I’ve lived in Ohio seven months now, and it’s starting to feel like home. My cozy college town is a familiar shade of blue. The rest of this semi-rural county, though, remains a place I’m still exploring and have barely begun to understand.

But I’m curious. Who are my fellow county residents, how do they live, and what do they believe? Why do many of them hold political views (as evidenced by voting patterns) so different from my own and those of almost everyone I know?

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Most people, myself included, inhabit social bubbles where we associate mainly with others whose experiences, beliefs, and values mesh with our own. To appreciate the lives of those outside our bubble, we first have to accept that our own cultural context is not some template of normality, just one of infinite variations. So I’ll begin by briefly describing my own milieu. Then, to look beyond it, I’ll draw on an unusual primary source: obituaries published in the local paper, which provide a window on the lives of other area residents. In a future post, I’ll consider what such insights may mean for Democrats and note some promising outreach across political lines in rural and Rust Belt communities.

My world

In my social networks, most of us have moved away from our birthplace: after attending college or university, we never returned to our childhood homes. We hold a four-year degree at minimum, plus a master’s or PhD in many cases, and our parents probably went to college, too. Clustered in big cities and their suburbs, we’re academics, doctors, lawyers, scientists, career civil servants, nonprofit staff, activists, writers, and artists. Most of us appear economically secure, although who really knows: people may be experiencing hardship they don’t discuss.

We have international interests and connections from time spent living, working, or traveling abroad, or from growing up in another country. We’re politically active, to a greater or lesser degree, and lean left. We value racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity; class diversity, not so much. As for political diversity, it hardly needs to be said how most people I know feel about Trump voters.

Until I moved to Ohio, it was easy for me to subconsciously assume that this was the normal way people lived; the default, if you will. Of course I knew that wasn’t true – not in the United States and not in the world. But sometimes it felt true.

Another world

The Ohio county I moved to is an urban-rural mix, comprising outer-ring suburbs of Cleveland, small towns, and farmlands. The county seat is a small city, population about 50,000, and it publishes a daily paper that I’ll call the Gazette. That is not its name, but Gazette is a common name for local newspapers in Ohio. I skim it every morning, paying special attention to local news and to the obits, which present a rich picture of local lives.

It is, to be sure, an incomplete picture. Not all local families place an obit in the Gazette when a loved one dies. While the county’s population is about one-quarter Black and Latino, at least 90 percent of those featured in the Gazette’s obits appear to be white. Also, they are – please don’t laugh at this startling insight – old. The lives of people who died in their 70s, 80s, and 90s are an imperfect guide to how younger generations live. So the Gazette’s obits don’t present a true cross-section of the county population. But they are illuminating nonetheless.

Most of the Gazette’s departed were lifelong residents of the area. They were born in this county or somewhere else in Ohio; if not Ohio-born, they typically came here from neighboring Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Their extended families live here, too.

After graduating from a local high school, the majority immediately entered the workforce or joined the military. Some attended a technical or business school, a community college, or, in a few cases, a four-year college. (Although the sample probably undercounts those with higher education, only about 28% of adults in this county hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.)

They became factory workers, construction workers, autoworkers, electricians, teachers, nurses, firefighters, small business owners, secretaries, bank tellers, salespeople, custodians. In short, they held normal jobs, not in the elite professions but in occupations that produce goods and services and make the economy tick.

The obits devote substantial space to family, which is described in great detail. Most people appear to have married: “Their faith and love sustained them for 65 years and 8 months of a blessed marriage,” reads one tribute. (In quoting from the obits, I’ve changed a few details for the sake of privacy.)

Hobbies and pastimes likewise receive emphasis. The late resident “loved golfing and bowling. He was very proud of his Irish heritage, and loved to dance and sing.” Another person “was a member of Lucy’s Lassies Baton and Drum Corp as a twirler.” Other interests mentioned include vintage cars, model trains, knitting, gardening, roller skating, ballroom dancing, flower arranging, attending polka dances, going to swap meets, collecting Hot Wheels cars, “riding his Harley,” and taking trips to Las Vegas to play the slots.

Political interests, on the other hand, are conspicuous by their absence. A death notice in the Washington Post often gives generous hints as to the person’s politics. Not so in the Gazette. Instead, the obits report membership in fraternal groups: the Knights of Columbus, Knights of St. John, Amvets, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Elks, Rotary Club, Kiwanis, Fraternal Order of Police, and something called the Loyal Order of Moose, which I’d never heard of. Truth be told, I’ve never known a single person who belongs to any of these organizations. That’s how different my life has been.

Ethnic associations are popular: the United Polish Club, the Polka Association, the Irish American Club. Many people in this area trace their roots to Eastern Europe, as did my paternal grandfather, who immigrated to Cleveland from Hungary. Many of the departed did volunteer work in their communities – a point we share in common, though I will not likely be joining the County Sheriff’s Auxiliary any time soon.

As for international experience, many local residents have indeed had it – as members of the US military. A few have gone abroad on church missions. Travel overseas for any other reason appears rare.

Finally, the obits are suffused with religious faith. The deceased “began his eternal life with Jesus, has gone to be with our Lord, entered the church triumphant, will be reunited in heaven with her husband, lived his life keeping God first in his life.”

Can we find common ground?

Democrats know they face challenges with rural voters nationwide. Organized labor, once a pillar of the Democratic Party, is also disaffected; while union leaders may support Democrats, many rank-and-file workers, especially in the skilled trades, have stayed faithful to Trump. Democratic activists are slowly coming to terms with the need to respect, listen to, and learn from all kinds of people if they hope to regain trust and votes. For urban coastal Democrats, I would argue, a first step is simply to understand how other people in other places live their lives.

From there, we can begin to find common purpose and ways to work together. Toward this end, there are some interesting ventures underway in communities around the country, where local Democrats are working with conservative neighbors toward shared goals. Led by county Democratic committees or independent grassroots groups, they work year-round to build trust and connections, then draw on that trust to reach out to voters at election time. I’ll look at a few of these initiatives in a future post.

