What I'm Going to Do, I Think

h/t the late, great Larry Woiwode, who would probably hate this post

Last night, for a couple of hours, the website of the US Census was down. Some pages of the CDC’s website, dealing with health data on young LGBTQ people, are still down, with the result that, for example, the tool that helps doctors decide how much HIV medicine to give a teenager who has been raped and infected is no longer up. So is the Forest Service’s page on climate change adaptation. (A longer treatment is here.) The agency employees who yanked these pages presumably did so in compliance with a series of executive orders from President Trump, orders that forbid government agencies from describing certain officially proscribed realities, among them “C02 traps heat” and “gay teenagers exist.”

Also last night, it was reported that some Elon Musk toadies who work for his “Department of Government Efficiency” — so named in reference to a type of fake internet money that the apartheid diamond mine heir is said to be fond of — went to the Treasury and insisted on being granted access to the computer system that controls your parents’ Social Security and Medicaid payments. Presumably none of us wants a ketamine addict’s groyper friends deciding whether we’re going to have Medicaid this month or not. Presumably not that many of Trump’s own voters, who rely on these systems, want that. The legal arguments that will surround and constrain, or fail to constrain, all of this — plus the attempted illegal funding freeze, already partially blocked, partially still in place — will take months to play out, and it would be unbelievably naive to argue that they will only play out in courtrooms. They will play out in response to a handful of nameable officials’ read of where power lies and where it’s shifting — and thus, they will play out in part in the very sorts of terrain, newsrooms and street protests and broadcasts and Congressional cowards’ phones and benign or malign media stunts, that feel as though they’ve all passed into eternal irrelevance. They may indeed have already so passed, but we don’t know that yet and would be very foolish to treat the thing as decided. The issue that these legal arguments will be settling is very simple. It’s simply this: is it part of the rules of a democracy for a democracy to end its existence as such by a vote? Or no?

I think the answer is “No” and I am trying to figure out how to act accordingly. To help myself think about that, and then to hold my feet to the fire, I’m going to try news posting a little more often, even though I am afraid that’s annoying to some of my readers. (I may try to set up a thing where you can opt in to certain posts and out of others.) I’m going to write up and link to the news stories that are haunting me the most at the moment and then make a commitment, here in public, where you can all judge me if I don’t do it, to take some concrete actions about them, even if these actions strike me as inadequate or even pathetic, because something is better than nothing and it’s good to have a plan, and then in the comments (which will be unlocked for non-paying subscribers), others can share what they’re going to do. I’ll try to do this at least once a week, or more.

This week I’m going to

—sit in on this recruiting call that Indivisible is doing, tomorrow night, 8-9pm (EST), with some other groups, specifically about the questionably-legal funding freezes and Elon Musk’s attempt to control the Big Money Computer. This seems wholly inadequate but until I hear that there’s a more practical thing I can do, I’m committing to at least it.

—do 5calls every workday.

—not buy any records. I will save the money I would usually spend on records so as to do a little more charitable giving, since the tariffs are gonna hit people hard, unless (as I am beginning to suspect will happen) they turn out to be Schrodinger’s Tariffs (Trump says they exist and credits them for any benign changes that occur in the economy but they are never actually enforced or collected).

—continue to pray the Daily Office, which I’ve been doing most days since the turn of the year, using a podcast that I swear to God is recorded by the last man on Earth who has a forties-movie-style Mid-Atlantic accent (prayer is proverbially useless — “Empty prayer, empty mouth,” sang Michael Stipe — but I have to assume those proverbs are wrong, somehow).

—not doomscroll, and if I start to feel like everything is hopeless, all our money is going to suddenly disappear, and I should kiss my loved ones goodbye, to log off and shut the fuck up before I make someone else despair

—identify three places on my daily walk where I could post agitprop

Again, if the spirit moves you, post some things you’d like to do (and be held accountable for) in the comments.