Why Bother to Write?

A bit of reflection to mark the milestone of my 100th Substack post.

When I published my first post on Substack, I had no idea that, in such short order, we’d be perched on the precipice of complete autocracy in the United States. Oh, it may have been a distant theoretical concept in the back of the minds of those who had been paying close attention. But there were few at the time who thought that it would come to pass, at least not in less than a year.

At that time, Kamala Harris had energized huge swaths of the population — folks who were both already thoroughly disgusted with Donald Trump and people who had become disillusioned with President Biden. Polling looked optimistic for a Democratic victory. The air was thick with hope and promise.

How quickly things changed.

The results of the election abruptly changed the national mood. Democrats immediately switched from optimism to dread. Trump¹ and his supporters, however, instantly became more emboldened, more zealous, and more certain that they possessed the moral high ground. (They clearly use different criteria for what constitutes morality, but they had been groomed for decades to believe their way was the only way.)

Now, less than six months into Trump’s second term, all of our darkest fears are being realized — and then some. Censorship, a faltering economy, the dissolution of the most basic functions of our government are only a few of the manifestations of Trump’s inability or refusal to do the hard work of governing.

Despite sitting in the Oval Office, Trump still isn’t satisfied. His bottomless pit of ego still needs to be fed, and the supply of ego nourishment needs to keep increasing in size and scope.

Saturday’s autocrat-manqué military parade will be just such an ego meal. Billed as a celebration of the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, it’s really just a thinly veiled birthday party for the man who would be king (if he had his druthers).

Couple the parade with the ongoing asymmetrical and unwanted military response to the largely peaceful ICE protests in Los Angeles, and we’ve got a perfect storm both for nourishing Trump’s vanity and for hastening the onset of autocracy.

I hardly need to mention that the tens of millions of dollars being spent on the parade and the hidden ancillary costs could well be spent more wisely, as could the hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted on deploying the National Guard and the Marines to quell a disturbance that, in any other time, would be dealt with by local police forces.

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There are few things constraining Trump these days. The legal system has at least put the brakes on about 95% of Trump’s worst impulses. The judicial rulings against Trump have been made by Republican-appointed and Democrat-appointed judges and justices in roughly equal proportions. A number of rulings against Trump have even been handed down by judges that he himself appointed during his first term.

The Democratic Party is outnumbered in both the House and the Senate, so it’s all but impossible for the Dems to restrain Trump when the Republicans in Congress are cowed by Trump’s overt and veiled threats. A number of Democrats are speaking out more forcefully, both in Committee hearings and in the media. But that’s about as far structurally as they are able to take things.

So that leaves the citizens — the people for whom the government is supposed to be operating. Among everyday people, there’s been an increasing drumbeat of dissatisfaction and downright disgust since the “shock and awe” of Trump’s first 100 days.

There have already been unprecedented protests at both the local and national level. But the nationwide No Kings protests, scheduled to coincide with (and perhaps overshadow) Trump’s self-indulgent military parade in D.C., are poised to be of a scale the nation has not seen before.

But, as someone who came of age during the civil rights era and the Vietnam war, it’s exceedingly clear to me that no single protest — no matter how vast or impactful — is enough to put an immediate end to the injustices being protested.

Real lasting change usually requires repeated protests, of course, but it also requires all kinds of participation of the citizenry. It takes writing letters and making phone calls to Congress. In the age of social media, it takes flooding the zone with truth to counteract the myriad lies being told on a daily basis and magnified by the current unprecedented propaganda media. It takes the work of artists — painters, songwriters, musicians, writers, anyone engaged in any creative pursuit — to put at least some of their creative energy into resistance and protest, as a way of reclaiming the nation’s collective ethical core.

It will also take political action — in this case, focusing initially on special elections and on the midterm elections — to change the balance of power in Congress enough to put the brakes on the destruction of our democracy.

It’s an ongoing effort, not a “one-and-done” proposition. We can’t achieve critical mass if people get discouraged and disengage.

There are more and more reasons to protest every day, with the increase of Trump’s authoritarianism.

It’s serendipitous that my 100th Substack post coincides with the “No Kings” rallies around the country. It’s a reminder to me that, no, my tiny corner of the internet is not going to change the world. But my tiny corner of the internet combined with your tiny corner of the internet combined with marches and phone calls and protest songs and satires and Instagram posts and discussions with friends and neighbors — all of that together will eventually move the nation back to what our founders intended.

Over the months that I’ve been writing here, I’ve tried not to chase the day’s headlines; doing that, for me, is an exercise in futility and there are plenty of others who do it extremely well. Instead, I’ve been attempting to widen my lens a bit and put what I believe to be context around events — sometimes seemingly disparate events.

Because there’s more happening than any one person can keep track of. The actions of this tyrannical administration are designed specifically to overwhelm us. There have been times that I’ve become overwhelmed and sidetracked by all the different directions a single post might take.

But I’m going to keep writing. I will march. I hope that people of good will do that which they are able to help move the needle. Never in my lifetime has that needle faced a more desperate need to be moved.

1. These days, when I refer to Trump, readers are free to infer that I also mean his supporters and the entire Republican Party. There have been too few people within his orbit pushing back against his worst impulses not to lump them all together when assigning blame or responsibility.