use the term “underage women” when they talk about the Epstein survivors and the things they went through as children — as if they hope we won’t notice you never hear the term “underage men.”

An underage woman is a girl. If you’re a grown man and you’re attracted to girls, at least be man enough to own it. It’s not like you’re going to get in trouble for it in this country, anyway, unless you run into the wrong woman at the wrong time, or unless more of us start training our daughters to be fucking warriors, which is where I’m at. Not all mothers, though.

On her podcast a while back, Megyn Kelly spent a lot of time trying to make Epstein one of those good pedophiles you never hear about. “He was into the barely legal type, like, he liked 15-year-old girls,” Kelly continued. “I’m not trying to make an excuse for this, I’m just giving you facts — that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passer-by.”

So, eight would be like, a “real” pedophile, and guys that like the “barely-legal types” are not the worst kind of pedophile? Is that the idea? Because fifteen means 9th grade for most kids. I have a sixteen-year-old daughter, I know exactly what we’re talking about here. So does Megyn Kelly — she has a fourteen-year-old daughter.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine what could happen to make the mother of a daughter (or anyone) become a pedophile-apologist, but it makes me sick.

I’m tired of all of it. I was enjoying the Olympics, a bright light in the midst of what is certainly the darkest chapter of American history I’ve experienced — and I say that as someone who was in New York City on 9/11. That’s my hometown, and that was the most heartbreaking day I’ve lived through, collectively speaking.

Back in 2001, if you were white in America and still not understanding the water you were swimming in was full of poison, you might have believed “the enemy” was somewhere else. You would have to ignore a whole lot of history to believe that, but plenty of people did, and still do. Facebook and Twitter did not exist yet, so we weren’t spending our time screaming at each other on the internet.

Fox News did exist in 2001, and as you might imagine, they got to work stoking anti-Muslim hatred which blends nicely with their broad anti-refugee/anti-immigrant rhetoric — and they have yet to stop.

Trump was just a gold name on tacky buildings, just a conman “real estate tycoon” with zero ethics. Everyone in New York knew he was a scam artist, a racist and a misogynist. These days he pretends he was at Ground Zero after the Towers went down, assisting with recovery. Close your eyes and try to picture that man extending himself to help another person. It’s hard to keep track of all the lies, but that is one of the most despicable.

What he did do on 9/11 was call into a radio station shortly after the Towers fell, and assert that because the Towers had fallen, 40 Wall Street — one of his buildings — was now the tallest building in the city. Lovely.

Maybe someone should take his phone away. The thing about the “locker room” phone call was how seamlessly the USA Men’s Hockey Team gave up any integrity or decency they had, any respect, concern, or friendship they felt for the Women’s Team (or any women in their lives, or any kids who looked up to them) — for the approval of a man accused of child rape. A man who was bffs with a convicted pedophile, who got Ghislaine Maxwell a sweet deal just months ago so she can now enjoy Pilates and organic food after trafficking and raping young children for years. Why?

As a woman, it makes you feel hopeless and disgusted. I don’t even have to talk about the idiocy of Kash Patel chugging beers like some kid who got picked last in gym class every time and is now desperate to be towel boy. It’s all the lowest of the low, and then the NHL couldn’t even get it together to issue an apology to the Women’s Team. Nope. Those men went to the White House and sat in a conference room eating McDonald’s and got trotted out for the State of the Union — which is not good at all, in case that needed to be said. They allowed themselves to be used by this unhinged, dementia-ridden president to distract from all the harm he’s causing.

Well done, fellas. You betrayed all the women and girls in your life for a weak, vindictive man who just wanted proximity to strength — but you gave yours away the minute you laughed at his demeaning non-joke. Why do you want to be close to a lying, cheating, adjudicated rapist criminal? Why do you care about his opinion more than the opinion of all sane, self-respecting women, and likely a large percentage of your daughters when they grow up and see what you did?

There are women who will laugh along because they also think proximity to the people in power will keep them safe or keep them on the inside. The inside of what, though? The inner circle of a president who uses AI to pretend he can play hockey and beat up Canadian hockey players? A woman asked me if I was bothered by the beer-drinking or the misuse of taxpayer money under someone’s post about Kash Patel, because Jill Biden went to the Olympics, too — and I didn’t bother answering because there’s nothing more depressing than a woman who is all in with these men.

There were posts from men saying the disgust over the phone call was “performative rage” and — astoundingly — this is why Democrats don’t win elections. And one from a male comic who decided it was a good time to mansplain “affiliative laughter” and how sometimes people laugh just to get along, and not because they agree or think something is funny. OMFG.

Then he said women should understand because sometimes they laugh to stay safe. I replied that there’s a difference between laughing at a man’s joke so he doesn’t kill you, and a whole team of grown men laughing at the president because they want his approval. He must’ve thought better of it after 9,877,631,987 women told him to sit this one out, because that post is deleted and all I can tell you is his name is Andy and I don’t think you should see his show.

The rage is not performative. The rage is real, and every time a man (almost always straight and white) posts some garbage take suggesting it isn’t, he adds more fuel to the fire.

I’d much rather talk about the Women’s Hockey Team, or the fact that of the 12 gold medals we took home, 8 were won by women. I’d rather talk about the fact that 49 athletes at the Olympics this year were/are openly queer, and 19 of them took home medals. I’d rather tell you of the 33 medals Team USA took home, 11 were won by athletes who are children of immigrants. There’s a Venn diagram in there somewhere comprised of almost everything worth nurturing in this world.

I could have watched Alysa Liu for weeks on end. That is what joy in motion looks like, and I cried every time she got on the ice. That’s what I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about, too. It was extraordinary. Mikaela Shiffrin won gold in the slalom and also in the hearts of anyone living with grief and wondering how to keep living, a thing I have had to learn myself these last few years. Breezy Johnson defied gravity multiple times and I was laughing at the announcers describing certain moments as “mistakes” because all I saw was a miracle flying down a mountain. Whatever the mistakes, she still took home gold in alpine skiing.

Elana Meyers Taylor, 41, won her first Olympic gold with her husband and two sons cheering her on. Kaillie Humphries, 40, won bronze — her 6th Olympic bobsled medal (3 gold, 3 bronze — and the only woman to win gold medals for two different countries, the USA and Canada). She’s also a mom as of June, 2024 after an IVF journey. Women are amazing.

And, of course, the fantastic USA Women’s Hockey Team won gold in overtime against Canada. The Women’s Team has medaled in every Olympics since the sport was introduced in 1998. Meaning, they have never gone to the Olympics and not gone home with a medal. They’ve won 3 gold, 4 silver, and 1 bronze.

The Men’s Team has been playing since 1920. They had not won a gold medal since 1980, so this year broke a 46-year drought (a number I had to check twice, because 1980 was not 46 years ago, obviously). They’ve won 8 silver, and a bronze. The last medal (silver) was 16 years ago. So 46-year gold medal drought, 16-year medal-of-any-kind drought. Maybe we should get Eileen Gu in here to ask if it is 16 years of medals lost…or?

I share this not to take anything away from the USA Men’s Hockey Team, but to highlight the incredible Women’s Team, who have had to work harder with less, and still did better.

They had to fight for a living wage along the way, for example. Back in 2017, the Women’s Team fought to get more than the $1000/month they were receiving to play — and that was just during the years when the Olympics occurred. Most of the players had to work two and three jobs in addition to training — a thing the members of the Men’s Team did not have to worry about. The Women’s Team had to fight for a decent budget for equipment, too.

The common (boring, tired) response is women are paid less because they bring in less money. If they sold tickets the same way the men did, they’d be paid more. Oh, yeah? How do you suppose male hockey players become well-known outside the people who follow hockey? They get brand endorsements and sponsorships:

While 40% of U.S. athletes are female, women’s sports sponsorship comprised less than 1% of total sports sponsorships back in 2020. In addition, female athletes received a mere 2-4% of media coverage compared to male athletes. This lack of representation could be rooted in outdated gender stereotypes. Sponsorships for male athletes are primarily influenced by their strength, skill set, and popularity, rather than their alignment with conventional beauty norms. Conversely, female athletes often encounter greater challenges, as their appearance can sometimes receive more attention than their abilities.

Shocker. Maybe if women got more exposure, support, respect and recognition, they’d fill arenas the same way men do. See how this is a systemic issue, and how it permeates everything?

The part of this that hurts so much is if you zoom way out, none of it is new. For whatever reason, ever since we decided we wanted to own things we keep choosing violence. Gladiator shit. Burning women at the stake. Domination. Invading countries, raping and pillaging, enslaving and trafficking, planting flags on a planet we only get to visit for a flash of time.

Thinking the tree in our front yard belongs to us, that we own it.

A few months ago I was talking to a man who said he was disturbed when a young woman he worked with told him the patriarchy had to go. “I told her, if the patriarchy goes, you’ll silence my voice!” He said this to me with a lot of emotion. I looked at him like he had three heads because I have no poker face. It made me wonder how many men think this way.

“Patriarchy” is derived from Greek for “rule of the father” — where the eldest male in the family ran the household. It is a male-centered, male-identified, male dominated system, and it affects everyone by enforcing strict gender roles. Men are supposed to be emotionless, women are supposed to be submissive, treated as objects. Comply or die. Make me a sandwich. Have my babies. Get me a beer.

It leads to the normalization of systemic inequality everywhere — things like the gender pay gap, violence against women, not believing women, denying women the right to vote or bodily autonomy or the ability to say no to their husbands (marital rape was not outlawed in every state in the U.S. until 1993). The inequality bleeds over into our children. They are not as valuable as men in this system, not by a long shot, so they can (and will) be used and abused.

Doing away with the patriarchy isn’t the silencing of the male voice, it’s inviting everyone to the table. It’s admitting this isn’t working well for anyone sane. It’s relinquishing male domination and giving everyone a chance to speak. It’s keeping the most vulnerable amongst us safe. It should not surprise any of us to know that matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy. In a matriarchal system, communal living is emphasized, cooperation is the foundation — not competition — and all are nurtured.

We might have to burn shit down to get there, though.

Thumbnail image/Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

We were in our classroom which was on the basement level of our tiny elementary school on the Upper West Side in New York City. It was wintertime, and too cold to go to the park that day.

We had eaten lunch at our desks, and our teacher, Mrs. B, had gone up to the Teachers’ Kitchen to have her own lunch. She’d left us with the directive to keep the volume down — which now strikes me as a hopeful thing to say to twenty six-year-olds you’re about to leave on their own.