I did it. I signed up! For a six-day trip to the Lake Erie islands, a birding hotspot, at peak migration season. Offered by Road Scholar, it’s an inexpensive outing just a couple hours’ drive from my home – a low-stakes venture to see whether senior group travel is for me. And oh yeah: I booked it for the spring of 2027. Best not to jump into these things too hastily.

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It’s not that I suddenly felt the urge to go birding with strangers. It seemed, rather, like something I ought to want to do. Retired people travel, right? At least they do if they have time and money and their health permits. I meet those criteria at the moment. So what’s stopping me? My retired friends travel to far-flung places, both independently and on tours, and they have a fabulous time.

Hard to believe now, but from my late teens through early thirties I was hell-bent on exploring the world: Western and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, the Caribbean, and above all West Africa, where I spent three years living and traveling. I favored areas that were remote, physically demanding, and culturally alien to me, and I often traveled alone. I learned to trust myself and to operate outside my comfort zone. Once I returned to the States, my political outlook remained primarily international for another decade at least.

But over time something shifted, bringing me to a different mental space.

Finding my people

I still like to travel, but I’m no longer driven to do it. What seems important now is rootedness: belonging to a community (or communities) and helping to build that community as best I can.

In part this reflects aging and the waning of my energy for rough travel. But the social and political context has also changed. I’m surely not the only one who has come to a deeper appreciation of community in the Trump era.

The 2016 election drew me into a vast network of people determined to resist MAGA and Trump. I joined NOPE Neighbors, a DC-based, all-volunteer group working to elect Democrats in battleground states. I loved knocking on voters’ doors, and strategizing over potlucks in members’ homes. Online organizing felt impersonal. I craved face-to-face connections.

Then came the pandemic. I didn’t realize how much I needed to see people IRL until I couldn’t. The pandemic fostered a spirit of mutual aid as neighborhood residents helped each other. Early on, when it was thought risky to shop in stores, Bill and I ordered from chain supermarkets through Instacart, paying high fees. But Mt. Pleasant’s small businesses soon stepped up. When I ordered from a neighborhood food store, my groceries appeared an hour later on my porch, dropped off gratis by an employee on her way home.

“Neighborism”

The most recent turning point was the incursion of federal forces into cities across the nation and the violence they unleashed.

DC was one of the first cities targeted, and Mt. Pleasant, along with adjacent Columbia Heights, was ground zero. Both have large immigrant populations, and beginning last August they swarmed with agents from ICE and Border Patrol. Masked men brandishing automatic weapons seized immigrants as they were driving their children to school, heading to work in contractor vans, delivering food on mopeds, or simply walking down the street. We set up a neighborhood Signal group of watchers, and my phone pinged with constant alerts.

The story of how the federal government invaded Democrat-run cities to spread fear and wreak havoc is by now well known. What interests me here is the response. A case in point is Minneapolis, where agents had arrested more than 4,000 people by last January and killed two citizen observers. Writing in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer told of meeting “Trygve Olsen, a big man in a wool hat and puffy vest,” who had come to pick up food for families who were afraid to leave their homes:

The church was filled with pallets of frozen meat and vegetables, diapers, fruit, and toilet paper. Outside, a man wearing a leather biker vest bearing the insignia of the Latin American Motorcycle Association, his blond beard flecked with ice crystals, directed a line of cars through the snow.

In addition to the volunteers who supply families in hiding, Minneapolis has thousands of citizen observers who patrol for federal agents and alert neighbors to their presence. Among them were Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two who were killed. Serwer continues:

Perhaps the Trump administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. … Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent … Tens of thousands of volunteers – at the very least – are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. … The number of Minnesotans resisting the federal occupation is so large that relatively few could be characterized as career activists. They are ordinary Americans – people with jobs, moms and dads, friends and neighbors.

He concludes:

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism” – a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme.

Hokti’s advice

One of my favorite TV series is Reservation Dogs, set on a fictional Indian reservation in Oklahoma. In the finale, Lily Gladstone’s character, Hokti, counsels the teenage Willie Jack on her obligations to those around her, saying, “That’s the thing about community. You have to take care of it. You have to play your part.” It’s not an original thought, yet it resonated with me.

My part has been small, in both Ohio and DC. In Mt. Pleasant I was among the neighbors who served as volunteer crossing guards outside our local elementary school. Since the arrival of ICE, these efforts have expanded to include the “walking bus.” Trusted adult volunteers, after passing background checks, lead groups of children on foot between the school and their homes so that parents don’t have to venture out. Many residents also donate to support immigrant neighbors with food, rent, and legal assistance.

I don’t want to make too much of this. In Mt. Pleasant as elsewhere, it remains difficult to build true community across economic, racial/ethnic, and linguistic lines. Often one group of people tries to help another group, with the best of intentions but with the top-down structure that implies. Still, thanks to the patient work of organizers on both sides of the divide, and especially since the federal invasion, tenuous ties are forming between the neighborhood’s working-class renters and its more affluent homeowners.

I’m just starting to get involved in my new Ohio town, beginning with the food pantry gig. For me, loyalty to a community doesn’t have to mean just one. Even as I build social networks here, I make frequent return visits to Mt. Pleasant and remain a member of the Mt. Pleasant Village, a neighborhood association. Can I sustain this dual allegiance? I will try.

Toronto, Canada, is a place I’ve never lived, but through regular visits to our daughter’s family I’m becoming more familiar with the city. If I were to move there – which I don’t plan to do – I feel sure I could find my people and a place in the community, because now I know how to do it. More than that, I know why it matters. It has taken me most of a lifetime to learn.

Temps across northern Ohio are plunging. It was 1 degree Fahrenheit when I got up yesterday morning. Snow squalls blast across Lake Erie: one minute the weather is calm, with drifting flakes and a pale sun peering through heavy overcast. Then the winds roar and within seconds the world turns white. Roads and sidewalks are slick with black ice.

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I’ve been thinking lately about ice, and ICE. Masked enforcers with automatic weapons roam the nation’s cities, seizing nonwhite people and people with accents and dragging them away. One of those rounded up was Ramon Menera, a US citizen, whom Border Patrol agents zip-tied and detained “because of your accent” outside his suburban Minneapolis home. There are countless others like him.

