Newton's Third Law
Last Friday I drove up the coast with my daughter to attend the wedding of close friends. If you haven’t done the drive up the Pacific Coast Highway from southern California to Big Sur, it is cinematic and breathtaking, and the stuff of movies for a reason.
I was born and raised in New York City, and I admit, when people describe Santa Monica — the place where I’ve lived for the last twenty-five years — as a city, there’s a peanut gallery in my mind that titters away. They’re obnoxious little asshats.
“Did someone say ‘city’? In an actual city you can get Szechuan dumplings at 3 AM. There’s public transportation and it goes everywhere, all the time, even to the airports. Santa Monica is a beach town!”
(It is a beach town, though).
The further north you drive, the more the coastline changes, and soon the beaches don’t look like SoCal beaches anymore. There aren’t any piers or ferris wheels, and you might see hawks instead of seagulls, like we did. The beaches are marked by jagged black rocks, and look untouched by humans.
If you’re Gen X, you would not be surprised to see Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins come out from behind one of these rocks, with their now-grown, platinum-blonde, adult children in tow. It’s not a deserted island, or an island at all, so it would be weird, but I’m just saying. The beaches are unblemished by people or signs of tourism, and stunning.
If you pull your car over in awe to stare at the ocean, you might see a pod of whales, made known by their spouting blowholes. That peanut gallery gets pretty quiet; this is why people call Santa Monica a city in comparison. My daughter was so overwhelmed by the views at one point, she slowed the car to a stop along a windy stretch of road at the apex of a cliff that reminded me of the moment in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief when Cary Grant wonders if he’s going to survive the ride with Grace Kelly.
“It looks like we’re at the edge of the world,” she said, and it did. The ocean looked like it went on forever. I explained that stopping the car along a windy road with no visibility for the person who might be speeding along behind us, could be a way to experience the edge of the world, and I didn’t think we were ready to do that. Nonetheless.
We went on a hike Saturday, the day of the wedding, that looked from the trailhead like it would be a relatively easy “nature walk” down to a rocky beach. This was good, because I only had old Stan Smith tennis shoes that had no treads. The sneaker companies call treads “outsoles” now. So my outsoles were smooth like butter, which is not what you want in a hiking shoe, but Stan Smiths are not for hiking. We all know this.
Anyway, we started hiking down this path and it became clear quickly, this was no nature walk. It was a steep switchback situation, the path was mostly dry, loose dirt with the occasional rock jutting out, and there was nothing to hold onto but flowers full of happy bees, weeds, and plants I hoped were not Poison Ivy or Poison Oak.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned I’m stubborn? Anyway, I was with my daughter, and I figured if I had to ride down on my ass, that would be fine. A kid from Phoenix arrived behind us at some point, he was holding an expensive camera and said he and his buddies had driven all day to get out of the 114-degree heat.
I offered to let him pass, but he was happy to go slowly because he didn’t want to break his camera or his head. Either that, or he wanted to talk to my daughter. The three of us had a fun conversation, it was nice not to be in a rush. When we got to the beach, my daughter and I climbed over some wet, jutting rocks and made our way to a flat one with room for both of us.
We sat and watched the waves, and as I often do when I find myself in a majestic place where I don’t feel the need to say anything, I found my mom. That makes it sound like a rare thing, but it is a constant thing. I don’t only find her in majestic places, I find her in the kitchen when I’m doing the dishes, or when I’m driving. She’s with me all the time, and if I pause and get quiet I can sense her.
I’ve been having a bit of a tough time lately, in a way I think she’d understand, and last week when I was in the kitchen making coffee, two mourning doves landed on the shelves right outside the window. They sat there in the sun, looking at me, tilting their heads one way, then another, and I froze for a minute and stared back at them. We were just a couple of feet from each other, a window screen between us.
I wondered if they were the same mourning doves that visited me after my mom died, but that’s a story for another time, a story that feels more like a dream. Last week in the kitchen, I laughed, and then I cried a little, and then I laughed again, and shook my head. They flew away. I don’t know if my mom was trying to tell me it would all be okay, any more than I know what happens after this, but it feels good to think that’s what was going on.