I was scared of Mrs. B. At the parent-teacher conference she’d told my mother that I “gesticulated too much.” This sounded like a terrible thing to do and I told my mom she must have confused me with someone else.

“It means you use your hands a lot,” my mother said. “You put your finger on your chin when you’re thinking, or wave your hands around when you talk.”

My mother’s side of the family is Italian. As far as I could tell, everyone used their hands when they were talking. I was a shy kid, and had become more so since my grandmother died and my parents got divorced a couple of years before I started first grade. I took the rules seriously, always did my homework, never talked out of turn.

After the parent-teacher conference I’d sit on my hands when I spoke in class. I didn’t raise my hand anymore even when I knew the answer, because I wasn’t sure if that was part of “gesticulating” — and I didn’t like speaking in front of the whole room, anyway.

Things were not great at home. I had two homes at that point, even though my mom would say my home was with her and I just visited my dad. Whatever you called it, I was at my dad’s half the time, and I missed my mom so much I cried myself to sleep most nights. I couldn’t tell my dad I missed her, or ask to call her on the phone, because he’d get this look on his face like I’d hurt him, badly.

He talked to me all the time about his problems, and he’d cry, which was scary for me. I’d hug him and say comforting things to try to make him feel better. He’d take me to meet all his lady friends and then remind me it was “our secret” on the way home to my stepmom, who wasn’t my stepmom yet. It was a lot to manage.

My not-yet stepmom didn’t like it if I missed my mom, either. I had to act like I was okay, or everyone would get upset, which was a very different thing than actually being okay, which I was not.

When I’d get to my mom’s house, she’d be tired from working all day, but she went on dates most of the nights I was there, which made me very sad. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t stay home with me more of the time, but she’d get angry if I asked her and then the night would be ruined, anyway. If she did stay home, we’d have dinner at the diner on the corner, and then she’d fall asleep watching something on tv.

School was the place where I felt secure, like things made sense. I had good friends at school, and on the day in question, we had been alone for about twenty minutes playing our game. I’m sure we got louder by the minute. I know all the horses were laughing, and some of them started trying to buck us off. I don’t remember who decided it would be fun to play Cowgirls and Cowboys, but I know it wasn’t me.

I didn’t really understand the games my friends liked to play, but I would always try to join in. My head was filled with grown-up worries, things like whether my dad would be okay while I was at my mom’s, or if he’d have no one to talk to if a woman called the house and my not-yet-stepmom cried in the bathroom all night.

I wanted to be a normal kid and do normal kid things.

That’s why I was riding a horse-friend and yelling “Giddyup, let’s gooooo!” — feeling surprised by how much fun I was having — when Mrs. B came down the stairs and into our classroom. Everyone in the room was either playing a horse, riding a horse, or being bucked off of a horse. There were peals of laughter and probably a lot of noise, and then — horribly — there was Mrs. B, bellowing, “Ally! Get over here! RIGHT. NOW.”

The room froze, and my friends Jenny and Jessie looked at me with wide, sympathetic eyes. I got off my horse quickly and walked over to Mrs. B with my face on fire and my heart pounding so loudly I was sure the whole room could hear it.

She told everyone to get in their seats and not to say a word until she was back. Then she turned and glared at me. “Come with me,” she said, and started marching up the stairs. I looked up at her in front of me, climbing the stairs. Cream-colored cardigan, dark skirt and tights, and what my mother would call “sensible shoes” — but she’d say it like she smelled something bad.

“Did I do something wrong?” My voice sounded eight octaves higher than usual because I was terrified.

“You’re getting the children into too much trouble,” she said. That sentence reverberated inside my head — there was something wrong with it, and my six-year-old mind tried to work out what it was. We got to the top of the stairs, and she told me to sit on the bench outside the principal’s office, which was also within view of the Teachers’ Kitchen. I wanted to disappear.

This is where the bad kids sat when they got in trouble, and I could not understand what I’d done. I hadn’t done anything any of the other kids weren’t doing, so why was I on the bench where all the older kids in school would see me, and all the other teachers, too? Now everyone was going to think I was a bad kid, when I tried so hard to be good all the time.

The year before, when I was in Kindergarten, the teachers lost me six times in one school year because I was always daydreaming. I’d get caught up staring at a caterpillar on Caterpillar Rock in Riverside Park, and not realize my entire class was gone until I looked up and found I was alone. Or we’d be walking as a group back to school, and I’d see ivy growing thick up the side of an entire building, and wonder where the roots were, at the bottom or the top … and how long it had taken for the ivy to grow up or down all the floors of the building that way. By the time I’d thought about all that, I’d look around and see I was on a corner by myself.

It’s lucky that every time they lost me, there was a compassionate stranger around to help me find my way back to school. My mom told me this year I had to make sure that didn’t happen. I had to pay attention when we were out at the park or on a field trip, she didn’t want to get a single phone call that I’d gotten lost. So far I hadn’t gotten lost at all. I might not be perfect, but I was doing the best I could.

And what did she mean, I was “getting the children into too much trouble”? Wasn’t I one of the children? Could she tell I was different, that my head was full of grown-up things? I didn’t know if she was going to bring me into the principal’s office, or if she’d already talked to him, and he was going to come out and get me — but the thought of it was too much and I could feel a lump rising in my throat, and tears welling up in my eyes. I could see a blurry Mrs. B sitting at the table in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking to the second grade teacher, Mrs.D, who would likely remember me as the bad kid on the bench when I started in her class next year.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The principal of our school was a wonderful old man (he was probably at least fifty) with a twinkle in his eye, Mr. Spence, and he and Mrs. Spence ran the school together. They were loving and warm, and the kind of people you never wanted to disappoint. They’d come to our school Assembly together every Friday. I thought they’d been married for a hundred years. I wondered if Mrs. Spence was in the inner office, too, and if I would have to go and face them together. I didn’t think I could take that.

I started to gasp for breath. A tear slipped down my cheek, and then another, and I wiped them away with the backs of my hands. I was scared because sometimes I would get asthma attacks, and I couldn’t remember what to do. It had only happened a few times, always when I’d gotten especially upset about something. My dad told me to breathe over the back of a chair, but I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to stand up and bend forward over the back of it, or turn around and lean on it, like a back-bend. There weren’t any chairs around, anyway, except in the Teachers’ Kitchen, and I wasn’t going in there.

The harder I tried to get a deep breath, the less room there seemed to be for air. I stood up, and held onto the edge of the bench. Immediately, Mrs. B called out from the Teachers’ Kitchen, “Ally Hamilton, I told you to stay seated!” I couldn’t sit down, though. I couldn’t breathe. I looked at her, and now I was crying full-on, and gasping for air.

I must have looked panicked because she got up and strode over to me. I turned and faced the bench, and pressed both of my hands into the wood. “I. Can’t. Breathe.” I managed to tell her between gasps. Mrs. D was out there too, she knelt down next to me and placed a hand on my back.

“Do you have asthma?” she asked me. I nodded. “It’s okay,” she said, and she looked at me with nothing but concern. She made slow circles on my back with her hand, and told me everything was all right, I wasn’t in trouble. She asked if I could breathe through my nose. I could. She told me that was good, I was doing really well.

She said to put both hands on my belly and try to breathe right into them. She said it was like a silly game of Simon Says. That surprised me and I smiled at her and she smiled back, and I didn’t feel as scared anymore. Her voice was comforting, and so were her eyes. Her daughter was in my class, and I thought it must be so nice to have a mom who knew how to calm you down. My mom would get angry if I got upset. After a few minutes I was breathing normally again.

Mrs. B had been standing there, watching. She looked worried, but she had let Mrs. D take over. When I’d been breathing normally for a few minutes, the bell rang. Mrs. D asked if I felt okay, and I nodded. Mrs. B said we would go back to our classroom. I thanked Mrs. D for helping me, and she put a hand on my head and told me to take good care of myself.

That night, I told my mom what had happened, and she called Mrs. B to ask her about it. Mrs. B told my mom she’d called me out like that so the other kids wouldn’t think I was a Goody Two Shoes — a phrase I’d never heard before. My mom had to explain it to me.

This seemed odd, since I was riding a horse with enthusiasm when Mrs. B walked in the room, and not sneaking up the stairs to snitch on everyone — which seemed like the kind of thing a Goody Two Shoes would do based on my mom’s description. Whatever was going on was Mrs. B’s projection. I didn’t need to be saved from some reputation I hadn’t earned, I was six. Maybe I looked like a girl who wasn’t nice to her when she was a kid, I’ll never know, but if you think a grownup can’t make up a story about a child and why they should be treated one way or another, you haven’t been watching the news.

The experience stayed with me. I never forgot the way Mrs. B said I was “getting the children into too much trouble” as if I wasn’t one of them — it stuck in my mind like a thorn. And then there is Mrs. D, my second grade teacher who turned out to be as wonderful and generous as she seemed. She made me realize that one person can change everything in a moment, just by caring and being kind.

Children are vulnerable and they deserve to be protected and nurtured, always.

I don’t know what has to happen to put a child outside someone’s circle of compassion, or lots of children for that matter — I only see it’s a thing that is afflicting far too many people. When there are children in detention centers and 77 million people say they voted for that, and it’s the parents’ fault for bringing their children here in the first place — there’s something rotten growing somewhere. It’s far more threatening to our country than the 70% of people who have been deported without any criminal record at all.

It’s like ivy growing up the side of a building. Did I mention ivy weakens old structures? Its roots can penetrate and deepen existing cracks in the mortar and masonry, leading to structural instability. Cruelty, apathy, corruption, depravity, greed, complicity … all of those have taken root in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of our government. You can see the way they spread over social media, in comment threads, on the lawn signs of people you once considered safe.

They’re penetrating and deepening the cracks in our foundation, and it’s causing structural instability.

It doesn’t matter that some of the children being detained are United States citizens, born here, and caught up in this mass deportation mess created by the president and his abomination of an administration. It should never matter where a child is born, any of us could have been born anywhere. How is this lost on anyone?

In ‘Why Is This Happening to Us?’ (Daily Number of Kids in ICE Detention Jumps 6x Under Trump), Anna Flagg and Shannon Heffernan interviewed people who are seeing what’s happening to these children firsthand. There’s also the most devastating artwork featured in the article, drawn by children living in conditions no child should ever experience. It is a stain on the soul of our country, and a thing that keeps me up at night.