Protesters in the Twin Cities, swathed against the frigid weather, spiky crampons on their boots, are blowing whistles, shouting at agents, and lobbing water balloons. In response, 1,500 troops from the Army’s 11th Airborne Division are being readied for deployment to Minnesota. The division is based in Alaska and is trained to operate in extreme cold. For the first time, the US military may be turned against Americans on domestic soil (or in this case, domestic ice).

On to Greenland

Even as he prepares to invade Minnesota, the president is ginning up a war against Europe. In a letter to Norway’s prime minister, Trump insisted that the United States must have “Complete and Total Control” of Greenland (or, as he repeatedly called it at Davos, “Iceland”).

While national security was the first rationale offered, the president’s letter suggests the real reason he’s willing to start a trade war or even a shooting war against our allies is that he didn’t get a prize he wanted. History is replete with wars started for bad reasons, but this one surely tops all. My father, a proud World War Two veteran, once told me he didn’t mind fighting necessary wars but “I sure as hell hate the unnecessary ones.” I’m glad he was spared seeing this.

It seems unlikely that Trump would actually invade Greenland, but that’s not the point. The point is humiliation, forcing others to grovel, bonus points if they’re world leaders. Canada’s Carney, at least, is not playing along.

I try not to circulate memes, but these stressful times call for some dark humor. Demon Flying Fox is a Berlin-based digital creator who makes AI-generated music videos. He’s not a Greenlander, and I can’t vouch for the cultural authenticity of the work. Certainly, penguins don’t live in the Arctic. But it scarcely matters. Somehow, he’s captured the moment.

Who’ll stop the madness?

Not Congress. They’ll dither and cower as long as we let them. The Republicans who control the House and Senate answer only to Trump’s base, and that base isn’t going anywhere, never mind the hopeful pundits who imagine “cracks in the MAGA coalition.” But die-hard Trump loyalists are a third of the electorate – at most. What’s up with the rest of us?

Not to discourage you further, but this recent article in The Atlantic is one of the most depressing things I’ve read. According to journalist Ashley Parker, the country is suffering from “Trump exhaustion syndrome.” She quotes Trump ally Steve Bannon: “He’s driving deep. Remember, our strategy [is] a maximalist strategy. You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven’t met any resistance.”

Parker continues:

“We haven’t met any resistance” is overstating the case, but it is astonishing just how far Trump has pushed the country over the past year. […] Already, many Americans have grown accustomed to bands of National Guard troops patrolling their cities; the United States bombing other countries without congressional approval (or even notification); white-nationalist rhetoric filling government social-media feeds; federal funding disappearing from elite universities that are viewed as too “woke” and hostile to Trump’s movement; hundreds of thousands of immigrants being arrested and deported, often with extreme force; the once-independent Justice Department taking orders from the White House; conservative influencers masquerading as journalists; government data losing their reliability; museums quietly whitewashing history; and the White House being physically and symbolically demolished and rebuilt in Trump’s image.

She concludes:

Trump Derangement Syndrome, in many ways, has been replaced by Trump Exhaustion Syndrome: The populace notes the latest indignity, and then returns to business as usual.

It’s a harsh assessment, but not wrong, and I’m as guilty as anyone. Fifty years ago I might have made my way to the Twin Cities to join the throngs in the streets. But now? Ice would make short work of me. ICE wouldn’t have to do a thing. About all I can do is call my Ohio senators and congressman and rant at the hapless 23-year-olds tasked with answering the phones.

A moment of grace

Amid the ugliness, there’s a glimpse of redemption in my life: a moment of kindness, of grace.

I’ve started volunteering in a local food pantry once or twice a week. It’s not much of a contribution in the grand scheme of things. My job, restocking shelves, requires few skills beyond showing up. It doesn’t change the government, or its policies, or the viciously unequal society we live in. Indeed it lays bare the inequities. Why do so many people need donated surplus food to survive while I, and most people I know, lack for nothing? I think about this as I unpack cartons, chatting with shoppers as they fill their carts.

They come from across this county and many look worn down, but some look just like me. The volunteer coordinator says that in addition to low-paid workers and those who are jobless, the food bank’s clients increasingly include middle-class people who have fallen down the ladder. In this economy, they can no longer make ends meet.

Some might suggest the clients are cheating, like Reagan’s welfare queens. Really? Would you drive miles over rural roads in a snowstorm to score canned peas, instant oatmeal, and “meat-flavored” pasta sauce that contains no meat? (To be fair, the food pantry also offers meat, eggs, bread, and fresh vegetables, though not always of the quality I like to buy.) Let there be no doubt: the need is real and growing.

On to the midterms

I don’t talk politics with the food pantry clients. It wouldn’t be appropriate, and anyway I don’t want to know. It wouldn’t surprise me if many still trust Trump. It would surprise me a lot, though, if they cared more about annexing Greenland than about feeding their families. That should give Democrats their cue.

The GOP-controlled Congress is a key enabler of Trump, so flipping at least one chamber in November is imperative. State legislatures matter too. They control redistricting and the electoral machinery in most states, determining who can and can’t vote. We have some excellent candidates running statewide in Ohio and in this district specifically. They’ll be talking about work, wages, and the cost of living. I hope to be out there supporting them, maybe even going door to door. But not until the ice melts and it stops snowing.

My last post lauded the sunny days that Bill and I enjoyed after moving to Ohio in September. Comments on the mild fall weather brought knowing looks from locals. I am finding out why.

I grew up in Rhode Island in the middle of the last century. New England winters were snowy back then, and cities took their snow removal duties seriously. I remember the sound of the plows grinding their way down our block at 11 p.m. The next day schools would close, and we’d tunnel into the snow mountains piled up by the plows to make snow forts.

But by 1978 I had moved to DC and mostly forgot about winter.

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It’s coming back to me now. Winter has started early this year in the Midwest. My Town lies just outside the snow belt that tracks the southern shore of Lake Erie, from Cleveland to Buffalo. The lake pumps out the fearsome weather known as lake effect snow. And the winds that sweep down from Canada slice you to the bone.