I sat there on the rocks with my daughter and tried to send her all the love in my heart, wishing for the eleventy billionth time I could shield her from harm if only I could alchemize my love into some kind of force field. There are specific dangers I worry about for her in this environment, things I’ve always worried about, but never more than I do now.
Namely, there’s a certain kind of man who isn’t humbled by a view like this:
I don’t understand it and I never will, because when I sit by the ocean, some things are so clear to me. So obvious, it seems ridiculous to write them.
Things like: None of this belongs to any of us.
Things like: We’re just visitors here.
I cannot fathom the mindset of destruction. The mindset of blowing things up that don’t belong to you, as in countries. As in, parts of the planet. As in, other people’s children. I don’t even believe in other people’s children. Isn’t it wildly evident we belong to each other? If you saw a child in trouble, wouldn’t you help?
I don’t understand the mindset of taking something that isn’t freely given. As in, someone else’s body. Someone else’s innocence. Someone else’s right to decide what happens to them. I don’t understand the turn-on of overpowering another person. The thought of it makes me ill, but maybe it’s because I know how it feels when someone overpowers you.
I can’t imagine sitting in a place like that and thinking, you know what would make this more wondrous? My name in big gold letters on the top of that cliff, or my face carved into the side of it. I want to walk gently on this earth. I want to leave good memories. I want to love my people so much, that love runs through their veins, and beats inside their hearts.
After a while, we made the crazy switchback hike in reverse, which was strenuous, but easier due to physics and gravity. I was overheated when we got to the room, in a way that felt good. My cheeks were flushed because I’d done something a little harder than usual.
The ceremony was outside under two huge trees. I’m not going to say a lot because it wasn’t my wedding, but I will say when the groom walked down the aisle, he was holding both his parents’ hands, and I flashed to him as a kid, and could almost see them, swinging him high in the air between them. When they crushed him in hugs I was already crying.
When the bride appeared and started walking down the aisle with her dad, she looked ethereal. I turned and saw the groom’s face when he saw her, and I got that video. He looked at her with the most profound love as she walked toward him, so I didn’t move. The pure hope of it all went right through me. I figured that was a video the bride would want.
I danced to all the wedding classics. We Are Family, Celebrate, Uptown Funk, Crazy In Love. I’m sure Who Let the Dogs Out came on at some point, long after I left the dance floor. I can’t remember the last time I danced to silly songs. I went to bed late. My daughter left from there to head north for a camping trip for a few days, and I hugged her harder and longer and more times than necessary, but what’s necessary when it comes to hugging someone you love with your whole heart? I got up to have breakfast with the wedding guests before everyone took off to head back home.
I am an introvert by nature, but I’ve learned how to live in an extroverted world. There was a time when walking into a weekend where I didn’t know anyone but my daughter and the bride and groom would have been exhausting or depleting. I’ve learned how to manage my energy and take care of myself, so I was feeling pretty good. I don’t do small talk, and for the most part, I don’t think people want to do small talk, anyway.
I ended up at a table with one of the groom’s friends from middle school in New York City, and one of his family members, an American who’s been living in Southeast Asia for years. We were in a dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows jutting out over a view that looked like a painting. It’s hard to find anything other than spectacular views in Big Sur, but this was next-level. The ocean, the rocks, trees that have been there 2,000 years.
The groom’s relative was talking about being in America after having been away for so many years. He said the first time he turned on the news, he thought he was watching a spoof, SNL or something. I looked at him, our eyes locked. I could tell he was waiting to see, the way we do these days. Making sure he was in likeminded company before he said too much. I shook my head. “It’s unfathomable,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to bring down the wedding vibes. I’d been trying to take the weekend off, but I supposed the weekend was over.
He was not worried about wedding vibes, he started talking about the Russian Revolution, and how Moscow and Petrograd were cut off from coal and gasoline. Locomotive conductors and railway workers staged massive strikes and would not deliver food supplies. Everyone was starving. Today, he said, there was no way to cut off the tentacles of the beast. Clearly, I’d picked the right table.