Kristin Kumpf, coordinator for the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention, explained that the public may see videos or photos of the moments people are taken from their homes or snatched off the street, but there is less attention to the conditions children endure in the black box of detention.

“It’s only a matter of time before we see a child die within Dilley or another facility,” Kumpf said.

Hayam El-Gamal and her five children, including 5-year-old twins, have been locked inside Dilley for eight grueling months. Lee, [the attorney] who represents the family, said they’ve received poor medical care and are suffering from psychological stress.

“They’re calling me crying every day,” Lee said. “It’s an unmitigated horror show, and there’s no other way to put it.”

Like many of us, I woke up Thursday to the news that former Prince Andrew aka Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been arrested on his 66th birthday. Of course, he wasn’t arrested for raping Virginia Giuffre, taking part in the trafficking of minors, treating girls like objects to use and be discarded (all while he was and remains the father of two daughters) — no, he was arrested for “misconduct in public office” due to concerns that he shared sensitive information with Epstein while he was the UK trade envoy. Information that undoubtedly (allegedly) made Epstein even wealthier and more powerful than he was already.

The only conclusion one can draw is that people in power across the entire globe take money and government secrets seriously, while women, girls and children are expendable.

Nonetheless, it is good to see some countries are launching investigations into the men (and some women) who hurt the Epstein survivors when they were children — or knew what was happening on the island, and in the mansion, and in Florida, and did nothing. Because somehow these children were outside their circle of compassion. Children. Minors.

I know the stories the men were telling themselves when they went to the island, because I know men like this. The girls were “from the wrong side of the tracks”, they would never have seen such luxury if not for Epstein. They would never be on an island like this. They would never meet such interesting and powerful men. Princes, prime ministers, captains of industry. They were being paid. So what if they were twelve, thirteen, fourteen? These men are not remorseful. They don’t believe the rules apply to them, or that they need to be accountable, or take seriously the pain they’ve caused the survivors. They are just sorry they’ve been caught.

Countries that seem to care a lot more than we do include the UK as stated, but also Norway, France, Sweden, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. They certainly care a lot more than Jesse Watters and his cohorts at Faux News, who joked about Epstein and called him “mostly just a fixer.” Watters, the father of three daughters — a man who has the audacity to brand himself a #girldad — said sometimes those problems he’d fix are, “you need a girl.” Then they laughed. There were women on the panel laughing along with them.

There will always be people who are cold and cruel, who cling to their rage, who wreak havoc wherever they go, who create stress and cause suffering, who point fingers and justify their horrendous behavior a million different ways so they can avoid facing themselves. So be it.

We all get to decide who we’re going to be in this world, no one else can decide for us. Whatever we choose, we only get eighty, maybe one hundred years, and that’s if we’re lucky. Personally, I think the best thing you can do with your time is love big and wide and out loud. Draw a heart around everything, even the painful parts, and fight like hell for what you believe in.

For quick but important priority actions you can take to help people who are being held in detention centers: https://immigrationjustice.quorum.us/

To donate or volunteer (volunteers who speak Spanish are needed most), donations go to legal representation for people being detained, many with their children: https://immigrationjustice.us/our-advocacy/

To call your senators and congresspeople and urge them to push for immediate investigations into any public servant named in the Epstein files: 5calls.org

It’s not ideal, writing on a plane — every so often I lose the wifi and a message pops up: Trying to connect.

Aren’t we all, I think. It’s not ideal because the words are flooding through me and I don’t like the forced pauses, but I don’t like a lot of things these days. I took a Lyft to LAX and I was talking to the driver on the way, and he said his trips to LAX are down significantly.

I said I was not surprised, I imagine there are a lot of people who are scared to travel right now. Scared to leave the country for fear of not getting back in, and scared to come here for fear of ending up in a detention center. I had a little trepidation myself, wondering if I should delete my social media before I went through security — which is a bonkers thing for me to be thinking, except it isn’t. My facebook page was banned last week for hate speech, but there wasn’t any hate speech, I assure you.

There was just me, saying some things that are true, with some pictures to back it up. Things like, hey, if you love the 2nd Amendment then you can’t say citizens run the risk of getting executed for carrying a holstered, registered gun to a protest that wasn’t even a protest. Then I posted pictures of a bunch of dudes carrying assault weapons to protests, and I bet you can guess who they voted for…and somehow that’s hate speech.

My Lyft driver started telling me that he and his family went to Mexico for vacation a few months ago. It was him, his wife and their six-year-old son. They are Armenian. He said there was no trouble at all on the way out, they had a wonderful vacation, but when they came back they got stopped at customs. Suddenly this agent is saying there’s no record this child is their son. Another agent comes over and asks whose child this is. He and his wife say he’s ours, what are you talking about? Incredulous, as any of us would be.

They ask the little boy, are these your parents? Their son is scared and confused, he nods, and leans in closer to his mom, wraps his arm around her waist. The agents say you’re going to have to wait in this room over here, we have no record this boy belongs to you. Now his wife is getting feral, just like I would if someone did this to me. What are you talking about, she snarls, this is my child, this is my son, my boy. Now their son is crying. The agent tells her not to be aggressive, to calm down.

The fury I felt in the back seat listening to this. How many times have women been told to “calm down” by a man pushing them to the brink? Her husband realizes where this is going if he can’t cool things off. He says, Please. Please, check the outgoing flight, here is the flight number, and you’ll see the three of us flew out together. This is my son. This is my wife. Please, you’re scaring my boy, you’re scaring my wife. We’ll wait.

An hour went by. He told me no one came in to update them. His wife was shaking. She called her mother, her mother found an attorney, and the attorney started advising them. His wife kept asking, if they don’t think he’s ours, where will they take him? I won’t let them take him.

Then one of the agents came in and said, “Okay, you can go.” That’s it, no, “So sorry about that. We apologize for traumatizing you. We got it wrong.” Just, “Okay, you can go.” Okay, we’re done getting off on your powerlessness. We’re done making you suffer for now, you’re excused. Consider yourselves lucky you get to go home.

I’m going to my Mom’s house because my stepdad and brother are going to move. It’s a long story or maybe it isn’t, but the punchline is we’re giving up a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper Westside. A three-bedroom, three-bath in a pre-War building in a great neighborhood. If I told you what the rent is you’d think we’re insane. I never imagined we’d leave. I’m saying “we” even though I haven’t lived there in years. I thought one of my kids would take the lease over eventually. I’m saying “we” because I promised my mom I would take care of things.

I can’t share the why’s of this decision, but I can say I’ve been over it in my head ninety gajillion times and I can’t see a way around it, even though I am heartbroken. The thought of ever being on the block and looking up at the building and saying, that’s the building where I grew up, but not being able to walk through the lobby and up the stairs and through the door is painful. Or maybe the painful part is that I can still feel my mom there, and now I won’t have access.

I’ve already gone through her things. The photo albums and letters, her clothes, her jewelry. I wear her engagement ring on my right hand. The ring was her mother’s — my Nanny’s — and one day it will be my daughter’s. But I’ve never gone through the apartment the way I will this time. The way you do when you think, “I’ll never be here again.”

I’m going to go through every closet, every drawer, the storage room downstairs, everything. I’m going to pack her good china — the stuff that only came out on Christmas — and ship it to myself, even though I’ve never seen myself as a fancy china kind of gal. It doesn’t matter, the plates remind me of her, and I find it comforting to have things around me — physical, tangible things, things she also held in her hands — around me. The china is from a restaurant she and my stepdad owned for a year when I was seven. It was a French restaurant called The Little Club.

He wasn’t my stepdad until I was eight, though — that was the year everyone got married, and by everyone, I mean my dad and stepmom got married a month after my mom and stepdad — but that story is for another day.

Now I’m writing from the desk where I wrote for so many years, in the room where I cried myself to sleep so many nights. I went to Staples with my brother this morning and got boxes and packing tape and bubble wrap. After we checked out we went toward the front door, but it became clear there was a commotion, and I realized there were feet sticking out from behind a display. As we got closer, an old man came into view, he had fallen, he was on his back, and there was an alarming amount of blood pooling on the floor around his head. There was a Staples employee on a walkie talkie. I asked if she’d called 911 and she nodded.

The old man was asking someone to tell his wife, I had to get close to him to make out what he was saying. She was in a red Mazda outside. I walked out with my brother and another man. I left my brother with the boxes and bubble wrap, and walked with the man toward the only red Mazda there was. A woman had already come out of Staples to find her, and she was walking toward us, shaking her head. “She doesn’t realize how serious it is,” she said. We got closer. The woman in the Mazda was now attempting to parallel park, but she cut the wheel way too hard and rammed into the curb. The man and I exchanged a meaningful glance. “Damn,” he said, “she’s gonna need the ambulance, too.”

Then she pulled forward and tried to park again, and this time she cut the wheel at the right moment, but she backed up hard, into the car parked behind her. “Yikes,” I said. We would have laughed if her husband hadn’t been bleeding profusely inside. She got out of the car in a fury and slammed the door. She looked about thirty years younger than her husband. No judgement, I’m telling you for a reason. “I told him not to go into the store!” she yelled at me, as if I’d said, “How could you let this happen?” I asked if she had everything she needed from her car. “You’re going to end up riding to the hospital in the ambulance,” I said. “Oh, great!” she retorted.

She marched toward the store. We followed. I passed my brother on the way in, and said I’d be right back. Still no ambulance, and I wanted to make sure the old guy was okay. I can’t say his wife was making me feel confident he’d be looked after. Now he had paper towels pressed up against his head, and blood was seeping into them. The Staples employee was on the phone explaining that she needed an ambulance, now.

The woman started yelling at her husband, “I told you not to come in here! This is the third time this has happened!” The Staples employee asked her to be quiet so she could hear the ambulance dispatcher, but the woman kept yelling, “I’m his wife, I can yell at him if I want to!”

An older woman who looked like a soap star I couldn’t (and still can’t) place approached her and tried to talk to her, and they exchanged some words I couldn’t hear. Then the wife yelled, “Everyone thinks they know, but you don’t know! This is the third time this has happened!” Then we heard sirens. I walked over to her and asked if she needed anything. I thought maybe she was just scared. Maybe she was overwhelmed.

