Post 717 - February 11, 2025

It seems to me that everything coming out of Washington is turning into sludge. The forward momentum of all the Executive Actions and announcements has become all wrapped up in court-ordered halts and interruptions. It’s remarkably unclear what’s getting implemented and what isn’t.

I’m checked out of most of it, so I can’t accurately comment on each specific pronouncement and the response to it from the judiciary. Still, from where I am standing, it appears as if the initially powerful forward-moving stream has come upon a lot of rocks. It’s all still moving ahead, but there’s a lot of splashing slowing it down.

For the first time since this began, a federal judge has accused the President of not complying with a court order. Judge John McConnell, Jr., from the great state of Rhode Island, ordered the White House to immediately unfreeze billions of dollars in federal grants as they had been ordered to do at the end of last month.

This, I think, is the development to watch. If the President can’t be made to obey a direct court order, then who among us will be able to stop him from doing anything?

The vice president posted on social media that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Even though the statement is an outright lie, it does seem to indicate what the Republican plan is. They are clearly going to defy all court rulings until somebody sane finds a way to get them to toe the line.

I find our leader’s ability to completely ignore the law fascinating. There is in him what seems a complete absence of shame and guilt around any of the horrible actions he takes. He doesn’t seem to care what anybody thinks. At the same time, he’s obsessed with crowd size and getting a loud supportive response for everything he does. His handlers provide him with the illusion that he’s getting exactly that. It’s all a sham, though.

Even Richard Nixon, the biggest crook we’ve had in the Oval Office, up until this guy, ultimately respected the rule of law. He was happy to break the law, but when he was caught, he accepted the fact that he’d done something wrong, and he resigned. He may not have believed he was wrong, but he did knuckle under. The guy we have now would never do that.

Elon Musk has the power to end world hunger with the money he has stockpiled. Our newly elected president has the power to make substantive positive changes to the institutions that govern our country. Can you imagine the public adulation that would be theirs if they shifted course?

Sadly, the likelihood of them changing directions probably stands either at or very close to nil.

Yesterday, for my birthday, I let myself eat a couple of slices of cake. I’d been looking forward to it for days because I haven’t been eating very much sugar at all since I began trying to pull myself together physically at the beginning of the year.

I’m not dieting, let me be clear. Instead, I am just trying to eat mindfully. Dieting is, in my mind, denying yourself something, while being mindful is actively choosing what to eat.

It turns out that just thinking about what you are doing can change the relationship you have with doing it.

I have always eaten a lot of sugar. Cake, cookies, bagels, warm bread – I’m a sucker for baked goods. Even as I eat them, I am conscious of the fact that I am only adding to the excess weight I am carrying. Since the pandemic began, however, I’ve ignored that inner voice that’s asked, why?

Having not eaten sugar in great quantities for about six weeks, eating the cake at our little birthday gathering yesterday made an immediate physical impression. I could feel my energy lift. Later, after we’d returned home, though, I crashed. By about eleven thirty, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

I realized that before I started paying attention to what I was consuming, the ends of my days were always like that. I’d go until I suddenly had to stop and go to bed. For the last few weeks, that hasn’t happened. At the end of each day, I was ready to go to bed, but I didn’t have to go to bed right at that moment.

Last night, our circle of friends had a conversation about how closely we were following what is going on in Washington. Some of us have been paying very close attention, and some have shut their eyes to it all. When, I wondered, does mindfulness help and when does it just drag us down?

We, each of us, have different levels of anxiety about what we are currently living through. Some of that is predicated on who we are as members of this society.

Michael and I are gay White men. Our skin color combined with our gender gives us an enormous advantage that the women we were with in the room last night don’t share. Our sexual orientation, on the other hand, puts us at risk for societal approbation in a way that the rest of our friends in that group, who are all straight, don’t have to worry about.

The Jewish women in our circle talked about their awareness of the rise of anti-Semitism they are experiencing. The sole Jewish man, however, did not feel the same way. He was aware of what he had been reading in the news but hadn’t felt it impinge upon him personally in any elevated way.

I have been aware of homophobia since before I can remember. It has rarely been more than a constant thrum underneath my everyday interactions, so I rarely take it in. It’s like when you have a pain in your shoulder that won’t go away. It isn’t debilitating, it’s just there so you ignore it and get on with your day. Every once in a while, the ache may flair up making you conscious of it, but on a normal day, you’d never notice.

Without being Jewish, myself, I can imagine that there is also always an underlying fear, some of which is obviously inherited, that one is surrounded by potential danger. These days, it isn’t surprising that it has reached a level where we are now talking about it.

I can only imagine the level of stress that people of color must endure daily for simply existing.

We live in New York City, which is about as open a living environment as there is, but even so, few of us are immune to feeling that we aren’t fully welcome here. Most of the time, as I said, we all ignore it but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

The trick, these days, I think, is keeping aware of what is happening to our government, without overdosing on it. That is, of course, far easier said than done.

When Kanye West, or whatever he’s calling himself now, advertises t-shirts with a swastika proudly emblazoned across the front of them on his website, it’s impossible not to seethe with anger. It’s also next to impossible not to feel terrified as that kind of hate begins to be normalized and accepted.

The news jumps all over it which only spreads the imagery and the sentiment behind it that much further through our community. The more you see an image like a swastika, the less you notice it. It becomes background noise, no matter how hateful you might consider it.

I now have evidence gained through personal experience of the exact effects of eating two (well honestly, three) slices of cake has on my body. I am not going to say that I will never do that again, but when I do, I will know what the price will be that I will pay.

When faced with a buffet of food, as I have been several times over the last couple of weeks, I can choose to see the food that is better for me and avoid that which isn’t. Just thinking about it, I have found, makes it all so much easier to navigate through.

In the same way, I can look at the spread of governmental sludge and pick out what I want or maybe need to see.

If the power of the courts fails to stem the tide of this Republican onslaught, then the United States of America will cease to exist as the democracy it has been for the last couple of centuries. I think it’s as simple as that.

It doesn’t matter what they are doing, if it is illegal, it must be stopped, and they must be held accountable. There must be repercussions. History has taught us, that when leaders refuse to adhere to the rule of law, the only way to stop them is for us, the people, to rise up against them.

I’m not scared about what’s going on, I’m angry. Yes, our government needs repair and improvements. Yes, it has failed to serve the needs of each of us in the way that it should. What’s happening now, though, is not the way to fix it.

Instead of just shutting everything down, we should be examining each aspect of what our agencies and elected officials do and changing what doesn’t work. The only way through is with thoughtfulness.

Somebody must figure out how to get these monster children to listen to authority.

While I’m waiting for Congress and our courts to figure this all out, I have some stretching to do. I can’t fix what’s going on in Washington, but I can do a better job of taking care of myself. I just need a little care and thought.

Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday yesterday. I’m fastening my seatbelt to prepare for another trip around the sun. From what I can see so far, this one’s going to be a doozy.