Over the past year, as the most critical test of our democracy since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence draws closer—the November elections—I’ve repeatedly asked myself why, how is it even possible, that we whose fathers and grandfathers fought on the beaches of Normandy and in the forests of the Ardennes to stop the mad fascist Hitler, are now considering electing another mad fascist? What is the benefit to any American, except the top 1% of the richest people in the country? The very people with their hedge funds and private equity groups who are already strangling our housing market, destroying our hospitals and healthcare, polluting our planet. The authors of Project 2025 and their chosen puppet to oversee the dismantling of our democracy, the trashing of our Constitution: Trump.

How Did We Get Here?

I’d like you to consider for a moment what democracy means to you. The right of the people to elect those who govern our nation? The right of every American to peaceful protest, guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution? An equality under the law of all Americans whatever their gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion or lack of same? This last, I know, is a long work in progress, but it has been in progress. Or was until the Supreme Court lifted decades of campaign finance restrictions with their 2010 ruling (5-4) in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a decision that essentially gave corporations and other outside groups free rein to spend unlimited dollars—millions, billions—to influence our elections. 

Until SCOTUS largely gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2013.

Until 2022, when the six conservative members of the court overturned Roe v. Wade, taking away the freedom of women to control their own bodies even in cases of incest, rape, and endangerment to the woman’s life. That last especially underscores the truth that it’s not life the far-right cares about, but putting women back in their “place”—under men’s thumbs.

Until 2023 when those same justices declared affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional, thus ending a highly successful program of nearly half a century that sought to redress the wrongs perpetrated against Black and Latino Americans.

Until 2024, when the far-right SCOTUS majority gave the president (Trump v. United States) the powers of a king. Not the current president, you understand. Not Joe Biden. Just one year earlier, on June 30, 2023, the conservative justices ruled against Biden’s student loan forgiveness program in Biden v. Nebraska—a program that would have erased up to $400 billion in educational loans for some 40 million Americans, most of whom have been paying off these loans at exorbitant interest rates for over 20 years. The conservative majority said the program “overstepped” the President’s authority. Apparently, only Trump, or any other dictator-puppet selected by far-right billionaires to do their bidding, has the conservative Court’s blessing to act as they please.  

To their credit, the Biden-Harris administration has fought back, to date finding legal loopholes to grant loan forgiveness to over 4.8 million Americans. In mid-October, they were able to get through another $4.5 billion for student debt relief to 60,000 public service workers—teachers, first responders, social workers, and nurses. They worked this miracle through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, a 2007 Bush-era initiative that, before Biden, had rescued less than 10,000 borrowers due to poor management and low acceptance rates.     

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said, “I want to send a message to college students across America that pursuing a career in public service is not only a noble calling but a reliable pathway.”

The School-to-Factory Pipeline?

Speaking of education, much has been written, and rightfully so, about the school-to-prison pipeline many poor children of Color face in our inner cities, but little attention has been paid to a new threat: Trump’s promise to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. A four-alarm disaster under any conditions, it is especially troubling in light of the GOP’s attacks on child labor laws in state after state. Since 2021, 28 state legislatures have introduced bills to weaken such protections, and 12 states have enacted them. This year, the Florida House voted to eliminate state guidelines regulating work hours for teens, while also banning meal and rest breaks. In Mississippi, a 16-year-old was working nights as a cleaner at a chicken processing plant when one of the machines drew him in and killed him. His employment clearly violated a federal law that requires meatpacking facility workers to be at least 18 years of age, in recognition of the dangers of the job. Iowa, however, passed a bill expanding such hazardous employment for kids as young as 14, federal law be damned. 

In the U.S. House, when Democrats sought a committee hearing on strengthening child labor protections, Republicans (with the backing of numerous business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association and the National Retail Federation) ignored their several requests.

Reading these reports—Trump’s promise to dismantle the Department of Education at the same moment child labor laws are being weakened in much of the country, I was reminded of Hitler’s labor camps like Dora-Mittelbau (originally a sub-camp of Buchenwald) in Germany’s Harz Mountains where the Nazi’s “untermenschen”—Jews, Poles, Communists, gays—were forced to build Hitler’s V-weapons until the prisoners literally dropped, at which time they were tossed into ovens. Next.