I said it seemed to me the Project 2025 coup officially kicked off the day Musk and his DOGE dudes walked into the U.S. Treasury with their flash drives, and our representatives told us about it over Instagram lives from their living room couches. No one said, “Take to the streets, this is the moment.” No one said, “Meet us at the Treasury Building, this is not normal.”
Maybe we should have gone, anyway.
It wasn’t bloody, it was digital. It didn’t look like the history books told us it would. There was no cohesive opposition leadership, there was no cohesion at all. I think many of us believed the guardrails would hold a lot longer, and more people would put country over party. Instead, it’s been a free fall in slow motion, and we keep reaching for things to grab onto.
Really, though, the portal opened a decade ago. That’s the part that hurts so much, the toll this has taken on everyone. It’s like those moments in life you look back on, those forks in the road where you can only pick one way. Sliding Doors. Golden Escalators.
You don’t get to know how things would look if you’d walked in the other direction. You never see the life that would have unfolded if you’d chosen the other school, a different job, another person. You don’t see the results if you’d said the scary thing, taken the chance, or broken someone’s heart because you knew in your own, it was the lesser hurt in the long run.
We can safely say we wouldn’t have ended up here, though. That much we know. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, that’s Newton’s Third Law of physics. When a hawk flies through the air, the force of its wings pushes the air downward, but force is proportional.
The air is also pushing the hawk upward. The size of the force on the air is equal to the size of the force on the hawk. The direction of the force on the air (downward) is opposite to the direction of the force on the hawk (upward).
When more than half the voting public doesn’t disqualify a man who says he grabs women by the pussy, the force of that collective misogyny pushes women and girls down. It crushes the air out of their lungs, even the women who voted for it, the ones who smile at you and say it’s just “locker room talk” with a roll of their eyes and a flounce of their hair. They won’t realize they can’t breathe until it’s too late.
There are a lot of people who hate women in this country, and they’ve proven it by the numbers, twice. They keep proving it. They’d vote for a swamp creature with no morals or desire to read a book for the pleasure of it — a racist, nasty Jabba the Gut — before they’d vote for a woman.
How dare she think she could be president? That cold bitch in a pantsuit? I’ll take the narcissistic, arrogant man, stalking her around the stage, thanks. The one who cheats on all his wives and says disgusting things about his daughters? The one who hangs out with Jeffrey Epstein, and goes backstage at the beauty pageants he owns to look at undressed teenagers? Yes, him. Anything other than that shrill, overly-competent, brilliant woman who is so unlikable. I’ll believe whatever insane conspiracy theories you feed me, no matter how preposterous, before I’ll vote for her.
Well, we’d still be in the Paris Agreement. We’d still be able to count on Social Security. She was the one fighting for Universal Healthcare, so we’d very likely have that, or some expanded version of the ACA. We’d have the ERA ratified by now, no doubt, we wouldn’t have a gender pay gap, I feel sure we’d have affordable childcare and PTO, and I bet we’d have sane gun control legislation. I feel certain she would not have shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
Instead we have the GOP, the party that offers thoughts and prayers when children die at school, and then tells us “today is not the day to make it political” even though it’s never the day, and decades have gone by since Columbine. What could be more political than calling yourself pro-life, but deciding your precious rights to AR-15s and AR-47s are more important than the heartbeats of living, breathing, children, and the rights of those children to leave for school and come home at the end of the day, with their little hearts still beating?
We would not have had so many millions of people die during the pandemic, because Hillary believes in science and doctors, and I can promise there wouldn’t have been any ivermectin insanity, or talk of injecting bleach. We’d still have Roe v Wade, and a Supreme Court we could trust. We’d still have the Voting Rights Act, and no bs talk of election fraud.
We wouldn’t have had an insurrection.
Without the insurrection, we wouldn’t have “J6ers” or the unthinkable pardoning of people who attacked the Capitol and tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power at the behest of the now-sitting president. We wouldn’t have the creation of this truly unbelievable “Anti-Weaponization Fund”, money available to pardoned insurrectionists, while 4.5 million people — 1.5 million of them children — are removed from SNAP benefits.