My daughter, who actually lives in Canada, is teaching me about winter. At her urging, I ordered merino wool “base layers” (what we used to call long underwear), along with boots, gloves, and a wool balaclava that makes me look like a space alien.

Winter driving in the snow belt is an act of faith or deep, deep stupidity. Crashes dot the region’s roadways during and after every storm.

I have some winter driving experience, thanks to my New England upbringing, but I’m learning things I never knew. In early December I took advantage of a dry spell to drive to Toronto and spend a week with my daughter’s family. The day for my return to Ohio dawned clear but frigid. Pulling onto the Danforth, a busy Toronto artery, I tried to clean my hazy windshield by squirting wiper fluid onto it. It froze instantaneously into an opaque white sheet.

Glancing out my side window, I saw a curb space to my right and pulled over. I put the flashers on, scraped the ice layer off the windscreen, and set the heat to blast from inside. I’ve since learned there’s such a thing as de-icer wiper fluid. Good to know.

A time for stocktaking

They say winter here lasts until April. I plan to get outside as often as I can. The town hosts an impressive number of free events, many of them with live music. Last weekend I went to a concert and pottery sale to raise money for the local food pantry, a “posada” organized by an immigrant support group, and a holiday get-together of activists. More is on my calendar.

But I have to face the fact that I’ll be spending the next four months mainly indoors: reading, corresponding with friends, streaming Netflix, and watching the birds at my neighbor’s feeders, the cardinals and jays bright pops of color against the swirling snow.

I’ll also be thinking. What’s the best use of my time in 2026, with the midterms looming? After a half century as a colonial subject in DC, I now live in a state, with elected representation: two senators and a congressman. All three are Trumpy Republicans, so I don’t exactly feel represented, but at least I have somewhere to voice my displeasure.

Ohio’s not a battleground state, but there are battles to be fought here. Sherrod Brown’s running for his old seat, which could tip control of the US Senate. Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s former health director, is running for governor against the widely despised Vivek Ramaswamy. There are seats to flip in the Ohio legislature, where the GOP holds veto-proof majorities. Once the snow melts, I might even get out there to knock on some doors.

What good does it do?

I’m not religious, but this quote from the Jewish Pirkei Avot resonates with me: You are not required to finish the work, yet neither are you permitted to desist from it.

With my long johns, de-icer fluid, and four new tires on the car, I’m coming to terms with Ohio winter. So too, I’m coming to accept the limits of what I can accomplish politically in my time remaining. My impact as an individual will be invisible. But collectively, we can do much more. Turn Ohio purple in 2026? Flip the US House – maybe even the Senate – so we can start the long, painful process of undoing the damage and charting a new path? It could happen. I will not finish the work in my lifetime. None of us will. We can only keep doing it as long as we are able.

Today marks six weeks since Bill and I landed in the Ohio college town that – to preserve a modicum of privacy for ourselves and our new neighbors – I will call My Town.

The move went about as well as it possibly could have. Even the weather cooperated. Northeast Ohio weather famously stinks, but we arrived to a long stretch of glorious fall days. (Check back with me in December.)

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In 1987 I visited Cuba to write an article for a journal. I spoke with government allies and critics, but one person’s comment stuck with me. “People come here for two weeks and then go home and write a book about Cuba,” he said. “Others stay two years, and they write a very different book. Still others come and stay for a lifetime. And they find they can’t write a book at all.”

This post will be of the two-week variety. I’m still an outsider looking in. It’s true that My Town is familiar: my father was in a retirement community here for 18 years, and we visited him often. But living here is different. In six months or a year I may have a better idea of what makes this place tick. Even then, my perceptions will differ from those of people who’ve spent their lives here.

So much space

One reason for the move was to enjoy cleaner air, less traffic, and more green space than we had in DC. I’ve not been disappointed. In fact I am thrilled.

My Town is small, about 8,000 people in five square miles. Most businesses cluster along a five-block stretch of Main Street. Everything is close to everything else. You can walk from here to there.

Days after arriving I bought a bike, a sturdy, easy-on, easy-off model that promises to be age-friendly. I ride every day, running errands or exploring quiet neighborhoods. I feel my legs and lungs getting stronger. Having long ago given up on biking in DC traffic – a blood sport I’ll leave to Gen Z – I’d forgotten the joy of ditching the car and biking where you want to go.

Some trips still require driving, but traffic is light. Then there’s parking, which has become a running joke between Bill and me. DC’s parking tribulations are but a memory. We already expect to drive up to a store or restaurant or office and park at the front door.

You might imagine that small-town charm has its downsides, and you’d be right. Public transportation is just about nil. There’s a free “e-bus” that makes a loop around town, but only on weekdays; it hits each stop once per hour, so wait times can be long. Neither Uber nor Lyft has a presence here.

Shopping and dining options are limited. A grocery run to a full-service supermarket means a trip out of town. Locally, store hours can be … peculiar. Some businesses close on Sunday. Oh, and on Monday and Tuesday, too. It’s not unusual for a store to be open, say, Wednesday through Saturday, 11 to 5. (The excellent public library, though, is open seven days a week.)

I need a manners upgrade

Everyone knows everyone else in a small town. Midwesterners are friendly. Both are stereotypes but they’re grounded in truth, and the experience has been jarring at times.

We needed furniture when we arrived, so we made the rounds of secondhand stores. Pressed for time one day, I charged into the local antiques barn, tape measure in hand. As I strode past the front desk I heard the bewildered clerk murmur, “Can I help you? Is everything all right? Oh … well … I guess you’re on a mission …” Abashed, I returned to the desk to greet her and explain what I was looking for. Since then I’ve learned: you greet people. You take your time, maybe comment on the weather, wish them a nice day. Because they expect it, and because they will remember you.

Everything here is personal. To get Ohio plates on our car and an Ohio driver’s license for me, we had to visit Bureau of Motor Vehicles offices several times. On the first two visits, two clerks recorded the car’s VIN and walked me through the additional steps I would need to take. Two days later, having done the retitling and inspection elsewhere, I returned to the first office to register the car and get my license. Both clerks recognized and greeted me: “Hi, Catherine!”

What the – ? Since when does somebody at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles remember your name?