Climate Change: Not “One of the Great Scams”

Despite the horrific loss of life and massive damage caused by recent back-to-back hurricanes Milton and Helene, Trump has also promised to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency—in line with Project 2025’s goals. Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax”, “one of the great scams.” Oil, he says, is the “liquid gold under our feet.” Not only has he no interest in taking action to reduce America’s carbon footprint, he’s openly pledged to approve all permits to “drill, baby, drill” on our public lands and waters, allow more gas pipelines to be built, and keep those coal plants burning. Such policies will fill our air, and lungs, with “greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to another billion cars,” The New York Times reports.

Kamala Harris calls climate change an “existential threat” that our country must combat and has promised to build on the billions of dollars the Biden Administration has already invested in clean energy. Indeed, as vice president, hers was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below their 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Her dedication is proven. In her role as California’s attorney general, she went after Big Oil for environmental violations.

A Very Public Enemy: Social Media Conspiracy Theorists and Their Lies

Charlie Warzel, in his recent piece for The Atlantic, “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is”, laments: The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.

It’s no secret that QAnon, Infowars’ Alex Jones, Steve Bannon’s War Room, and a host of other conspiracy theorists have been spreading lies and outrageous propaganda since the rise of Trump in 2016. Infowars’ Alex Jones recently claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government.

Indeed, purposely seeding lies on social media has the potential to be deadly as happened in Chimney Rock, North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene. A rumor rapidly spread that FEMA rescue workers were not really there to help the people of this village, but to destroy what remained of the town and bury the bodies beneath the rubble. Yes, I know. Utter madness, right? But enough people bought the lie to bring FEMA rescue efforts to a halt for 24 hours as threats of a local armed militia—raised to murder the government workers— persisted despite authorities and news outlets insistence that the rumors about FEMA were 100% false. What was true, apparently, was that National Guard troops, called in, came across several trucks of armed militia claiming they were hunting down FEMA workers.       

FEMA workers did return the next day to clear roads for search-and-rescue teams, but due to the death threats, they abandoned their normal practice of going door to door. A Forest Service official from Asheville said that people have been shouting “We don’t want your help” at rescue workers delivering aid.  

This Is Not Who We Are

How is it that the values, opinions, and wishes of the majority of Americans are increasingly not reflected in our laws, our courts, or the GOP platform? Most Americans oppose a federal abortion ban. Indeed, an increasing number of us support access to abortion for any reason.

Two-thirds of Americans also believe we should make developing renewable energy—wind, solar—a priority, and cut back on oil, coal, and natural gas. In a 2022 Pew survey, 69% of Americans supported the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050, a goal President Biden called for at the outset of his administration.

The majority of Americans, 71%, approve of labor unions and support workers’ right to organize.

So why are we always having to fight for what the vast majority of us want? It’s time to revisit the Supreme Court.

Dark Money: Lights Out for Democracy 

While conservative justices have dominated the Supreme Court for all of the new century, two of their decisions stand out as having special relevance—and a potential threat—to the 2024 elections. First, the Court’s 2000 decision to reverse a Florida Supreme Court order that mandated a manual recount of the states’ ballots for presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush. Instead, SCOTUS simply stopped the recount and handed the election to Bush. The Supreme Court (5-4) chose the president of the United States!

Second, the enduring damage to our elections and, thus, our democracy was rendered in the 2010 decision I mentioned up top, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC). Big money is nothing new in elections. The wealthy have always been able to open their wallets wide to the candidates of their choice, but as a 2019 report from the Brennan Center for Justice notes: “That sway has dramatically expanded since the Citizens United decision, with negative repercussions for American democracy and the fight against political corruption.” The decision opened the door, via two other decisions in the months following, for a vast flood of “dark money” through the creation of super PACs, those shadowy orgs that keep their donors’ identities secret. By the 2012 elections, more than $300 million of dark money was in play compared to less than $5 million in 2006. Dark money groups also allow foreign countries to invest in our elections “under the radar.” Russia. China. Saudi Arabia. Anyone with an interest in the outcome.

In that same report, author Daniel I. Weiner laments that a very small group of super-wealthy Americans now wield vast power “while many of the rest [of us] seem to be disengaging from politics”, perhaps believing that our vote doesn’t really matter.

Vote Up and Down the Ballot

Believing our vote doesn’t really matter. If anyone reading this feels that way, I beg you to reconsider. Nothing could be more false. Our participation—every one of us—has never been more crucial than it is right now. That’s not hyperbole. In our 248 years, we have never had a presidential candidate threaten to send the military after members of the opposition party or toss them into concentration camps as Trump is promising. Never had a candidate who repeatedly praises Hitler and wishes he had generals like the Führer. Everything is at stake on November 5—our democracy, our health and safety, our very survival as a country, our planet.  