We wouldn’t have the most corrupt AG in the history of our nation, about to get the rubber stamp after promising to cancel the Anti-Weaponization Fund and limit a deal with the IRS to get his clients (the president, all his kids, and all his associates) exempted from being audited ever again. A deal he never should have penned in the first place, because “acting Attorney General” still means he works for We, the People, not Them, the president, his kids, and all his cronies. A distinction no one in this administration understands, and — even more bizarrely — none of the president’s supporters seem to mind.
Sadly, his promise to amend or undo that IRS deal is worth as much as a piece of toilet paper that sticks to someone’s shoe when they leave an airport bathroom, so I have no doubt they’ll reintroduce it by a different name, or not even bother changing the name. Almost as soon as the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed him, audio of Todd Blanche on a call to “faith leaders” hosted by the “White House Faith Office” was leaked.
In a Sliding Escalators timeline we would not have a White House Faith Office.
During the call, Blanche assured faith leaders from “Intercessors of America” (I looked them up because I’m curious like that, and “intercessors” are people who pray on behalf of other people, and the CEO of this organization is a guy named Dave Kubal). They’re the folks who “pray over” the president when you see those very discordant photos of people laying hands on a man who couldn’t recite a Bible passage for a billion dollars, and who breaks the most important Commandments as a way of life.
Praise be, blessed be the fruit. If you go to the Intercessors of America site, you’ll see a video of Dave Kubal on the homepage “praying against the witches and diabolical power operating in AOC’s district.” Sorry, come again? I could have sworn you said witches! I just looked at my calendar, and no matter what timeline we’re on, it’s 2026. They’re still looking for witches to burn.
During the call, Todd Blanche assured them that although it was taking longer than they’d hoped (19 months and counting) they were going to get that Dobbs decision in every state in the country. To be clear, he was referring to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade, and left decisions about reproductive rights, women’s and girls’ bodily autonomy, and their ability to receive lifesaving healthcare “to the states.”
He said the White House was working with the Department of Justice and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and he referenced policies they were advancing to end the mailing of abortion drugs from pro-choice states, to states with abortion bans — making it virtually impossible for women in states with restrictive bans to access abortions under any circumstances.
Please take a look at the stats for maternal and infant mortality rates in states with restrictive abortion bans, and ask yourself why any pro-life person would be in favor of this. Women die. Infants die. Doctors and medical students in these states leave, making it harder for pregnant women to receive adequate pre and postnatal care, and to find OB/GYNs in their area at all. No doctor wants to lose their medical license for trying to save the life of a woman who is miscarrying, or end up in jail, accused of murder.
Speaking of ending up in jail, over 400 women have been arrested for “pregnancy-related crimes” since Roe was overturned — many turned in by boyfriends or relatives who suspected them of taking abortion drugs, one of whom was surveilled using Flock cameras. In some cases, women were having miscarriages or stillbirths, experiences that are traumatic enough without being imprisoned.
Meanwhile, zero people have been arrested who are in the Epstein files here in the states. When men rape girls and women, the survivors of assault are attacked again, in the court of public opinion, like the woman raped by her Uber driver, who was asked to describe the dress she was wearing the night of the assault.
She was asked by one of Uber’s attorneys, a woman, who certainly voted for the Golden Escalator. The sentences for rapists are often seen through the lens of their “promise and potential” with judges bending over backwards to try to make sure these young men’s lives are not ruined because of “one bad decision.”
Unless they are Black, in which case, it’s off to prison for them.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. My heart aches for where we find ourselves, especially those of us who saw it coming and begged people to pick a different escalator, or take the stairs. So many of those people are still smugly holding onto the decision like it was a good one, no matter how many AI data centers get built, no matter how many children go hungry, no matter how many laws are broken, or what fresh news story comes out each day.
For example, the Capitol One case. Money-laundering ought to be a big deal for a sitting president, but this story has not had the impact it should.
The case centers on roughly 385 accounts tied to the Trump Organization, Eric Trump and a collection of affiliated businesses — including a winery, a bottled-water company and a golf course developer — that banked with Capital One for more than a decade before the accounts were shut down in mid-2021.
The president’s legal team is suing Capitol One, saying they caused him, his companies and his family “reputational damage” and they debanked him out of “wokeness” because it was politically correct to distance themselves from him after January 6th, 2021. But attorneys for Capitol One point out they never publicized the closures of his accounts, or ending of their business relationship, a thing they would have done if they were looking for “woke points.”