Living with diversity – the political kind

It may be worth mentioning that one BMV clerk, who was particularly kind and helpful to me, wore a star-spangled pin proclaiming “I love America.”

This perplexed my blue-city brain. Was she MAGA? Or just conservative? Middle of the road or liberal, but patriotic? Did it even matter?

I concluded it did not. I couldn’t read her value system based on one pin, even if patriotic slogans are coded as right-leaning in my world. She and I might find much to agree on, or not, but in either case our interaction would be friendly.

That understanding will be foundational to my life here, because this area is politically and economically mixed. Many residents of My Town have ties to the college as students, alumni, faculty, and staff; this population is generally left-leaning and economically secure. But some other townspeople, along with residents of the surrounding rural towns and farmlands, many of whom have been here for generations, are hurting economically. For them, the cost of living in this area, which seems low to me, is unsustainably high. It’s not surprising that the county, which voted narrowly Democratic in every presidential election from 1988 to 2016, swung to Trump in 2020 and 2024.

No longer can I assume that almost everyone I meet in my daily life will share my political views. I’m used to, and appreciate, the racial and ethnic diversity of cities like DC. But a largely white area where the divisions are educational and economic, and where there’s significant Trump support – that’s new to me.

Finding an activist community

So it was exciting to drive to a nearby small city on No Kings Day, October 18, and find thousands of protestors lining both sides of a highway for a quarter mile. A cacophony of supportive honks and cheers came from traffic passing by.

It’s true that this protest, which drew people from across the county, was on the far outskirts of Cleveland, a blue city. But it’s also true that no state or county, whether red or blue, is monolithic. Here amid the cornfields, progressive politics is alive and well, if not exactly robust.

There are several local Democratic groups, including one known as Rural Dems; a town-based immigrant support group; and a countywide group that seeks to end gerrymandering and promote fair elections. I’ve been to two meetings in town so far, one on redistricting (a hot issue in Ohio right now) and the other on immigrant support and rapid response in case ICE shows up.

Last weekend I went canvassing in town with a friend, supporting a candidate for municipal judge who’s on the ballot in November. After years of driving to battleground states to knock on strangers’ doors, it was a new experience to canvass in a place where I live, among people who are – though I may not know them yet – my neighbors.

Real, yet not

Sometimes I feel like My Town is home. Sometimes I feel like I’m on an extended vacation in an Airbnb. My brain hasn’t quite figured it out. I like it here, and I’m confident the change will be good for both Bill and me. Yet when I close my eyes and picture DC – my Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, the blocks I walked every day for almost half a century, the people I’ve known for years or decades – it doesn’t feel like just a memory. It feels physical, like a part of my body. It feels inseparable from who I am and always will be.

Is this how immigrants feel when they leave their countries? I wonder if, like many recent immigrants, I will need to stay connected to both places, lest I lose a part of myself.

The moment it began to seem real wasn’t when we unloaded the moving van, or when I changed my address, or when I got my Ohio driver’s license or registered to vote here. It was this:

I don’t know what our car thought about its new Ohio identity. For me, it felt like a point of no return. But return we will. We’ll be in DC for 10 days in November to tie up loose ends and reconnect with friends. After that, Bill will fly to the African Studies Association meeting in Atlanta and I’ll fly back here. I’ll see if it feels like coming home.

Forgive the trite title. Three weeks before our move, it’s an apt description of the conflicting feelings tearing at me. There’s optimism, even excitement. The move will be good for us, we feel sure. And there’s grief. After 47 years in the same city and the same neighborhood, my roots here go deep. The thought of leaving my friends in Mt. Pleasant is almost too much to bear.

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There’s guilt, too.

DC is under military occupation. As I typed this sentence I paused, wondering if it would come off as hyperbole or perhaps an overreaction to rumors of things I hadn’t actually seen.

Then this happened, less than a block away:

As soon as the alert came over our neighborhood Signal group, I grabbed my phone and headed out. Over the next hour a large crowd of neighbors gathered to heckle agents from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), MPD (the DC police), and other agencies. “Go home! You’re not welcome here!” Eventually, MPD set up a police perimeter, took a resident out of an apartment building, and drove him away. (I took the photos above. News coverage here; I’m interviewed briefly toward the end, in a gray t-shirt and blue baseball cap.)

An MPD officer said it was an arrest on a federal drug and firearms warrant, not an immigration operation. Maybe. But arrests on all kinds of pretexts are happening day and night, many of them targeting immigrants. Thousands of agents from ICE, the FBI, the ATF, Homeland Security, and the National Guard of six states are swarming the city. Armed and masked, they’re seizing people off the street and taking them away in unmarked cars. Those detained are food delivery drivers on mopeds, roofers and painters in contractor vans, even people waiting in line outside churches for food aid.

My father fought in World War Two because Hitler was sending jackbooted forces into the streets to round people up and take them away. Now fascism is coming to us. I miss my dad, but I’m grateful he’s not here to see this.

DC could be made safer, but not like this. Arresting people whose only offense is to be undocumented doesn’t stop crime. Nor does hauling in drivers for a broken tail light and then slamming them with federal charges. National Guard from Republican-led states are patrolling the city’s monuments, where crime rarely happens. That’s not policing. It’s performance, intended to humiliate blue cities and excite Trump’s base.

So why the guilt? I’ve never felt closer to my neighborhood and my neighbors. At a time like this, I need to be here. Not that I can do anything to stop what’s happening. We can film arrests, but we can’t interfere with them. About all we can do is protest and bear witness.

Why move?

I know I promised to explain where we’re going and why, but in the current climate I don’t want to be too specific about location. So let me just say we’re moving to a small college town in Ohio, a town I know well. (Connect the dots if you wish, but please don’t dox us.) There’s a wonderful retirement community there, the same one where my father spent 18 very happy years. We visited him there frequently. It’s like a second home to me.

My husband Bill is about to turn 83 and has Parkinson’s. I’ve had some pesky health issues crop up in the past year as well. We’ve seen friends and friends’ parents who planned to age in place, only to have those plans upended by a health crisis. Their adult children then must scramble to find care, often from hundreds of miles away.