I thought about my dad and how he refused to use his walker at the end of his life, and how terrifying it was because he needed it. Then, when I could convince him to use it, he’d race across the Walgreens parking lot like a speed demon. One day the front wheels of his walker tipped over the curb, and I managed to dart out in front of him and catch him in the nick of time, but I couldn’t hold him and also lift the walker, so we were stuck there, facing each other, me in the street, looking at my dad, holding him up while he yelled at me that, goddammit he didn’t need my help, and the walker, hanging there between us until a woman in a wheelchair came by and lifted it back up onto the curb. My dad was so prideful and embarrassed he didn’t even thank her, but I did. Then he took off racing again.

Maybe this red Mazda wife was just tapped out and losing her mind at Staples, in front of all these strangers who were judging her and thinking this snapshot was the whole picture. Maybe she was usually kind to him. The soap star walked by and said, “When you marry someone thirty years older, this is what you get. You could at least be nice.” Before the woman could respond, we heard sirens right outside the store. Then paramedics were walking in, and I knew they’d be okay. The man I’d walked out with a few minutes before came back in and handed the wife a parking receipt. He’d paid for two hours of parking for her. She started crying.

I’ve spent the last two days sorting things into categories — what are we packing, what are we donating, what are we throwing away? It is wild how many things you find in the place where someone has lived most of her life. My mom and dad and I moved into the apartment when I was two. My mother was so organized about some things, and so disorganized about others. She had a few albums, but most photos were kept haphazardly in tins and shoeboxes, and some in sterilites on a high shelf inside a closet. I opened a bedside drawer today and found a whole bunch just scattered there. They are all mixed together so I often find pictures from my childhood I have never seen before, along with photos from her childhood, and pictures of her mother, my Nanny, when she was young. Which means I can’t not look at every single photo.

I also found a banner I made for her one Mother’s Day. My mother needed gifts and cards and a huge commotion made out of Mother’s Day. Brunch and balloons and as big a spectacle as possible. It was rough for me because of the drinking and the rage and the violence. I found this cloth banner I made that said World’s Best Mom in huge, colorful block letters big enough to be seen from the second-floor window if you were looking out of it down to the street where your daughter was sitting in a horse and buggy, holding it up — which I was one year. I remember making the banner. It hurts my heart to think of it, for both of us.

She was not the world’s best mom, and we both knew it. No banner in the world would make that different. I wish I’d written, You Are Not Perfect But You Are the Only Mom I’d Ever Want — and I Treasure You.

I wish I’d written in a card: One day when you die I will panic not knowing where you are or where you’ve gone or how to keep walking on a planet where you no longer walk.

Today is Valentine’s Day and tomorrow is my birthday. My mom used to bake me heart-shaped cakes which you never would have guessed if you’d seen her in a rage. There’s a lot of pain in this world and sometimes it bends people as they’re trying to grow toward the light, just like trees in the forest. That doesn’t make it okay, it’s just the way of things. There’s a lot of love in this world if you look carefully, too.

Happy Valentine’s Day, friends. I love you. Thank you so much for being here. Decided to run a week-long Valentine’s Day/Birthday, love-for-all-of-us special if you have been wanting to become a paid subscriber. 25% off annual subscriptions for one year, and I promise I will not work with 25% less dedication xo

It makes me very sad and also enraged, that every time I write about the countless experiences I had with predatory men as a little girl and a teenager and a young woman — and continue to have as a grown woman (with the added horror of having to worry about my teenage daughter out in this mess) — there is a deafening chorus of women in the comments saying, Me, too.

I wonder who we would all be if we did not have to spend so much energy assessing our surroundings all the time, and wondering whether we are safe — safe in a literal, physical sense — but also safe to express ourselves, to say no, to speak up, to take up space, to not waste so much time questioning our worth, to not have to fight so hard for basic things like respect, dignity and bodily autonomy — while simultaneously being expected to hold up the sky.

I wonder who we’d be if we could jog at 5am or 9pm without thinking twice, if we could walk through an empty parking lot without glancing over our shoulders, if we could walk down a desolate street without feeling the need to put our keys between our fingers, if we could leave our drinks unattended when we’re out with friends…

Why do they never ask what men were wearing?

I wonder who we’d be if we were believed when something bad happened, when a man did a thing that is painful to repeat, let alone to have lived through. I wonder who we’d be if we could pass a man on a hiking trail and not worry if there was no one else in sight. I wonder who we’d be if the names they redacted were the names of the children, not the horrific men who hurt them.

I wonder who we’d be if the good men in our lives worked a little bit harder to show us we aren’t in this fight alone — because it feels that way too much of the time.

Maybe we’d smile more.

Sending love to anyone having a tough time right now. None of this is easy, but we are not delicate, and we have each other. That’s a lot.

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This was the era when my daughter was using air quotes incorrectly and I wasn’t stopping her because it cracked me up, every time. She’d come into the kitchen and tell me she was “hungry” — but she really was hungry. She’d draw pictures of us under rainbows, or riding on unicorns. She was writing letters to the Tooth Fairy, and wishing on stars.

I had a bag full of snacks and water, bandaids and alcohol wipes, sunscreen and an extra sweatshirt — the way you do when you’re the mother of kids — a blanket and a book in case I might end up with a little time to read while they played at the park. Doubtful, but I used to carry books around “just in case” all the time back then.

We turned the corner onto Main Street, the playground was just a couple of blocks ahead. City Hall was coming up on our right, we’d have to cross the street to get to the playground. There were two men standing by a tree near the crosswalk. I saw them see the girls. I saw one of them say something to the other, and watched them look around. I picked up my pace — I didn’t want to assume there was a problem, but my sensors were going off.

I was about fifteen feet away from the girls, thirty feet away from the men. The girls were between us, caught up in their own world, not skipping now, but talking intensely. I saw one of the men saunter toward the girls saying something, while the other one laughed — and I watched the girls come to a stop. My daughter looked over her shoulder for me in slow motion. I was running before I knew I was running.

I was yelling, too — HEY! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THEM! — those were the words that came thundering out of my mouth. I was surprised they were not riding on a blast of flames. I was surprised those men were not incinerated on the spot where they stood. The one guy just looked me up and down as I came to an enraged halt in front of the girls.

“Look at you. You are fine, baby,” he drawled, chuckling. “You should smile more.”

The girls understood this was serious. The other man had walked over and was standing a few feet away from his buddy, also amused. I had an arm up between the girls and these men, the way my grandmother did when I rode in the bucket seat of her car when I was little, and she’d have to stop short. As if the arm of someone who loves you can save you from danger, or from death. Maybe it can. The rage was so intense I felt I could have taken on both those bastards, right there in front of City Hall. “You’re sick,” I said quietly, “These girls are SEVEN. These are children. Go fuck yourself sideways.”

I heard my daughter make a little squeak, something that sounded like she was surprised I was using the forbidden F-word (twice), and also proud of me. Then I turned around, took the girls by the hands, tightly, and walked with them to the playground. They weren’t skipping anymore, they weren’t laughing, either, but they looked impressed. They were wide-eyed and staring at me like I had wings. I wished I did. I wished I could pick them up and fly them somewhere safe, but there’s nowhere safe for children in this world.

Just ask Deepak Chopra.

Here’s a tip for a lot of women — if you want to study The Divine Feminine, my advice would be to study with a woman. Otherwise you run the risk of learning that your job is to soften endlessly around the constructs that serve men — and any anger/concern/resentment/confusion/questioning you may experience around that idea — is an invitation to explore your resistance more deeply.

LO fucking L. Do you know how many straight, male “spiritual teachers” are trying to teach women to be grateful for the patriarchy? They’re saying “comply or die” but dressing it up in “love and light.” Why are you giving them your money? If you keep centering these men, they will keep teaching you to gaslight yourself, which is the opposite of healing. Do you do it because they have names like Deepak and Bikram and you assume they are bringing you ancient Eastern wisdom? If they are white men, do you do it because they are dripping in mala beads they bought off Amazon (the website, to be clear, not the rainforest)? Is it because they’re men and you feel men make better experts?

There are a lot of men who are more comfortable taking up space, that is true. There are a lot of men who do not spend a wild and incalculable amount of time — time they will never get back — agonizing over what to charge for their courses and workshops and retreats, because they don’t doubt the value of their contributions or hesitate to put a hefty price tag on their time, even if they are not particularly qualified to be teaching, preaching, proselytizing, etc, about whatever it is they’re selling.

They are products of the culture in which we all exist. You can feed that culture or starve it, but if you feed it, do not be surprised when your “spiritual teacher” sends emails to his pedo buddy saying, “The universe is a human construct. No such thing. Cute girls are aware when they make noises.” Don’t be surprised when you find out they’ve fleeced people out of their life savings. Don’t let it blow your house down when you find out the charismatic leader of a his own “brand” of yoga, the one who talked about alignment on the mat and off, has a whole secret life going on, and an inability to be accountable for the harm he’s caused, ahimsa be damned. Don’t be shocked when there are so many rape allegations and sexual harassment lawsuits they flee the country to avoid an arrest warrant and a $7 million judgement against them.

Do ask yourself why you would continue to study with people like that.

I’d give you all the SA warnings now, but we live in the timeline of the Epstein files. It seems survivors can share anything and no one really cares, except in Europe where they launch investigations and take legal action. There’s nothing I’m about to say that rises to the level of some of the things I’ve read in the last few days, but I am going to talk about my own experiences as a girl, a woman, and a survivor in this world. Please stop here if you need to, we all need to be gentle with ourselves right now (and always).

If you’re a man who is not a survivor of abuse, though, these are things you should know.

The first time I saw a penis I was in Central Park. I was eight years old, I was sketching with my third grade class, off with my best friend because we’d found a pretty tree, and this man decided to show two little girls what an erect penis looks like, and what masturbation looks like, too. He laughed maniacally when we grabbed our sketchbooks and ran screaming for our teacher. I don’t know if they called our parents, but I can tell you there was no conversation about it after. It was just a thing that happened.

The second time I saw a penis it belonged to a man in a raincoat on a public bus. I was ten years old, on my way to school. He made eye contact with me, and then glanced down meaningfully, like we were sharing a secret. I looked down in his lap and didn’t understand what I was looking at — and then I did. But I didn’t understand why, and I still don’t. What kind of sick man gets off on showing his erection to a child?

The first time a man grabbed me I was thirteen, in a stairwell on my way to ballet. I had braces. My favorite color was purple. I drew horses in the margins of my notebook. I was a kid. He grabbed me from behind, put one hand over my mouth, the other between my legs while he shoved his hips into me and told me not to move, okay? I’m glad he asked because it snapped my brain out of freeze mode and brought me back to a place where there were options.