I would further implore you to vote up and down the ballot for democracy. Many good proposals in the past four years have been thwarted by a GOP House intent on wrecking Biden’s presidency in order to re-install Trump. When (putting a positive spin on it) Kamala wins, she’ll need a Congress—House and Senate—whose main objective is serving the American people, not acting as a roadblock to everything she proposes. State legislatures matter, too. Many of the efforts in the past decade to kill bills that would have helped their state’s citizens have come from right-wing state legislatures.

Democracy, it’s not a lost cause. Sophia Lin Lakin, director, ACLU Voting Rights Project, in a recent email wrote: I know many of us are concerned about what might happen on Election Day. I want to assure you: our legal team is working around the clock to protect voters and make sure every vote is counted. Lakin reminds us: In the wake of the 2020 election, our team filed more than 30 lawsuits to protect voters and safeguard the outcome of the election.

No Middle Ground

It takes decades, centuries, to build a true democracy. It takes only one election to lose it. To lose our right to speak up for what is humane, fair; to protest against injustice and cruelty; our freedom to worship as we choose or not to worship at all; to lose the opportunity to ever vote again. If you elect me, Trump has promised his followers, you’ll never have to vote again. Could any statement be more chilling in its implications? No need to ever vote again because you will not be given a choice again.

America was founded with the avowal that we would not be ruled by kings but by the people, a democracy. The Supreme Court’s decision to grant Trump unlimited powers should he become president again, though not unexpected, stunned millions, and not just Americans. As dissenting SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan (an Obama appointee) remarked afterward: “Wasn’t the whole point of the Constitution that the president was not a monarch and was not supposed to be above the law?”

Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, speaking to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1852, cautioned: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Power is ever stealing from the many to the few.”

Between the threat of fascism and the promise of democracy there is no middle ground.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 
 Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5)

[NOTE: Yes, this is not new, but then who among us is? So, enjoy the opp to revisit this immortal post and let yours truly go galavanting among the ancient ruins of Rome for a few weeks, with nothing more pressing to ponder than which of the 10,000 delicious Italian dishes on offer should I choose for my next meal?]

Alert readers of this blog may recall a post (“Everything Takes as Long as it Takes”) where I shared a sample of the stuff I scribble on scraps of paper which I then leave all over the house. That particular scribbling noted that One day you’re 30; the next, you’re 60, and yet 10 minutes can seem like forever.

Observations like this take up not inconsiderable real estate in my head. I call them “mysteries.”

I thought it might be a nice diversion from the current journey we seem to be embarked on—going to hell in a handbasket—to share some of these musings with you. Also, I’m packing for a trip and penning advance blog posts at a rate Stephen King would envy. I don’t have time to research, say, the validity of Einstein’s theory of relativity or to follow up on a CNN article Drinking more coffee leads to a longer life, two studies say. I’m willing to take CNN at its word. The press in NOT the enemy of the people, and coffee is our friend.

Excuse me, while I get a refill.

Okay, I promised you mysteries.

Mystery #1: How Can We See the Sky?

I was sitting out on the lawn at Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) in July, sharing a picnic with Ed and listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor. As it was early evening in high summer, the sky above me was still amazingly blue, feathered with clouds that looked like someone just ran a comb through them. Cirrus clouds, I think (I’m a writer, not a scientist). They arced overhead, a perfect dome, the sky meeting the ground in a complete circle around the Tanglewood lawn, our chairs at the exact center. How cool is that?

It’s rare to have such an open vista without buildings or other debris clogging up the sightlines. I hadn’t quite realized before that wherever we are, it’s like we’re inhabiting part of a snow globe. That Earth appears to be a ball inside another ball (the sky) which encompasses it completely.

Actually, we never experience Earth as a ball. More like a plane, bisecting a sphere. (To clarify this gibberish, see illustration.)

The Boston Symphony Orchestra moved on to a Tchaikovsky symphony (the Fifth, in E minor—I was paying attention, more or less) while I jotted a note on my program: How can we see the sky?

I pondered this through the Andante-Allegro movement and soon realized that, like Pandora’s Box, this question opens up a slew of thorny conundrums:

If Earth is a ball inside the SkyBall, why can we never touch the sky, even with a very tall ladder or, say, from the roof of the Empire State Building? We can’t even touch the sky where it meets the ground at the horizon because, like a pesky older sibling, the horizon taunts us, moving away as we move toward it.