If I’m going to end up in a senior living facility eventually, I want to choose it. That means acting with time to spare, as waiting lists for good places run to years. The one we selected is a nonprofit, Quaker-run CCRC, or continuing care retirement community. You start out living independently in your own cottage or apartment; later, if you need care, they provide it.

There’s another factor as well, for me if not for Bill. After 47 years here, I’m burned out on the inner city, with its choking traffic and bad air. I had to weigh those drawbacks against aspects of our neighborhood that I love – its progressive, internationalist vibe, the intergenerational friendships, the network of older residents who look out for each other. It wasn’t an easy decision. But nowadays, staying in touch with friends across distance is more feasible than ever before. We plan to return to DC on frequent visits (Bill’s leery of Ohio winters, with good reason, so he may be here a lot). And I already know people in the town where we’re going. I believe you can find community anywhere, if you try.

Blue politics in a red state

Our new town is bikeable and walkable. Traffic is light and parking easy, at least from my point of view (longtime residents may beg to differ). Northeast Ohio air isn’t pristine, but it’s better than DC’s. The town is overwhelmingly liberal to progressive, thanks largely to the presence of the college, as is the retirement community itself.

The rural area around town, though, is conservative, even Trumpy. I’ve never lived in a red area; like many who lean left, I’ve spent my life in blue cities. Ohio is heavily gerrymandered, with a Republican supermajority. It’ll be a challenge to do progressive politics in this context, but I intend to learn. And for once in my life, my vote will count!

We have three weeks to get ready, so I don’t expect to post again until late September. By then I’ll have a foot in two communities and two worlds. Wish us luck. Talk to you soon.

It’s true, though I can hardly believe it: Bill and I are moving, most likely in September. I’ll say more about where and why in a future post.

Meanwhile, we’re downsizing – again. We did this three years ago when we sold our house, but things started accumulating again, as things do. Then there are the stubborn downsizing problems that I never did solve but just deferred, stashing the items out of sight in a basement storage cage.

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The scariest of those is the letters box, actually a plastic bin. Growing up in the pre-internet age, I sent and received handwritten letters regularly – as did most people – and for some reason I kept them. They cover a period from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, by which time email had largely taken over. (In February 1999 my father began using email and wrote, “The thought of our exchanging messages within a few minutes is absolutely beguiling.” My mother lay stricken with cancer in a downstairs bedroom, leaving my father homebound – except when a health aide visited – but unable to do anything to alter the downward spiral; she would die in March. With no family living nearby, email became his emotional lifeline.)

For years I avoided opening the bin, fearing what I might find. Letters are primary documents. They offer a view of the past that is not unfiltered – obviously the original writer’s filters are at work – yet is free of the biases of those who come later, seeking to interpret and explain the past. Letters also bypass the protective filters of memory. Imagine the psychological stress and sheer mental exhaustion if we could remember every moment of our lives.

But I did open it. And once I started reading the letters, I could hardly put them down.

Fatherly advice

Much of the collection consists of letters from my parents, especially my mother. A reserved and private person, she wasn’t much given to emotional sharing. She died when I was 45, and I regret not having gotten to know her more deeply, as one adult to another, when we still had time. Yet when I reread the letters, I hear her voice, feel her presence. I gain new insight into the person she was.

Even envelopes bear witness. In 1972, as a college freshman, I wrote to thank my parents for some camping equipment. The note natters on about dropping a class, coming down with a cold, and the bad weather in Oberlin, but what interests me is the envelope, which my mother had evidently used as scratch paper. Brilliant and introverted, she liked to work what my father, in his eulogy, described as “extraordinary and complex puzzles ... whose instructions I could not even begin to decode.” The envelope is covered on both sides with hieroglyphic markings, and I can see my mother even now, alone at her desk, jotting notes as she cracked the code.

My father often wrote with advice. One such missive arrived when I was about to travel to Washington, DC, with some friends for a big march against the Vietnam War, my first. This may have been 1969 or 1970, when I was 16 or 17. He urged me not to provoke the cops or fall in with outside agitators. If I got arrested, I was to call collect. He concluded, “I am as opposed to this war as you are, or more so, because I know what it’s like and what’s involved. That is why I have given you permission to go.”

He weighed in on my early career choices, and these letters are hard to reread. In 1982, working for an activist group in DC, I wrote a book about a left-wing movement that had seized power in a small island nation. I interviewed people in the country and imagined my work to be a well-researched look at a successful revolution (as the ruling party styled its takeover). But almost everyone I interviewed was allied with the government, which put us up in a hotel, and the flattering portrayal I produced was little more than PR. A few years later the ruling clique shattered amid violence, proving the short-lived experiment to have been neither successful nor particularly revolutionary.

My father, the journalist, was skeptical of this attempt at scholarship. “My eyebrows go up when I hear you say things without equivocation that I doubt you can back up with hard evidence. Perhaps I am wrong and you really can, but I would like to be shown. ... I have spent most of a lifetime learning to be careful about accepting what people tell me, especially when what they are saying is self-serving. That is why I worry when I think you are accepting as fact what people say merely because you admire their objectives. ... You have to ask the hard questions, not just the questions you know will bring the answers you want.”

Dad, if you can hear me, out there in the beyond: You were right. And I eventually learned.

I also wrote letters to my parents, some of which they saved and later returned to me. A postcard from my first backpacking trip, in the Smoky Mountains with college friends, describes a miserable outing: “It rained every day except for the day it snowed. All our food got eaten by bears. Everyone had the intestinal flu.” Another hike featured an “attempt to cross a raging torrent of ice water in the nude.” I doubt it was a raging torrent, a phrase probably intended to alarm my parents, but we were in fact naked, hiking boots strung by their laces around our necks.

My early writing is larded with superlatives and clichés. A thing is not just beautiful but “truly beautiful”; an apology is a “heartfelt apology”; my confessed ignorance, “breathtaking ignorance.” I could be smart-alecky. “Dad,” I wrote, “I’m ashamed of you. ‘Girl publisher,’ indeed. I only hope you don’t allow your newspaper reporters to get away with value-loaded identifiers like that.” (Despite my admonitions, my father continued to use terms such as “lady lawyer” for the rest of his life.)