I bit his hand and elbowed him in the ribs and yelled NO as loudly as I could. No, I will not just stand here and let you do this to me. I sobbed and stared at him in horror as I crab-walked up the stairwell away from him as fast as I could, determined not to turn my back on him again. I watched him run down the stairs and out the door.

My mother didn’t come to the studio to get me when they called to tell her. These were just the kinds of things that happened in the world, there was nothing she could do to save me.

I am not going to talk about being assaulted when I was sixteen, though I could. I didn’t get away that time. I blamed myself because I drank too much. I blamed myself because my best friend said I was probably flirting. I blamed myself because I should have known better. I blamed myself because that’s what the culture taught me to do. He was a grown man. He got a sixteen-year-old drunk, on purpose. I said no. I begged. I fought. It didn’t matter. I’ve written about these things before.

I am going to say that children are not safe in this world, and they are made to know it quickly. I am going to say that when you have children in this world, all you want to do is keep them safe, unless there is something very, very wrong with you.

Here’s the other part. It isn’t just strangers, it’s your parents’ friends. It’s the husbands of the women who are best friends with your mother. The women who call themselves your aunt even though they aren’t. Their husbands show up at your house when you are home alone. The same husbands who laugh with your stepdad and have dinner at your dining room table regularly.

They pretend they’re looking for your mom. They might come in, or they might hover by the front door, making you feel uncomfortable for reasons you don’t understand. You think it’s you. Why are you so awkward? Why can’t you be normal? Then they lean in and kiss you on the mouth, and you’re twelve.

Or they get your phone number somehow, the phone that rings just in your room, and they call. They want to surprise your parents with something, and they’ll ask your opinion. Then they’ll ask how school is going. You’ve been trained to be polite, so you answer. Then they’ll share something weirdly personal and their voice will start to sound funny, and you’ll say you have to go. They’ll ask you to stay on the phone for just a few more minutes and you won’t know why until you’re older, and it suddenly occurs to you one day and you feel sick.

One night when you’re sixteen, a friend of your parents’ will offer to take you around a college town you’re interested in, a place you’ve applied to. You’ll think you’re safe but you’ll be wrong.

One morning way back in 2012, when my son was six and my daughter was almost four — back when Barack Obama was president — I got a phone call. It was early, too early for calls, but it was the young woman (and by that I mean twenty-six, not twelve) who opened my yoga studio in the mornings. She was a friend, or so I thought at the time. It was just after 6am, but I was up, making pancakes. My kids were at the dining room table.

I picked up and put the phone on speaker so I could flip the pancakes that were flashing little air pockets at me.

“Everything okay?”

“Ummm, no,” she said, “There’s a mountain lion in the courtyard and the police are here and Fish and Game are on the way.”

I thought I’d heard her wrong or she was playing some kind of odd joke on me. My yoga studio was around the corner from the 3rd Street Promenade, a very busy, very populated part of Santa Monica. There were all kinds of restaurants and stores there, businesses on the surrounding blocks, and residential streets in every direction. A mountain lion in the courtyard was like a mountain lion in Times Square. It made no sense.

“Wait. What? A mountain lion, are you serious?”

She was serious. A mountain lion had come down from the Santa Monica Mountains during the night, undoubtedly looking for food. I canceled all the morning classes. After a while someone from the Santa Monica Police Department called to tell me what was happening. They’d closed the gates of the courtyard and set up a perimeter on 2nd Street. The Fire Department was there. Fish and Game were there. They were going to try to subdue the mountain lion by shooting it with a tranquilizer dart. I admit I wondered why they didn’t crush up some pills in a huge steak, but figured they possessed expertise I did not.

Apparently Fish and Game had been tracking the mountain lion population in Southern California for years, which included 275-square miles of range in the Santa Monica Mountains — an area hemmed in by freeways, the ocean, and agricultural land. That isn’t enough habitat for more than 10-15 mountain lions, so when young males grew into adults, they would often be challenged by another adult male in the area. Sometimes they’d make a run for it and end up dead, hit by a car on the freeway. Other times, apparently, they’d end up in the courtyard of my yoga studio.

I felt protective of this big cat. It didn’t seem coincidental that he’d walked into our particular courtyard — how could anything about this entire event feel like happenstance? Animals run on instinct, especially when they’re scared, and I wondered if he felt he might be safe there. It wasn’t his fault there wasn’t enough land for him, or enough food, it was our fault. He was probably a lot more freaked out to be in the courtyard than we were to have him there. I could almost see the scene. All the police, firemen, sirens. I wanted to go over, to see if I could help in some way, but I had my kids, and they weren’t letting anyone into or out of the area, anyway.

They shot the mountain lion with a tranquilizer dart, and he ran for the gate trying to escape, because of course he did. So then they shot him with bullets.

I don’t know why I want to tell you about this right now, except that it’s something to do with accountability or the absence of it. About “gurus” exchanging abhorrent emails with pedophiles because they think they’re above the rules, better than the rules, that their “genius” and their money and their status exempts them. Surely, the peons who study with them will never know. The young women who go to their trauma centers and fork over thousands of dollars to heal don’t run in these circles.

You know all the men who went to the island, and Epstein himself? I promise you they thought things like, these girls are being paid. They’d never get to see an island like this any other way. They’d never meet such powerful, interesting men. There are people in the comments under posts about the files today, saying things like that. Trying to litigate how old a child is. Asking where their parents were. Every survivor sees those comments. I would bet there are desperate kids out there right now, not reporting something because of people and comments like that.

These children saw things and were subjected to depravity no child should ever experience. They were prey, and I promise you these men did not think twice about it. I don’t understand it and I never will, but I know that it’s true. It’s the same thing that enables a man to flash a little girl at the park or on a bus, or rub up against her on a subway, or grab her thirteen-year-old self in a stairwell on her way to ballet class.

It’s the same mechanism that enables a man to drug and rape his wife for years on end, and invite 72 other men in the area to join him…and it’s the same mechanism that makes it possible for 72 other men to exist and say yes to that. Now think about a group of men with billions of dollars and ask yourself what they wouldn’t do if they could.

I don’t understand the desire to destroy someone or something beautiful, defenseless and innocent, but I suspect it comes from a deep, ugly self-loathing. Some sense that you can’t ever be that thing, but you can dominate it. It’s probably why these soulless excuses for men specifically hunt endangered species. They go through life doing whatever they want, knowing they won’t pay the price, because they make the rules.

There’s something about the mountain lion that has to do with the Trumps and Musks and Zucks and Thiels and Epsteins and Chopras and Gates and Bezos of the world taking so much more than they need — and when people start to notice — showing them who’s boss. Making them understand, laws be damned. I wish we could grasp that most of us are the mountain lion, trying to survive in impossible conditions. Trying to find a mate, maybe have a family, find some food and shelter.

It’s not a lot to hope for, but they want it all. No healthcare for us, none that’s affordable, but armed militia on the streets, making us listen if we dare to question their authority. Killing us if we think they don’t mean it.

So here we are, with our rage and our grief and our belief in something so much better than this. The fucking bitches who won’t stop caring. The protesters who won’t mind their own business. The survivors who won’t stop trying to get some justice.

The women who decide they’ve had enough and are done smiling on command.

It’s time to bare our teeth instead.

I picked up my pace and glanced up at the hotel to see if anyone was on any of the balconies, but they were empty. I looked over my shoulder, and sure enough, the man had paused. When we made eye contact he started running toward me, eyes wild. I screamed. I screamed so loudly I woke my dog.

Last night I had a similar dream. I was in some kind of village, but everyone was dressed like it was Colonial times. It’s my subconscious, what can I tell you? There was a furious woman chasing me. I ducked into a store. There were rows of bookshelves almost to the ceiling, there was a huge, empty birdcage for sale in a corner, there were umbrellas in a stand — more likely parasols if I was dreaming realistically — or so Google tells me.

I ducked behind one of the huge shelves, and peeked around the corner in time to see the woman come bounding through the doors. She knew exactly where I was.

I understood she intended to kill me, I didn’t know why. I looked down and realized I had a pole in my hands, so held it up and yelled at her to stay away from me! Woke the dog, again.

You don’t have to be an oneirologist to catch the drift. I’m feeling vulnerable, like there are threats coming from every side. The baby carriage represents, no doubt, some feeling I have that I can’t keep my kids safe. No one being on the balconies is the disappointment I feel in people who are going about their lives as though everything is normal. Finding myself in Colonial America is (almost) hilarious. I have to give my subconscious an A+ for use of metaphor. Maybe tonight I’ll dream of Joan of Arc.

On the plus side, the moment I open my mouth to yell, I yell. This is new. For most of my adult life, if I have a nightmare and want to scream, no sound comes out. This is a terrible feeling, whether you’re awake or asleep. The feeling of being in imminent danger and wanting to call for help, only to find you cannot make a sound? I take it as a positive change that now when I go to scream in my dream, I scream in real life — it took me years but I have finally found my voice. Perhaps not a positive development for the dog, but I like to think I make it up to him in a million other ways.

There are good reasons to have some hope. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father are home. I take this as the most tangible and joy-affirming evidence that our loud, unwavering refusal to accept the inhumanity and lawlessness of this administration — works. It might not work as quickly as we’d like, but it works — and so does our judicial system, some of the time.

Democratic U.S. Representative from Texas Joaquin Castro has been working tirelessly on their release. He went to Dilley Detention Center to meet with Liam and his dad Adrian while they were detained. He traveled with them from Texas back to Minnesota. Their attorney, Mark Prokosch, is continuing to represent them. There is a gofundme for Liam and his family if you are able to contribute any amount, it’s going to be a long road.

There are judges like the Honorable U.S. District Judge Fred Biery. In his Opinion and Order granting a Writ of Release to Liam and his father, he did not hold back. I encourage you to read his Opinion in full, and I propose we call him Fiery Biery from this day forward.

Yes, “Biery” is pronounce “beer” “ee” and no, I don’t care. Here is just a taste:

“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us the perfidious lust for unbridled power, and the imposition of cruelty in its quest, know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”

We shall see what happens with the DHS bill. The Epstein files are horrific. There’s too much coming at us every day, and no one can keep up, which is the point. It seems 37% of our population is still supporting this administration for reasons that boggle the mind. They seem to feel fine if the Constitution guarantees their rights, but no one else’s — certainly not liberals, immigrants, Black or brown people, or anyone in the LGBTQ community — and also most women, generally. Maybe they’d make an exception for a few people they know, but probably not.