And where oh where is outer space? How does this blue, cloud-scraped sky—a visually opaque ceiling—obscure the cosmos of stars and planets that glitter and spin on a decidedly black background?

This is not as stupid a question as it may first appear. Recall the photos of Earth from outer space—there is no “sky barrier” in the way. Maybe a wisp of cloudy looking stuff but you can still see Earth—the oceans, the continents.

                                   By the Finale (Andante, Allegro, Moderato), the SkyBall had vanished, leaving me to view a sprinkling of stars light years away. Where did that opaque blue barrier go? Is there a day-to-night transparency button somewhere operating on a timer? And when the night is overcast, does that mean the transparency gizmo is out of juice and needs new batteries?

Like I said, it’s a mystery.

Mystery #2: Are We Right-Side Up or Upside Down? 

Okay, gravity is the stuff that keeps us sticking to the earth—our feet squarely glued as sure as Newton’s apple to whatever patch of turf we’re standing on—but are we right-side up or upside down?

Like most of us, I grew up with those cartoons of little kids holding hands encircling the globe, so popular on UNICEF holiday cards. Being from the northern part of North America, I wasn’t too worried because Michigan was fairly high on the top side of the EarthBall. But those kids in Algeria are living at a perilous slant, and the ones from New Zealand and Patagonia have blood rushing to their little skulls 24/7.

As my age advanced to double digits, I began to question such two-dimensional representations. Was north always up and south always down? Up compared to what? Down from where?

We are citizens of the universe, a multi-dimensional space without end, as scientists tell us (and questions within questions—how do they know this?). So, what exactly is “right-side up” in outer space? Does it change with the movement from day to night, the seasons, the place where we live?

And if there is no right-side up in space, are we always upside down or only sometimes?

Is it this constant switch in equilibrium that creates the need for Excedrin, Prozac, a lobotomy? Or just these constant questions?

I don’t know. Do you?

Mystery #3: How Do We Go to Sleep, and How Do We Get Back?

The word on the street is that even the most exciting things—chocolate, sex, bungee jumping—lose their allure, their mystery, if they are repeated routinely.

Well, it’s hard to find a more enduring routine in life than sleep, and yet sleep remains a great mystery. How do we get there? How do we get back? What exactly is there?

If you think this is just me inventing puzzlers in an effort to slap a blog together so I can get out of town on time, try this experiment: 1) Place a notepad and pen by your bed. 2) Tonight, write down the exact time you “go to” sleep.

Not as easy as you thought, eh?

We don’t consciously relinquish our consciousness. It just sort of “happens.” Like walking backwards unawares toward a steep drop-off. That last step… We don’t know what hit us. And we don’t know we aren’t awake wherever it is we “go to.” Except once in a while we realize, “Hey I’m in a dream. I can behave as badly as I like and it doesn’t count.” Which realization is almost as weird as going to sleep itself (though it does show a marvelous talent for taking advantage of unexpected opportunities).

When we’re in dreamland, how do we tune out the burps and beeps of the real world around us? While we sleep, life certainly continues on its merry, noisy way. Thunderstorms thunder. Fire engines siren past. But nothing registers unless it’s REALLY LOUD.  Like the time I was awoken by the bedroom radiator CLANGING in a way it had never clanged before. The sweet oblivion of sleep dropped away in a heartbeat as I realized geysers of boiling water were shooting up from that radiator, at 5:14 a.m.

Do you know how hard it is to get a plumber at five in the morning? Those 24-hour emergency services listed online? Just phone check-ins that contact a plumber when he or she rises at a more civilized hour.

We surrender our consciousness each night never doubting it will mysteriously “return” in the morning. Now that’s the kind of deep faith most religious proselytizers would envy.

But how is it we do “return” to the real world each day? And why don’t we fall out of bed in our sleep? We certainly move around in our sleep, so why aren’t we hitting the floor in great numbers, regularly? This has never happened to me, but it did happen to Ed once when we were taking a weekend in NYC. Believe me, it was frightening—waking up suddenly to see him tumbling over the edge of the bed, with a nanosecond to hope he didn’t take his eye out on the corner of the nightstand (he didn’t, though he did suffer a nasty cut on his cheek).

Sleep—there’s a Gordian knot of mysteries involved here.

Mystery #4: How Do Cats Know Where to Go?