The bin contains correspondence with friends dating back 40 or 50 years. They include people I barely remember as well as a few I’m still in touch with. (Hi, Sonia!) There are letters from old flames and would-be flames. “Those three days together have left me in something of an emotional turmoil,” one wrote. “I felt very deeply that there was something good between us and am now sad that all this must pass.” There was also a lengthy apology from an early crush who worried, decades later, that he’d taken advantage. I wrote back immediately, assuring him that I bore no hard feelings and that my own teenage immaturity had been equally to blame. In matters of the heart, I could be snippy. Writing from college, I complained to my parents that a former boyfriend was “coming up this weekend (not at my invitation) to have some kind of a heart-to-heart talk that he feels will resolve things in his mind. I’m unclear as to what kind of doubts he could be having at this point. I wonder if he’s ever heard of letting something die naturally.”

What to do?

The letters testify to a formative period of my life. Events I remember vividly, dimly, or not at all: they happened, and here is the proof. With their wealth of detail, the letters fill in some of the mental white space around my fragmentary memories and the snapshots in albums.

But the bin is heavy and bulky to store. If I don’t deal with these letters now, whoever cleans up after me will have to face the task. That would likely be my daughter Cynthia. Even if she keeps them, what happens a generation or two down the road? If I were famous, the letters could go to an archive. I am not. The sensible thing to do would be to dispose of them now.

I can’t do it. Instead, I’m triaging. More than half the collection has already hit the recycle bin, mainly correspondence with people who didn’t end up playing a significant role in my life. I compiled my letters from Niger, where I served two years in the Peace Corps, into an album, along with photos. An album on a shelf invites casual browsing; a storage bin in a basement, not so much. I’m keeping the letters from my parents, at least for now. In 2000, after his bereavement and a major surgery, my father wrote, “Dear Cathy, Thank you for everything you have done. You and Tom are the greatest kids in the world. Mom would be so very proud. Love, Dad.” How can I throw this away?

I’m also keeping cards and letters from Bill and Cynthia. Like most millennials, my daughter grew up using email and text, but there’s a bundle of handwritten letters she sent home from nature camp at age 11 or 12. How homesick she was that first summer! But she toughed it out, finished the session, and returned to the camp for many summers after that, eventually joining the staff. The letters detail every hike, every sleep-out, every frog and owl and snake she encountered. I know she will want to keep these letters. I will save them for her. And the cycle starts all over again.

When air travel stinks, it really stinks. I’m not talking here about catastrophic events, but about mundane ordeals such as weather delays. Yesterday Bill and I spent nine hours in the Cleveland airport, waiting for a line of storms to cross the East Coast. Having left our Airbnb for the airport at noon, we finally boarded the plane at 10:20 p.m., arriving home in DC at 1:30 in the morning.

I’m exhausted, so this post will be short. But I do want to share a few reflections about last Saturday, June 14 – No Kings Day – because it gave me more hope and optimism than I’ve felt in a long time.

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It had partly to do with what the day wasn’t. It wasn’t the Women’s March, a centralized, leader-driven event drawing millions in their pussy hats to the National Mall. That made a big statement in 2017. It would likely be met with shrugs today.

Instead, the core of the nation’s capital was depopulated, left to Trump and his minions along with a small crowd of onlookers who showed up for the Army parade. Across the country, meanwhile, an estimated 5 million people turned out in big cities, small towns, and rural areas to protest. The message was simple: The United States is a country of laws. No one is above the law. The president is not a king.

The actions were leaderless, at least in the sense of any top-down direction. Many were spontaneous, with people gathering on short notice to wave banners from highway bridges or in front of Fox News. They were, above all, local, melding seamlessly with homegrown community events like picnics and Pride parades. And that, I believe, was their strength.

How I spent the day

Every large city had marchers, in the tens of thousands, but the flagship march was in Philly. I debated taking the train up, but opted instead to stay in DC. I’m glad I did.

In the morning, Bill and I, with several neighbors, waved “No Kings” signs to traffic streaming down 16th Street NW, a commuter artery that runs through my neighborhood, Mt. Pleasant. The response was a cacophony of honks: one car would start, then they’d all join in. Even Metrobus drivers gave brief, professional toots. I know: it’s a blue city. If you don’t get honks here, where would you get them? Still, the message – “We’re in this together” – resonated.

After picking up some NOPE flyers to hand out, I went across town to what was billed as a “pro-democracy picnic” in a public park. With food trucks, live music, and families relaxing on blankets on the grass, it could have been any community get-together, but for all the “No Kings” signs toted by picnic-goers and the tables with sign-up sheets for joining local Dems and likeminded groups.

My last stop of the day was the best. The Mt. Pleasant 5th Annual Pride Popup, held in an alley a few blocks from my home, drew a large part of the neighborhood, gay and straight. We didn’t have Tara Hoot, DC’s drag queen, this year, but there were games and rainbow tattoos, burgers on the grill, and best of all, Gina DeSimone and the Moaners, an all-female, DC-based dance band. And we danced! I didn’t think my aging body could do that, but somehow, it did.

At the Pride fest, I sat for a while at the Mt. Pleasant Village table, where we sold T‑shirts and signed up new members. The Village is an all-volunteer neighborhood association formed 10 years ago, and to my surprise, it has changed my life, greatly expanding my circle of friends. The membership skews older, and one of the goals is to “meet the challenges of aging in the community.” There are exercise programs and field trips, as well as a “neighbors helping neighbors” program for requesting rides, tech support, or other such help. No one thought it odd that I taped my “No Kings” sign behind the Village table and handed out NOPE flyers along with Village lit. Officially nonpartisan, the Village reflects the progressive ethos of the neighborhood and counts many activists among its members.

Building local power

The Trump administration’s capture of elite social institutions such as universities, law firms, and media outlets has triggered alarm. Just as consequential, I would argue, is the MAGA movement’s steady, long-term entrenchment in local communities through its members’ participation in churches, fraternal orders, parent-teacher organizations, and similar entities. From there it’s a short jump to local governance structures like school boards, city councils, and county commissions, and then to state legislatures. And we know how that’s worked out for the GOP.