Here is a funny thing about strangers. When we walk out the door in the morning, we’re all strangers to most of the people we encounter. We don’t know a thing about them — what they’ve been through, what they’re going through right now, what keeps them up at night. If you crossed paths with either of my children today, it’s likely you would not know they are mine — but they mean everything to me, and I hope with my entire heart that you would treat them the way I would treat your most precious people if we met somewhere, somehow.

We all need a kind stranger sometimes. How this is confusing to anyone is beyond me. The smug confidence that allows a person to “other” someone else is one of the most painful forms of ignorance I’ve seen in my lifetime. These are the people who believe in God and call themselves Christian, too. If that’s your worldview, aren’t these God’s children you’re “othering”? I don’t know, but I would think God is going to have some words for you at the Pearly Gates before you head elsewhere. You might want to slow down with the laughing emojis — just a thought.

There’s no such thing as other people’s children. We all belong to each other, and to the world.

Sending you a lot of love, friends. Keep at it. Love always wins in the end.

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We weren’t extremely close, but had a lot of friends in common. We’d been at school together a few years by then. We’d been at the same parties, laughed together at school assemblies, sat next to each other on the bus heading to field trips here and there. He could be snarky, and though I hadn’t discovered my own snark yet, I appreciated it in other people as long as it wasn’t mean-spirited.

When the bell rang at the end of the day, I ran to my locker and swapped out the books I needed to lug home, leaving the rest behind. I liked to walk across the park, and those textbooks added a lot of weight. I grabbed my coat, spun my lock a few times, and headed to the boys’ locker room. I stood in Room Zero, right outside the locker room exit — the only classroom on the basement level. The gymnasium was through the boys’ locker room, the coaches’ offices were located in there, too. Once in a while you’d have to walk through while boys were changing to get to the gym.

A design flaw, no doubt. No one wanted to walk through at the wrong time. After a few minutes when it felt like most of the boys in school had emptied out — I called in. “John! Are you almost out? I really have to go!”

John yelled back that he was coming. He sounded aggravated. One of my good friends was in Room Zero with his girlfriend. We all kind of laughed because John sounded so annoyed. Several minutes went by, and I started to worry about making it to my ballet class. Couldn’t he just run my notebook out? I could almost hear my mother saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” She had a lot of sayings like that. They seemed so negative to me, and I hated when she was proven right. I called in again, “Hey, John, I really have to go or I’m going to be late!”

John came barreling through the doorway, pushing past me into Room Zero. I exchanged glances with my other friends. He slammed his bag down on a desk and yanked my notebook out. Then he flung it at me. Before I could respond, he was moving toward me, and in one motion he grabbed me and lifted me off my feet. It was awkward and all wrong. I could not understand what was happening. Was he joking? He spun around in a weird circle, gaining momentum.

If we had been kids playing in a park, it might have been fun at first, the kind of thing where someone has you by both wrists and you spin until you’re dizzy and then land on the grass and watch the world fly by — but this was not that. My brain couldn’t make sense of it, the blur of desks, the shocked faces of my friends standing there, mouths agape, the recessed lights in the ceiling flashing overhead.

Then he let go of me, and I went flying into a desk and hit the floor hard. I stared at the burgundy rug until things stopped spinning, and then up at him, shocked. My friends stared at him, too. The room was totally silent except for a ringing in my ears. Then one of my wrists started throbbing and I looked at it and saw it was already swelling. My knee hurt, my hip, too, and somehow, the back of my head. It was tender when I touched it. I must’ve hit the desk on the way down. Tears were spilling, but a lot of the pain was the brutality of what had happened without warning.

He left without a word, without looking at me — just took off and left me there on the industrial carpet. My friends came over right away and asked if I was okay. They helped me up, said they could not believe it, and asked if I wanted them to go to the main office and get help. I shook my head. I was having a whole nervous system response. My hands were shaking, my whole body was shaking.

I sat down at one of the desks and replayed the last ten minutes in my mind. I wasn’t making it to my dance class, anyway. I couldn’t understand. Had I sounded really upset when I’d called into the locker room? Both of my friends assured me I had not, I just sounded like someone who needed to go.

After a few minutes I felt the need to be outside. Room Zero had no windows and I was light-headed. I wanted to be alone because I felt like crying and didn’t want to do that in front of anyone. My mom would get violent with me physically for no reason sometimes when she drank, but to have a friend do that with no warning was something that caught me completely off guard.

That’s how I feel all the time these days. It’s not that I’m surprised, it’s that I’d forgotten how cruel people could be, casually — with glee, even, or satisfaction. It’s Emmett Till. It’s Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain. It’s Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. It’s George Floyd. It’s Sonya Massey. And that’s off the top of my head. American citizens —sometimes kids — being shot dead by angry men in uniform is not a new thing.

I knew we were in trouble when we all watched Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, and people started talking about a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and fentanyl use. As if the punishment for having a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill is death, or you need anything more than a knee on your neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds to put an end to your life.

We’ve had moments when I thought we were moving in a better direction. I remember when white people started to understand that Black families were having “The Talk” with their kids, and I thought we might finally have our own talk, as a country.

But no. Instead, 77 million people decided to put the insurrectionist felon back in office.

I knew we were in trouble for sure a few months ago when a friend I’ve known for twenty years brought up fentanyl when I mentioned George Floyd. I stared at him for a long time and my heart broke because I knew our friendship was over. He told me he likes the president because he “tells it like it is.” I like friends who respect women and Black people and the LGBTQ community and immigrants and the Constitution.

Now we have terror on our streets, and the folks who voted for this are unrepentant about it. Remorseless. My heart is broken for Minnesota. If this was about immigration, ICE wouldn’t be in Minnesota. There are 80,000 undocumented immigrants there, versus well over 2.5 million in CA and 2 million in Texas, almost a million in New York, and 700K+ in Florida. The president is sending his armed, masked militia to the blue states he hates the most. They’ll leave if the governor will give up the voter rolls. The goalposts change all the time, but the lawlessness does not.

He said he was going to deport “the worst of the worst” but only 5% of people who’ve been kidnapped off the streets have criminal convictions.

Liam Ramos is sleeping all day in Dilley Detention Center because he’s depressed and malnourished. A five-year-old is depressed. Renee Nicole Good’s children are undoubtedly still trying to understand how their mother can be gone. Alex Pretti’s family is reeling from the loss of him.

The conditions in these detention centers are inhumane. The food is inedible, they don’t turn on the heat, people are denied medical attention, these centers proclaim they aren’t responsible if detainees are sexually assaulted by guards. Is this who people want to be? My used-to-be-friend likes this president?

I tried a few times after that coffee to send some links, but I realized quickly it was pointless. He is gone. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If I saw pods that had absorbed people’s empathy that would make more sense than what I do see. The laughing emojis when American citizens are murdered in cold blood. The lack of compassion when families are ripped apart. I can’t tell you what it does to me, but I probably don’t have to because I’m sure it does the same to you. It is so gut-wrenching to witness people lose their humanity.

There was a woman interviewed on 60 Minutes. An ICE vehicle side-swiped her car and forced her into the parked cars on her other side. She thought it was a normal fender bender, but then ICE agents got out of the car that hit her with guns drawn. She thought a regular person was going to get out and they’d exchange insurance information, but no, masked, armed men, pointing guns at her, screaming for her to get out of the car.

She asked what was happening and why, and they yanked her out, threw her to the ground, handcuffed her, and took her to a detention center. She’d had kidney surgery a few weeks prior. She’s a citizen. She started urinating blood a few hours after they assaulted her. I commented underneath a clip of her interview. Just said how brave she was for speaking out about what happened to her — and some man told me she should have stayed home and that wouldn’t have happened.

I asked him if he realized she was just driving. Just a woman, out driving, living her life, and they side-swiped her because she was brown. Brown while driving, that was her crime. He said she should have listened and gotten out of the car. So I said okay, so I should stay home and not drive anywhere, but if I do, and I am hit by a car, and men get out with guns drawn — your advice is that I calmly exchange insurance information with them? Or do I never leave my house?

I saw someone comment under a post today that she “liked it better when everyone wasn’t so political.” I liked it better when we lived in a democracy, even if it was imperfect and we had work to do. I liked it better when the president and his cohorts at least pretended to care about the Constitution, the three branches of government, the checks and balances.

I liked it better when I didn’t know how many of my friends would go about their business like everything is okay because they think this won’t affect them. Do they not care about their constitutional rights? Do they not care about the rights of our immigrant community? I understand it does no one any good if we’re all in puddles of despair and angst, but there’s a middle ground somewhere between that — and checking out.

When the kindest people you know are all enraged, that’s your cue to realize they’re upset because they’re kind. It’s not that they’ve suddenly become militant and angry, they’re in pain. They’re grieving for this country, for the friends they’ve lost, for the people who are being harmed, for the lack of compassion, decency and basic humanity.

But for every person with a laughing emoji when tragedy strikes, there are ten to twenty more who feel gutted and refuse to accept the heartlessness. Not everyone has been body-snatched, or empathy-drained. I feel leveled when I see people who have become hardened. It really is like watching a huge and terrifying percentage of the population succumb to a virus. There are so many more of us who do not want it to be like this, and never did.

The DHS bill was separated from the other funding bills early this morning, in an effort by Senate Democrats to keep the government running (to continue funding FEMA and The Coast Guard, for example), while giving them more time to negotiate on ways to “rein ICE in.” This means they have not approved further funding of ICE, which will not make as much of an impact as it should because they already have tens of billions of dollars to fund this insanity thanks to the Big Ugly Bill.

Maybe we can get some kind of Code of Conduct going, an end to the masks which would undoubtedly help, and a serious uptick in investigations and transparency over violations. I hope they will fight for arrests in Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s murders as well. Am I hopeful about “reining ICE in”? No, I can’t say that I am. Those men out on the streets look like they are enjoying themselves. They look satisfied when they spray a woman directly in the face with a chemical agent.

Is there a chance Democrats could have fought to abolish ICE when they are in the minority? I don’t think so, sadly. Which brings us to the midterms, the FBI raid on Georgia, and a thousand other ways they’re trying to cheat, but let’s save that for next time. We have to be reasonable with ourselves.

