This is no Time for Deafness, Blind Indifference or Despair

Do not tune out when the call to you is so plain

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

By Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
_________________________________

(All photos are Protesters at Eugene, OR Federal Building, 18 Oct 2025 No Kings rally)

Things like food, water and shelter are always in the hierarchy of our most critical needs but hope these days has become as essential. I keep one ear and one eye on sentry duty, ever on the lookout for it. The other eye and ear are first responders on a safety patrol, easily seeing the red flags and hearing the growing chorus of alarms that ring daily.

All four are required for survival but the hopeful pair take precedence.

Music, art, good prose and poetry, theater, dance all provide respite and inspiration to fuel the lanterns of hope. Friendship, community building, random acts of kindness are renewable energy sources to keep those lights ablaze.

I’m lucky to have more than a dozen social media friends who uplift and inspire me with poetry (a guy and a gal), photography, philosophy and beauty in combination, along with a half dozen musicians, and a few other multimedia artists. Each provides a few minutes of retreat and refresh for the soul. Add to them 2 or 3 dozen jokers who I have to read with a mouth devoid of liquid or my desk would constantly be flooded.

When tragedy strikes, when news events create anger or fear, these fine people provide solace and reflection, a bit of gyroscopic balance that keeps the darkest worries at bay. Everyone should be so lucky.

As well, some who keep me well-informed provide a similar service. By now, I think you’re all familiar with the historian Heather Cox Richardson. Her back stories from history often remind us how our political system works and is supposed to work, and where some politicians have driven it out of legal bounds. Hearing about politicians, jurists, journalists, scientists, military heroes and seemingly ordinary people stepping up to create a better world, it also brightens the way forward. Good offsets when we face leaders who are such big assholes that they block the sun.

It’s been months since I’ve written this newsletter. Now the clanging bell and flashing red lights of alarms have forced my hand.

When 5 to 8 million Americans assemble and rally peacefully to protest crappy leadership there’s cause for great hope. We did that. Hundreds of American ex-pats and tourists showed up in several big cities around the globe, in solidarity.

Collectively, we didn’t conspire against any country. The most accurate description of our global assemblage best defines us as ‘anti-assholes.’ We don’t hate America or Americans or any country or any population. There’s not a terror threat among us.

Certain politicians, their propagandists and their fans who find their every fart intoxicating keep trying to provoke fear about tens of millions of us to provoke division in their quest for more power. The worst of the lot have no interest in providing anything close to universal public service. They’re driven by avarice, would readily sacrifice the blood of millions and treat us as pawns and fools. Some just as readily sacrifice the lives of their most ardent supporters.

This is who we fight against by writing, assembling, marching and voting. We aren’t prone to any violence; most are committed to maintaining and pursuing peaceful resolutions.

Great dangers abound when those powerful few, in politics and business begin defining us as radicals, extremists and terrorists. Domestic terrorists have existed in our country’s history but most have been organizations of powerful and influential people like the KKK, Citizen’s Councils, the Cold Warriors like Senator Joe McCarthy, blackmailers like J. Edgar Hoover, etc. In over 250 years there’s only been a handful of organized groups within the larger populace that have posed a threat to elected officials.

There’s far more examples of power brokers in politics, business and warped religions who’ve demonized Chinese immigrants, Japanese Americans, Latino immigrants, Irish immigrants, Black people (many descended from slaves), indigenous tribes who ruled these lands first, women seeking equal rights, and others. Properties, assets, freedoms, rights and lives have been stolen and most often stolen by powerful men. The historical record makes it abundantly clear that most of the time, those are the domestic terrorists who’ve earned our fear and opposition.

They’ll stir groups within the larger population to inflict violence upon other groups of people within our population. That can occur in every generation and remains the most common domestic threat of all.

And if you’re not well-versed and fluent in our nation’s history, you, too, can more easily be fooled into acts of violent bigotry.

High school history courses should mandate a broader array of authors. Hannah Arendt about totalitarians. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Silent Spring or The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. Even fictional authors like Kurt Vonnegut with Slaughterhouse Five provides great insight into our real historical record. The Women’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Or Working by Studs Terkel. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Read Howard Zinn, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Frederick Douglass, Dee Brown, Adam Hochschild,

The Diary of Anne Frank is fairly well read. But a lot of high school history has been sanitized, filtered like white flour till it’s devoid of anything nutritious. Actual history when well written, can unfold like a crime novel. It’s a constant challenge to read a lot of it throughout one’s life. But it’s necessary. Especially now with the most powerful nation in the world under siege by the sleaziest power brokers the US has seen in the past century.

It’s why I recommend reading Heather Cox Richardson at least twice a week. Amid the horrors, she also provides reasons for higher hopes.

Consider:

The Antideficiency Act, a law that has evolved over time since 1870, prohibits the government from spending money that Congress has not appropriated for that purpose, or agreeing to contracts that spend money Congress has not appropriated for that purpose.

This summer, Democratic senators charged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with triggering the Antideficiency Act by overspending her department’s budget, but Trump’s claim that he can move government money around as he wishes is an even greater threat to the country than Noem’s overspending.

There is more at stake here than a broken law.

Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes.

That principle was at the heart of the American Revolution. The 1773 Tea Act that sparked Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, to throw chests of tea into Boston Harbor did not raise the price of tea in the colonies; the law lowered those prices. To pay for the cost of what colonists knew as the French and Indian War, Parliament in 1767 had taxed glass, lead, oil, paint, paper, and tea, but boycotts and protests had forced Parliament to repeal all the taxes except the one on tea. It kept that tax to maintain the principle that it could tax the colonies despite the fact they were unrepresented in that body.

link: Letters From an American, October 16, 2025

And why does it matter that this administration is already conducting a war against Caribbean nations like Venezuela and Columbia? Though there’s no law defining capital punishment as the penalty for drug dealing and distribution, the President is claiming he has the right to shred the bodies of people on boats without offering evidence of what is on the boats or where they’re headed. By enormous margins, most illegal drugs come into the US through Mexico and a lot of it is smuggled in by Americans.

So is there an ulterior motive to these boat attacks? Is he trying to start a war? And if so, who would profit from such a war? There’s a whole lotta laws being broken here with zero proof that Venezuelan and Columbian governments are involved at all.

Richardson provides more perspective.

But, while highlighting the uplifters and the better explainers of 2025, there’s also some really dark warnings we all should give serious thought to.

Highly recommended reading list:

Deniro unloads on ‘Nazi’ Stephen Miller

Prison is Running Massive Ghislaine Maxwell Coverup For Trump: Insider

Making Democrats ‘the enemy within’ with blatantly racist images and refusing to negotiate at all with Democrats to end the government shutdown.

Who’s bringing violence into US Cities? In addition to the loss of legal rights there’s a huge financial cost.

Essential to read:

How Trump is Building A Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force, from Propublica

Are we becoming the next Venezuela?

Why we have to make the antifa myths obsolete: Sarah Kendzior forwards the dark warnings of an expert on authoritarianism.

As I initially pointed out: keep your hope above all as it can light the way forward. But do not ignore the growing dark that we have to contain.


Read the history. Listen to the elders who’ve seen this shit before.

PEACE. And keep that flicker of Hope alive.