As mentioned in my August post (“I Always Wanted an Orange Kitten”), I have had many cats in my life. Most of them were indoor/outdoor creatures, which means there came a day in their young lives when I opened the back door and allowed them to explore the wide world beyond. Without exception, they all returned after a few hours. No one got confused about which house was theirs—the mock Tudor in need of a paint job, or the Cape with the sagging steps and the rusting swingset?

How do they do it—how do cats unerringly zero in on their house wherever they’ve wandered? I mean you wouldn’t want to try this with your three-year-old.

This mystery deepens as I recall an afternoon in my college days. I went with a carload of friends to a party, a cookout hosted by a couple who lived in the university’s married student housing.

Several hours into the event, my hosts asked if someone would ride down to the convenience store six blocks over to pick up some more drink mixers. They offered the use of their bicycle. I volunteered and off I went. Finding the Mini-Mart was easy. It was up on the main drag. Finding my hosts’ house again—that was the challenge.

Like cats released into freedom for the first time, I was operating on limited information. Having hitched a ride to the party with friends, I hadn’t bothered to check the house number. Or the street name. Married student housing was laid out in nothing resembling a grid, and all the houses were identical. All 500 of them.

I rode around for a while, Cokes and tonic water warming, bagged ice melting in the bike’s basket. I would probably still be riding if one of my hosts hadn’t chosen the moment I was circling his circle for the hundredth time to set out an empty keg on the front porch. I have rarely been so glad to see anyone.

Cats. Mystery is their milieu. The Egyptians held them sacred. Believed they guarded Egypt from invaders. Next time you see a cat, bow your head in acknowledgment of the inexplicable powers they hold, including the ability to always find home.

 Mystery #5: What Are We?

Okay, one more.

Some years back, a friend invited me to an art exhibit at Smith College. I can’t recall exactly what the theme of the show was, but it included a photograph of the poet Tennyson taken after his death.

In the photo we see Tennyson’s head resting on a pillow, eyes closed, a peaceful expression on his face, as if he were just napping (recall Mystery #3). But he’s dead.

I stared and stared at that still face. Looked at some more of the exhibit. Returned to Tennyson. There he was—head, shoulders, torso—all of him except the thing that was him. The “Tennyson thing.” The thing that was a poet rather than a cab driver or a hip-hop artist. The thing that preferred Skittles to Milk Duds, or favored the Yankees over the Mets. Okay, I’m improvising here—well, fabricating wildly—but the question is: Where did the mind-personality-heart that was Tennyson go? How was it there one moment and—poof!—gone the next?

I relate all this as background to the greatest mystery of all: What are we?

The startling glimpse I had into this most amazing of riddles came while I was visiting London twelve years ago with my youngest. As well as enjoying galleries and museums, parks and pubs, Lauren was talking to admissions people at several UK universities. This particular day, they were talking to someone at King’s College London about studying microbiology (they wound up majoring in public policy in the States, but that’s a completely separate mystery and nothing to do with the topic at hand).

While they were chatting with the admissions folks, I wandered around and discovered a little anatomy “museum” on one floor. A kind of 19^th century exhibit of spare parts—like a Victorian penny dreadful. Among the displays I recall were stomachs and brains, lungs and large intestines, hearts and kidneys. There was even a set of fetal Siamese twins. All floating in some murky preservative in voluminous glass jars.

It brought me smack up against all my assumptions about the species Homo sapiens, and changed my head 180.

Up to that moment, I thought of human beings in the lofty, ethereal way you might expect from a lit major/writer/daydream believer. We were ideas and dreams, philosophical meanderings and heart-throbbings. But as I stood, gazing at these jars of stuff that looked nothing so much as a lot of cruddy dilapidated hot water bottles and crusted tubing, I had to admit: That’s us.

And when that junk stops working, the game’s over.

The mystery is how something as mentally and emotionally complex, as creative and resourceful as us emerges from what appears to be about five dollars’ worth of spare parts.

You can see how a Hitler or a Trump might come out of this muck, but a Tennyson or a Van Gogh? A Nelson Mandela or a Frida Kahlo?

And yet it is the truth of us.

Mysteries. Life is full of them. I embrace them. I like the way they keep my brain on a Socratic buzz—asking and answering questions, which then generate more questions—as I puzzle out the oddities of this world.

It all comes down to this: When the SkyBall goes transparent tonight, giving way to a universe of stars, I’ll be thankful that whichever way my head is facing, I don’t fall off the planet. And when I come back from the land of sleep tomorrow morning, however that happens, I’ll be grateful for another day, crossing my fingers that the mucky parts and crusty tubing keep on ticking.