What I'm Going To Do, I Think/What I Think I Did (2-9-25)

apologies, again, to Mr. Woiwode

Last week, in the first of these posts, I wrote:

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.

So here goes Accountability Post #1. I recommend these posts by Josh Marshall and Jonathan Last, both of which writers I have really disliked at different points in the past. These posts are pretty sensible and describe the political state of play nicely. Basically, they both contend that the Democrats need to use the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations — for which they unquestionably are needed, and in which they definitely have some leverage — to demand that Musk and DOGE be expelled from Washington, DC, and that USAid be restored, at an absolute minimum. Normally, it’s a bad idea for an opposition party to do things that might result in a federal government shutdown — but we are already in something like one of those, but worse.

Last week I said that I would 1) sit in on the big Indivisible conference call for that week, that I would 2) do 5calls every workday, that I would 3) limit “fun” personal spending so there was more money to give to charity, that I would 4) continue to pray the Daily Office, that I would 5) not doomscroll, and that I would 6) identify three places on my daily walk where I could post agitprop. Now you’re all about to see how good I am at follow-through. I succeeded at 1); I succeeded at 2) two out of five days. (In my defense, I learned on Wednesday that at least one senator’s voicemail is completely full—more on that in a second.) I did 3)¹ and 4). I completely failed at 5) not doomscrolling. I succeeded at 6) noticing several places in my daily walk where agitprop could be posted.

This is a pretty typical follow-through rate for me on commitments I make. I achieve some things through willpower and I also fall down on the job a lot. There is an absurd finickiness in my nature that can’t accept this; I can’t simply say “Try again tomorrow,” as a sensible person would. I have to find some pretext for treating each week as an empty page, with a whole new set of commitments. However, that simply won’t work here. We have almost all been failing to one degree or another at the boring and/or hard work of generating a decent society and this is what we get for it. You have to go back again to what you failed at yesterday, even if that requires patience with yourself, even if you have to exercise that patience in a moment where it feels like there’s no more time for patience with anyone. Wallace Stegner has this typology of “Boomers” and “Stickers”: people who are constantly moving further West because they’re about to make their fortune vs. people who stick around and make a place, even if they make it inadequately. I think like a Boomer but I want to be a Sticker. In practice I am always trying to Boom my way into Sticking: “Starting at 5AM next Monday, I will be a patient, enduring monk in every area of my life, and till then I’m going to play video games because that’s going to be a very demanding regimen.”

However, I also did one thing this week that I didn’t know I would be able to do. On Wednesday I went with a bunch of Ann Arbor Indivisible volunteers to my Senators’ offices in Detroit. At both places we spoke to staffers. I liked the staffers. They seemed earnest and overwhelmed. I didn’t get a “I’m doing this now so that I can be a useless rich senator someday” vibe from any of them, although I am not sure I would recognize that vibe if I encountered it in the wild. In both cases I feel like we took too much of their time, and there was one volunteer in particular who I thought had no idea when to quit. That’s Ann Arbor for ya. The staffers told us that they were seeing a lot of constituents, including groups like ours, with similar demands, and that the phone systems across Congress were collapsing under the call volume. This is as it should be. Unelected non-employees of the government² who are loyal only to an absurd South African child-man have the ability to shut off my mom’s social security payments or the grants that guarantee I’ll have a job to go to on Monday. And we’re first-worlders; we’re not refugees in Syria or children with AIDS in Africa. Courts are starting to issue injunctions to stop all of it, but it’s not clear to me, or I think to anyone, whether courts retain the ability to enforce such injunctions. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re doing it, and I don’t minimize the danger these judges are courting. (It is rare for me to have something nice to say about a judge, but here we are.)

It wasn’t a waste of time; it may be too late; I’m glad I did it.

The response to my previous post in this vein was warm, so I’ll keep trying to do it every week or so. I got a good question from friend of the newsletter

Celine Nguyen

that I think is worth answering publicly: I'd also like to ask a favor: if you feel comfortable sharing where you are doing your charitable giving, I would love to know what orgs/etc you are donating to!

My charitable giving is insufficiently thought-through. I give some money every month to the church I’m currently attending — the place is pretty serious about doing the works of charity and doesn’t waste money, so I know a lot of it is going where it should — and we also give to two other churches we used to attend, one of which is historically black, in a poor neighborhood, etc., so we know that’s going to people who really need it too. For a while I was giving money to GiveDirectly and when we’re out from under a couple of debts I’m going to do that again; a similar, newer program that simply distributes money to the very poor is Held. I also just throw money at GoFundMes for strangers when they happen across my social-media accounts. And I practice what a long-ago social media acquaintance used to call The People’s Fiver, which is: when you go to the grocery store and you use your debit card and they ask if you want cash back, always grab a five or ten, which belongs to the next poor person who asks you for money. I am at the drug store or the grocery store a few times a week, and I usually remember to do this (with inflation, it’s tens and twentys now). I am not sure that any of these are particularly good ways to do charity, but they’re what I do at the moment.

Anyway, here are this week’s commitments:

—I’m going to commit to doing 5calls again, every workday, and to continuing to pray the daily office;

—I’m going to donate a hundred bucks (which would otherwise have been blown on records) to Harm Reduction Toolkits, a charity for trans people, who this government seems to hate with a special venom (I tried to do this just now but the CAPTCHA system seems fucked up);

—I’m going to write letters to all three of my congresspeople summarizing the abovementioned arguments for using all their power not only to slow Congressional business but to actually withdraw from debt ceiling negotiations if USAid isn’t restored and Musk/DOGE neutralized;

—probably something else, but I don’t know what it is yet and will keep an eye open for it.

An action I would take, if I were in a position to do so:

—Parents of university students should be writing and calling upper administration to ask what presidents and regents are doing to protect their children’s data from doxing/blackmailing by Musk and DOGE, and also what universities are doing to guarantee their own existence in the face of a possible block on basically all government grants to scientific and medical research. I mean, should you be planning to make your next tuition payment if the place is about to cease to exist? A few dozen calls like this from the right parents might put a spine into even Santa Ono’s back.

An action I am considering taking, but that I may not have the repertorial or organizing chops to actually do:

—Find out who my Congresspeople’s biggest donors are. Identify one who might be sympathetic to the idea of total obstructionism. Try to get a delegation together to talk to that person, tell them to tell the Congressperson to do the right thing, etc. etc., and also offer to help the Congressperson out financially if the problem is that they are literally afraid for their lives. The volume of death threats is rumored to be pretty high at the moment, by historical standards.

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

(Thus ends this week’s Boring, Earnest Resistance Post. There will be other, more fun posts. I’m almost done rereading Amusing Ourselves to Death, for one thing.)

1. I bought no records or books. I did attend a revival screening of the 1987 Clive Barker horror classic Hellraiser, and, while there, I purchased snacks. I am not made of stone.

2. One of whom appears to have owned domains used by groups that are mainly associated with blackmail and child sexual abuse material. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/.