I went to a breathing workshop the other night, and the guy leading it kept saying you are not delicate and it felt good to hear that and to assert it for myself. I’m not delicate. I’m sensitive and I feel things deeply and I am devastated by people who do not care about their neighbors, but I’m not delicate and I won’t “tone it down” to make anyone comfortable. This isn’t the time to tone it down, it’s the time to light it up. It’s the time to stand for whatever you believe in and fight for it, even if it’s hard and you aren’t sure what to do.

There will always be cruel people — there always have been. There will be people you think are friends and they will let you down, and sometimes you’ll be the friend who lets someone else down. You don’t have to be perfect to help. You don’t have to get everything right. You just have to try. Today is a general strike. The idea is not to buy anything at all, and to stay home from work and school if you can. You may not be able to stay home, but you can do something, right? There are so many ways to pitch in right now, and they all matter.

This week was one of my hardest yet. Watching what’s happening to our country is like watching someone you love as they suffer from a painful disease. It’s like being in the ICU doing everything you can to advocate, but nothing feels like enough. I genuinely do not think the people who are in support of this administration recognize democracy is on life support. The lies and hypocrisy are toxic and this president and his appointees are giving us an overdose every day, but there’s an antidote.

Check on your friends, and be gentle with yourself. Reach out if you need encouragement. Don’t give up and don’t stop fighting back, even if you do one small thing each day. Taking action will help so you don’t feel powerless. Make one phone call to your representatives. Write one email to the CEO of a company you won’t support because they’re complicit.* Check on your neighbors, see if they need anything, even if it’s just someone to care. If you’re in an area that is likely to be targeted by our government, start making plans. Get organized, get whistles (but don’t buy them today ;)).

Lastly, make your art, whatever it may be. We have to lift each other up however we can. Remember this is not forever, it won’t always be like this. We’re just in a very tough part of the story. The story isn’t over. Love always wins in the end, but sometimes there’s an epic battle first. Everyone knows that. This is the epic battle part. We can do it. We are doing it.

Love you. Thank you for being here, truly.

*If you want to pop off an email:

ecr@hilton.com

ted_decker@homedepot.com

keith.rozolis@abcsupply.com

And once again: 5calls.org

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This is how an organized crime gang would behave if they moved into a neighborhood and wanted to make sure we understood they were in charge now. They’d let one of their own murder a mother of three in cold blood, and not worry about the videos with the five different angles, the slow motion renderings, the 3D models. They’d block local law enforcement from the scene, tamper with evidence, and allow the killer to walk free. They’d hide him, even.

They’d send a puppy-executioner to tell a fictional, insulting tale about what happened, without even bothering to get the glaring facts right.

Later, when the autopsy results showed she had a pulse for eight long minutes while her wife sat on the ground, sobbing into their dog — eight minutes they refused to allow a doctor to check on her — they’d just shrug.

Then they’d sit back and laugh, watching their zombie-apocalypse-followers repeat the party line.

Before we could wrap our heads around that, we’d see photos of a sweet, tiny boy in a light blue bunny hat being loaded into an ICE vehicle, a giant gloved hand on his back. They’d lie about that, too. They’d say his dad was here illegally, his whole family was — and not worry about the fact that it isn’t true. Because facts don’t matter, and they know it. They can just say a thing is true. I don’t even think their followers believe it — they understand the game.

Daddy tells you what he wants you to say, or he sends Noem, Miller, Hegseth, Leavitt, or Vance to do his bidding. It doesn’t matter, they all spit venom the same, and you take your orders like a good soldier. Yes, Daddy. Understood, Daddy. We’ll go drive those left-wing liberals crazy, Daddy, hahahaha. Will you make us another AI video shitting on them later as a treat?

Then they get on the internet and say black is white or wrong is right or good is bad or these people are getting what they deserve and soon America will be white again — like it or not you woke-ass whiners, why don’t you just leave if you hate it here so much?

I don’t know to what degree you have to hate yourself to give your blind loyalty to a man who would step directly onto your head if it was in his way, but it must be a lot. I guess the rage must run so deep, you can look at an innocent little boy who is surely traumatized by now — and feel nothing — and be willing to make up stories about his family so you can laugh at devastated strangers on the internet.

You can say it was his dad who abandoned him, or that his mother wouldn’t open the door and that’s why this happened, and what were these kindhearted, patriotic ICE agents supposed to do? Drive away and leave him on the doorstep with his mom right on the other side of the front door, begging them to do exactly that, while her husband screamed at her not to open the door — because if she did, they’d take her, too — and then who would be there when their middle school tween got home?

You can watch a man shoot a woman in the face three times because of his teeny, weeny, peeny ego, and side with him, and feel not even a flicker of sadness for her, for her three children, for her wife, her parents, or her dog. You just don’t care. She should have stayed home, like you. She shouldn’t have given a crap about her neighbors, then she’d be alive.

How about now, I wonder? Alex Pretti is getting dangerously close to someone you’d almost like, minus the liberalism and caring about your neighbors part. He was all heart and courage and kindness, so nothing like you, but you catch my drift. If you’d passed him on a hiking trail, you might not have been sure. He’ll never go hiking again, though. Tall, young, white, thirty-seven-year-old lawful gun-owner with a permit to carry. Totally legal in Minnesota. So now what. Now they’ve executed a white man who believed in the Second Amendment.

It doesn’t matter, though. These folks will play whatever game their Daddy wants. A couple of weeks ago they were screaming that Renee Nicole Good should have stayed home, minding her own business. Then she’d be alive. Same people who have no problem that Kyle Rittenhouse drove twenty miles to go to a protest and involve himself in other people’s business. Hypocrisy runs through their veins in place of blood, it’s how it is.

Today, a lot of these people were screaming that Alex Pretti put his hands on federal agents and then went for his gun — but he absolutely did not. This is getting so old and tired. This is a painful and horrifying execution, so do not watch unless you have the resources to do that right now, or feel the need to see for yourself. He was there filming. An ICE agent initiated contact with him, starting pushing him back toward the sidewalk. Then another woman, also filming, had a chemical agent sprayed directly into her face. Alex went to help her. He’s a registered nurse. He works at the VA hospital in MN, has for ten years. Everyone there loves him. Everyone there loved him.

He was always helping people, always kind. He’s been protesting since Renee Good, he talked to his parents about it a couple of weeks ago. They told him to be careful, and he promised them he would, said he wouldn’t do anything but observe. They are heartbroken, obviously, but they are also furious.

When they pepper-sprayed the woman, Alex went to help. He put his body between her and the agent. He said, “It’s okay!” attempting to de-escalate, a thing ICE agents are supposed to do but definitely 100% do not do. He also asked if she was okay. Then they sprayed him in the face. You can kill people like that. Then five or six guys tackled him. His hands were on the ground the entire time, likely because he couldn’t see.

They beat him, and one of the agents took Alex’s gun out of his holster — you can see that happen in the video. Alex Pretti was not just incapacitated when they executed him, but also unarmed. Then one of the thugs shot him, multiple times. They executed him. At no time did he reach for his gun. At no time did he threaten the agents.

If a single Democrat senator funds this DHS bill, that needs to be the end of their career. We need to vote out anyone who continues to participate in the war our government is waging against its own people. They’re killing us in the streets. Their supporters will be with them till the end if they’re still with them now, so stop wasting your energy fighting with people who want to pretend up is down.

We need our energy to keep each other safe, any way we can. If you’re here in the states and you haven’t been doing anything proactive, if you thought this might pass you by, if you don’t like to “be political” — non-participation is not an option anymore. Truly, it is not. It hasn’t been. Please find a way to help.

The incredible made two versions of the Renee Good t-shirts from my little protest sign. They’re so great. All the proceeds after cost go to either the ACLU (always doing incredible work to fight this administration at every turn):

https://wyrdshirts.threadless.com/designs/just-another

or the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network:

https://wyrdshirts.threadless.com/designs/just-another-trans-version

Sending you so much love. I am angry, I am heartbroken, I am so horrified by people who are still supporting this — but I am not without hope. There are more of us. There are more of us, I promise you. We have so much heart. We have not lost our way. We have not lost our souls. It is scary, but we have each other.

Meet you in the comments if you need a little love.

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I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw his bottom lip trembling, his huge blue eyes clouded over, his brow furrowed.

I pulled the car to the side of the road, turned it off, and unbuckled my seatbelt so I could turn all the way around and take his dimpled little hand in mine. “Someday, yes, but not for a very long time,” I said, and hoped that it was true. A fat tear spilled out of one eye, then the other. He wiped his tears with the backs of his hands. “I don’t want you to die, ever,” he said, “I don’t want you to leave me.” Then he started crying in earnest.

I climbed over the console and into the backseat, unbuckled his carseat and pulled him onto my lap. I held him as hard as I could and told him I would never leave him, because part of me would always be alive inside him, in his heart, and in his memories — and that I took really good care of myself and planned on living to be at least one hundred-and-eight. Which made him giggle a little. I told him I loved him more than all the stars in the sky, I loved him bigger than the universe, and wider than the entire ocean.

A five-year-old should never be detained and I feel sick in my soul. What is happening to us? What kind of person can do that to a child? What kind of people can defend it?

I had a hard time getting my thoughts together this week because they’re taking children now. I’m sure I’m no different than many of you: heartbroken, furious, frustrated. Hours ago, they approved the funding bill for DHS which includes more money and no additional regulations for ICE — and by “they” I mean Congress, and by “they” I also mean seven Democrats who crossed party lines to vote with their Republican “colleagues”.

I feel the need to put that word in parentheses, because the root of the word is legare, a Latin verb meaning “to choose or send as a deputy or emissary” or “to bequeath.” That’s what Congress is supposed to be, a place where we, the people, have sent our emissaries to represent our needs and wants, and vote in a way that is in our best interests — but Congress has made a mockery of itself with very few exceptions.

Of course I want FEMA to function — that’s also part of this funding bill and why some of these Dems said they voted for it — but have they forgotten this vile president will withhold funds from blue states when disaster strikes? Way to go Seven Dems, you really came through for your constituents. Yes I want TSA agents to be paid, yes I want the US Coast Guard to have what it needs, but no, I do not trust this administration with our federal tax dollars — why would I? Why would they? Where is Rod Serling? Where is the rip in the matrix? Where is the older millennial throwing his head back telling us we’ve been punk’d? Any of that makes more sense than the reality that is our country right now.

