2025 Official Portrait by Daniel Torok. United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs.
Every day the front pages of newspapers and the news shows scream. Every day friends use more and more exaggerated terms:
MONSTER
CRIMINAL
INSANE
These terms may be accurate, at least for some of us, but accurate or not, they are over the top and they don’t help our thinking or our ability to act.
In fact they paralyze us.
I have been in the same room with madness, with criminal behavior, with reactions that seemed insane, and I found myself unable to do anything useful. Tears? Protests? Not much use and counterproductive in the present situation.
It’s worth remembering two things: if you have ever had to deal—or try to deal—with a two-year-old having a tantrum, you know how useless reasoning is. “I think you are angry.” More screams. “What can I do to help?” Kicking and writhing. It occurs to you at some point that your attention is feeding fuel to the flames—because attention is exactly what this two-year-old wants.
So it doesn’t take much imagination to guess at the satisfaction our overreactions, individually and institutionally, bring to the current two-year-old.
The second thing to remember is that all these executive orders that cause us to overreact are very regularly rescinded or overthrown. The courts are undoing some of it (whether the two-year-old obeys the courts is another question), and pushback from the public, especially from big donors, is also causing abrupt cancellation of executive orders: look at what happened with the defunding of Head Start. Somebody with political pull said something and the funding was restored.
So our over-reaction is both counterproductive—it produces no positive results—and unnecessary.
And it saps our ability to carry on.
This is the kind of carrying-on that counts. Expressing even a limited faith in the ability of the American people to bring about the needed changes; faith in the strength—now being regularly tested—of our two-party system, of the separation of church and state, of the power of Congress, at some point, to exert its financial responsibilities.
Our country is pulling together for the first time since the Vietnam War. We’ve become lazy. We don’t vote, we don’t donate, we don’t bother ourselves to be informed. It’s all too much trouble, and life for at least some of us is too comfortable (the ones for whom it is not at all comfortable, for whom it is nearly unbearable, are stretched to their limits trying to survive and can’t do anything more.) So let’s go to another restaurant—the new one is supposed to be really good!—let’s shop at the new boutique (one of the few small stores that seem to be surviving) or, even easier, let’s put in another order with Amazon instead of trudging to our local bookstore.
None of this is carrying on our essential fight.
But we can rise up. We can make our voices heard, at public forums (like the recent Town Halls that dismayed many Republicans) or by writing letters to newspaper editors to correct their outrageous basis.
That is the right kind of carrying on.
We who are second-wave feminists (if we must have a label) remember when we first raised our voices. It was shocking to us, and to some of the people who heard us.
But over time we were heard. And change happened.
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