Anyway, if you accrue 10,000 Woke Points, you get the Antifa-sponsored George Soros luxury vacation, and who among us doesn’t want that?
The bank’s lawyers also noted that it kept its reasoning for the closures confidential at the time: it “never publicized the termination decision nor its confidential internal process giving rise to the closure,” and gave the Trump companies months — plus several extensions — to move their money elsewhere, which they did.
The wild arrogance of suing banks for de-banking you (he’s suing JP Morgan, too), pretending it’s politically motivated, and not because you notoriously do illegal things all the time — the very week you announce a new insider trading scheme — is really something. Long, weak, golf clap.
“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, interim chief executive officer of TMTG, said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.”
So, just totally open about the insider trading now, not even hiding it.
The groom’s relative was saying it’s easy to leave America. He leads a simple life now, he really doesn’t need much. The groom’s friend was saying he loves the way that sounds, but feels like he isn’t ready for the slower, simpler lifestyle yet. He’s so used to living in New York City, where you can get anything at any time. I smiled, but I was looking out the huge windows at the view.
I was having an odd thought, or it felt odd to me. I was thinking, this is the kind of dining room, the kind of view, the kind of setting a film director would choose if they were going to shoot the opening scene of a movie about people who didn’t realize everything was about to change. The conveniences they’d taken for granted for so long were about to become unavailable. The glass windows were about to shatter. Some people in the dining room would figure it out — how to survive, how to think on their feet, how to adapt and plan, while others would not.
I looked at the guy from my hometown. I said, “I know what you mean, but do you ever think that maybe…” and then I stopped, because there’s a difference between not liking small talk, and saying the most depressing thing imaginable to a stranger. But he said, “Do I ever think that maybe we’re looking at End of Days?” Just like that, I realized maybe we’re all having the same thoughts. The same fears and sadness. The same hope that maybe somehow we’ll be okay.
“Hold on,” he said, and left the table. A minute later, he came back holding a baby I’d been seeing all weekend from afar. A tiny baby, with a full head of thick, black hair. A very snuggly baby, the parents’ third according to the groom’s friend. He stood by the table, rocking the baby back and forth.
He told me his mother used to go up to strangers at restaurants and offer to hold their babies so the mothers could eat. She’s from India, and he said that’s how they do it there, but he would tell her, “Ma, they don’t do that in America. You can’t just walk up and offer to hold a stranger’s baby!” I thought back to when my kids were little, and how I hadn’t had any help. I think I would have let his mother hold one of my babies so I could eat. I think we could all use a little more help and support, a little more kindness. Probably a lot.
There’s Newton’s Third Law, but there’s also Chaos Theory, the science of the unpredictable, and I want to end with that in case you’re feeling low on hope. On my forty-first birthday, I was in Mexico with my kids and one of my best friends. We were on a whale watch, just us and the guides, and we’d been at it for almost an hour. My son was five, my daughter was three. It was a good day, the weather was beautiful, the water was gorgeous, and if we didn’t see any whales, it was still a great birthday. But seeing a whale would be pretty phenomenal, and suddenly it occurred to me I could ask.
So I closed my eyes, and I thought, “It’s my birthday, and I know this is a really big ask, but it would be so incredible to see a whale breach. I would love that so much, so I thought I would ask as my birthday wish, thank you for considering.” Mind you, I was sending the request to any potential whales in the area. Then I opened my eyes, and my hand to whatever you hold holy, fifteen feet away from our boat, a gargantuan whale came straight up out of the ocean. It was the most gravity-defying, mind-bending, outrageously amazing thing I’ve ever seen.
There is also this, an emergency landing made by a twenty-one-year-old flight instructor in Pensacola, Florida this week. Y’all, this young woman landed her small plane on a freeway, and no one got hurt, but if you’re thinking that was a spoiler alert, I assure you, nothing I’ve said has prepared you for this badass landing. If she can do that, we can slide our way into a better reality before it’s too late. I know we can.
Sending you a lot of love, friends. Come meet me in person in October!
The most perfect thing I’ve read recently.
I second that perfect!