At this point, Blue state governors could say:

We don’t trust this administration or our Republican senators anymore because they allow this President to impound funds Congress has appropriated. They are no longer following the laws of the Constitution, which clearly state Congress controls the purse strings. The current President allowed Elon Musk and six young dudes to enter the Treasury and compromise every American’s Social Security number and most sensitive financial data. The Supreme Court has granted the Executive Branch unprecedented immunity.

So, if we are now in a country where the President controls the purse strings and the rules, we will also make our own rules. We are advising any citizen in any of our states who feels they are being taxed by the federal government without fair representation in turn, to send their federal tax monies to this address or to upload to this secure link. Blue state governors have created an <escrow?> account where federal tax dollars will be held, due to violations of the Origination Clause and violations already listed above. These monies will not be touched unless or until they are needed by a Blue state to fund FEMA disaster relief, or to help Blue states defend themselves against the war being waged upon them by their own government. When we have a normal, functioning democracy again, funds will be turned over.

Or something. I don’t know, I’m spitballing here. Surely there are other people inside the system who could come up with better and more feasible ideas? Elected officials who realize this administration is not playing by the rules and it’s time to meet them on that playing field? Where the f%#@k are they? I’d like to see some bold and creative action items suggested from inside the house, since that’s where the calls are originating FFS.

I don’t know what would happen next, but I’d like to find out.

We could all say, I am not spending money with any corporation collaborating with ICE. Campaigns like this have brought a lot of heat to Spotify, Target, Home Depot and Hilton, for example. This doesn’t mean these companies have stopped collaborating, it means the public outcry has been significant and intense. This is having an effect on some corporations more than others. Maybe we double and triple down. In this country money is king. Let’s starve the king.

I saw Jack Smith’s testimony yesterday. If you have not watched, it is well worth your time. He is under attack by the potus, and will likely be under attack from the DOJ soon enough, because they are the president’s Personal Vendetta Crew, a thing that is a violation of the Constitution, ethics, morals, and the rule of law. Nonetheless, Smith said he will not be intimidated, he and his team had more than enough evidence to prove DJT is a treasonous criminal, and yes, he felt confident he could have proven that in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt.

This is a lifelong prosecutor who has brought cases against members of both parties. He clearly stated no one should be above the law, not even the president.

Underneath a clip of his testimony, I saw a comment, If only we had this evidence sooner. We all had our eyes and ears, though, that should have been enough. Everyone saw what happened on January 6th. Everyone understood this president incited an insurrection, watched it unfold on television, refused to send out a tweet asking his followers to stop attacking the Capitol, to stand down, to go home, to take the noose with them, to stop calling for the death of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, to stop attacking capitol police. He didn’t do any of that. He watched it happen.

Then when he got back into Office, he pardoned every angry, violent rioter. Every domestic terrorist.

Why hasn’t Jonathan Ross been arrested? We all saw him murder Renee Nicole Good. We saw it from five different angles. Some of us have seen it frame-by-frame, in slow motion, with 3D renderings. We all heard him call her a fucking bitch when he was done. Any honest person understands he killed her because he was an angry man with a fragile ego. He hasn’t been arrested because this administration is pretending things are not what they are, their followers are following along, and the people in power with the means to disagree are scared to stand up. They’re afraid of retribution and civil war.

Maybe they should worry less. All you have to do is tell this man Renee’s dad was a fan (no idea if this is true), and his whole tune changes. Suddenly Renee Good is a “young woman” whose death was a “tragedy” and “ICE makes mistakes sometimes.”

They’re taking children. They are taking children. They killed Renee Nicole Good in cold blood, and now they are taking tiny children with bunny ears and pom poms on their heads and Spiderman backpacks, and it is not because their parents did anything wrong. It’s because the bottom has fallen out. They want to Make America White. I’m not writing “Again” because America has never been white, a thing they’d know if they cracked a history book.

There are people who felt better after the unhinged and embarrassing speech in Davos, because look, he backed away from military action in Greenland I mean Iceland I mean Greenland. He backed away because he got to Davos, and world leaders other than Mark Carney and Ursula von der Leyen appeased him. They assured him NATO would be there if the United States was attacked (again) — even as he disparaged NATO, suggested NATO countries had “stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines” in Afghanistan, and said he didn’t really think they’d be there to defend us if something went down.

And NATO countries are ungrateful?

The problem is, though, world leaders still pack it in to listen to this deranged madman insult them. Short-term relief that he isn’t going to take Greenland by force, and he isn’t going to impose his on-again/off-again tariffs, guarantee this insane behavior will continue. The market crashes, then it goes back up. Everything is transactional with this man, and I don’t know why ten years isn’t long enough for everyone to have gotten the memo.

Mark Carney said there is a “rupture” in the relationship between the United States and all NATO countries, and Ursula von der Leyen said there’s been a shift in the world order that is permanent — meaning it won’t matter who is president next, things between Europe and the U.S. will never be the same again.

I think that is true, at least for decades. It’s like being in a relationship with a horribly abusive person who goes for your jugular in front of a room full of people, then says he was kidding, then does it again, then apologizes. How many years before you realize the apologies are meaningless and there is no trust anymore? Most people do not like to demean themselves. Some leaders will “take one for the team” when dealing with this man, thinking they are working for their country’s best interests, but when you capitulate to a narcissist, you’re screwed. A narcissist will never respect a person they own.

They’re taking children. They’re shooting mothers in cold blood. They’ve decided The Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone whose door ICE decides to break down. Our friends in Minnesota are afraid to leave their houses, or they’re dropping off groceries to their neighbors who are afraid to leave the house, or they’re opting for zoom school because they’re taking children now. I don’t know how to stop thinking about Liam Ramos. That sweet little face. Five years old. He must want his mom so much. He must be so scared. He should be cuddled up with her, reading a book. He should be warm and cozy. His poor mom must be wild with worry.

It is devastating and it does not make us great. It makes us soulless. We need to primary every one of the Democrats who decided to trust these people with more of our tax dollars. Would another shutdown be painful? Isn’t what we’re going through right now painful in ways that are hard to fathom?

Seven Democrats joined with their Republican colleagues to fund DHS, and “body cams on ICE agents” aren’t the answer. You think a body cam on Jonathan Ross would have changed anything? We’d just have even more horrific angles to see the way he murdered her. This isn’t Good Enough.

They didn’t even get a line in this bill to guarantee U.S. citizens can’t be detained or deported by ICE. Well, they did get the line in there with bipartisan support, but the White House/Stephen Miller said no, and struck that line. Which is strange because the White House and Stephen Miller should have no part in bills passed by Congress. Which means Republicans were strong-armed by Stephen Miller and this president yet again. Hey Seven Dems, are you getting it yet? These people don’t play by the rules.

Those of us in blue states, the people the president calls “radical left scum”? Yeah, they’ll take our tax dollars and use our hard-earned money to wage war against us on our own streets. And you just voted yes on that because you think we’ll get FEMA money when we need it?

They don’t care about the Constitution, but they are not going to cancel the midterms — they’ll just do everything possible to mess with them. Redrawing maps, making it hard to vote in-person, screwing with the time-stamp on the USPS, challenging any outcomes they don’t like — and if all else fails, pretending there was some kind of fraud (again). We’re going to have to fight on every front. Maybe that will mean volunteering to work the polls, phone banking, going door-to-door. I’ve been thinking about throwing a Block Party, because even though I’ve lived on my block for twenty-plus years. I only have a handful of my neighbors’ phone numbers.

We’ve traded the village for DoorDash. We’ve opted for convenience over conversation, but we need each other, now more than ever. Start organizing right where you are. Maybe a Block Party isn’t your idea of a good time. I’m an introverted extrovert, or an extroverted introvert. Whatever I am, I’m good for 2-3 hours of socializing, so I get it if this isn’t your thing, but you need phone numbers.

You need to know who your safe people are, who needs help on your block, who might want to go door-to-door with you when it’s time to get people registered to vote, or maybe you can set up a table at your Block Party for that. Maybe you can offer to drive people to the polls if they need rides. Make it a potluck, get some sidewalk chalk, hand out whistles so people have them, maybe talk about a Neighborhood Watch, get bubbles for the kids, giant Jenga, and corn hole. Maybe a band, you never know who’s on your block.

It’s time to get in the streets, friends. They’re taking children.

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They would shrug and say I should have thought about my kids, stayed home, and minded my own business — then I’d still be alive. That’s what they said about Renee Good. That’s what they’re saying about women who are trying to take care of their communities. We’re the problem. What a shock.

These are MAGA men, and the women who support them, and I got a very unpleasant taste of the way they think under an essay I wrote recently. There was no room to talk about violations of the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, no willingness to look at actual examples of ICE agents grabbing people from their legal immigration appointments, rappelling out of a helicopter and into a building in Chicago, busting down doors without a warrant anywhere in sight. No ability to talk about children zip-tied and thrown into the backs of U-hauls, some of them U.S. citizens. No conversation about the ways this has been happening for a year.

They just wanted to scream at me.

People are filming ICE raids for a reason. Nonviolent protest and civil disobedience are as old as Jesus Christ, as any Christian who read the Bible would tell you. So is state-sanctioned murder. Rosa Parks was protesting and committing an act of civil disobedience when she refused to give up her seat on the bus. Should she have stayed home, minding her own business?

People filming ICE agents are not trying to impede or harass anyone, they’re trying to keep their neighbors safe, and they are thinking about their children. They’re thinking about what kind of world they’re going to inherit if we’re going to allow a Mad King to overtake our democracy.

Greenland and every NATO country is looking at us in shock, horror, and utter despair. Anyone who loves this country ought to feel the same. Men who hate women should never be in power. They are violent and they do not understand consent. Not when it comes to women and girls, not when it comes to countries who do not want to be owned by us.

Renee Good should still be here. She would be if an angry man with a gun hadn’t decided to defend his fragile ego because two queer women were too relaxed for his liking, not impressed by him, not intimidated. There’s no such thing as “toxic empathy” — there’s just empathy, and you have it, or you don’t.

There is such a thing as toxic masculinity, though, and it sounds like calling someone a “fucking bitch” after you shoot her in the face three times.

All this and more on the pod.

Grateful for the men who like and respect women (because, duh), grateful for the people who care about their neighbors, all of them. Stay safe out there as best you can. We love you, Minneapolis. And always grateful for the fantastic, brilliant, strong women in my life — and all women and girls of every background everywhere. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Sending you love.

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