Those who value democracy and oppose autocracy need to follow a similar strategy. We need to embed. So on No Kings Day I stayed home, joining others in communities across the country to say no to democratic backsliding. We showed the power of our numbers that day, not by convening one massive march but by gathering locally in more than 2,000 cities and towns. Protests erupted in blue and red states, even deep in Trump country, places like Cooper County, Missouri, and Brazos County, Texas. Hundreds of organizations took part, from national networks like Indivisible down to hyperlocal groups.

Apparently hoping for violence, Trump blustered, “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” But on No Kings Day, the force was with us.

As a child, I found it amusing to “walk on the ceiling.” You hold a mirror facing up and walk around the house while staring down at the ceiling’s reflection. Lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling now sprout from the floor, and the tops of door frames become walls to be climbed over. Everything up is down; everything down is up.

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So, too, in Trump’s second term. On January 20, the day he took office, Trump shut down the refugee program for people fleeing war and political persecution, halting all new refugee admissions. At least 20,000 people, already vetted and approved for entry, have been stranded, including 12,000 who had flights already booked. The administration also froze payments to refugee resettlement organizations.

Yet on Monday, Trump officials welcomed a planeload of white South Africans as “refugees.” Trump is claiming, without evidence, that South African whites are victims of racial discrimination and genocide. So a first group of them has been whisked into this country, performing the MAGA credo of white victimhood. They’ll receive resettlement aid and, apparently, a path to citizenship even as other refugee assistance remains suspended.

Time and again, whatever is the wise and right thing to do, Trump does the precise opposite – the mirror image. I’m not among the people who stand to be most hurt by him. I don’t depend directly on the agencies and programs he’s destroying. Still, much of what’s going on feels personal to me. It’s also clarifying, helping me recognize how my life experiences have shaped my values. Let me cite a few examples (among many) and then say briefly why I think this matters.

Education

My truth: Education is a good thing. Competence is a good thing. Expertise is a good thing. Mirror mirror: Education, competence, and expertise are disdained. Only personal loyalty to the leader matters.

At my dad’s memorial service, I told of his modest roots as the son of an immigrant father who was a traveling salesman. To afford college, he borrowed $800 for the first year’s tuition from a more prosperous aunt. Subsequent years were covered by the GI Bill, and later in life Dad helped others inside and outside our family pay for college.

The path to higher education isn’t entirely closed to people without money (and without a generous aunt), but it’s difficult. Even when tuition is free, families must forego needed income for the time spent studying rather than working. Higher education in this country thus perpetuates inequality even as it enables some people, like my father, to move up.

I think people on the losing end of that system have a right to be angry. We need to make higher education accessible to everyone, and we need to expand vocational training and create good jobs that don’t require college. But Trump’s war on expertise – firing thousands of federal workers, defunding scientific research, attacking law firms and universities, and stocking his cabinet with incompetent toadies – does nothing to accomplish those goals. Its purpose is to disempower and humiliate the bureaucrats, lawyers, scientists, academics, journalists, and others who make up the professional class and who, not coincidentally, tilt Democratic.

The media

My truth: Newspapers are important sources of information, though they sometimes get things wrong. Mirror mirror: The mainstream media is fake news, and journalists are enemies of the people.

As the daughter of a newspaperman, I believe most journalists are honest and strive for accuracy, though some bias is inevitable. That doesn’t mean I agree with my dad’s view that all information, to be considered reliable, must be filtered through gatekeepers – highly trained professional editors like, well, him. I think social media, which lacks gatekeepers, provides a valuable platform for voices that are excluded from the mainstream press. But the MAGA universe of lies and conspiracy theories is dangerous, especially now that many people get their news only from social media. And using Truth Social, a private platform whose profits enrich Trump, as the main outlet for official government information is just plain corrupt.

Foreign aid

My truth: As a rich country, the United States has a moral obligation – and it’s in our national interest – to provide food aid, medical assistance, and disaster relief to people in need. Mirror mirror: The United States should dominate other countries through raw power. Helping people is for the weak and the woke.

I spent 1975 to 1977 in Niger, West Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer, working in maternal and child health. When DOGE goons burst into Peace Corps headquarters last month to begin slashing staff, I felt sad but not surprised. After all, Musk had already boasted of feeding USAID, the main foreign assistance agency, into the wood chipper. I’m not so naïve as to think that foreign aid is motivated mainly by altruism. It’s a form of soft power, the friendlier counterpart to the militaristic hard power this country exerts on the world stage. Still, millions of people around the world depend for their survival on US-funded programs, especially in health. Diseases cross borders, and pulling the plug on disease-fighting aid is not only wrong, it’s stupid.

Public health

My truth: Public health programs, including vaccination, have saved untold numbers of lives. We need a robust public health infrastructure to meet future challenges like pandemics. Mirror mirror: We must convince people to distrust vaccines and scorn the advice of public health professionals.

In Niger, I saw what happens when a country does not have a solid public health infrastructure. More than one in 10 Nigerien children die before their fifth birthday, and life expectancy is around 60. People die regularly of vaccine-preventable diseases, as they did in this country less than a century ago. Do we want to go back to that? The United States has an advanced public health framework that the Trump administration is rapidly dismantling. They’re defunding medical research, gutting public health institutions, and driving down vaccination rates with nonsense and lies. The return of measles deaths is a harbinger of what’s to come.

Immigration

My truth: People have the right to seek security and a better life, and immigrants provide labor and skills for our economy. We should welcome them with a well-functioning immigration system that provides a path to citizenship. Mirror mirror: Immigrants are criminals who take jobs and steal resources from native-born Americans. They should be rounded up, imprisoned, and deported.

Teaching English to immigrants for over a decade, I got to know students from many countries. My DC neighborhood has a large immigrant population, and I’ve traveled and lived abroad. For all these reasons, I’m at ease with other languages and cultures. And as someone who enjoys economic security, I don’t need to worry that immigrants might be taking something from me. But I know that my experiences, while common among my friends, are not the norm.

Canada

My truth: Canada is our friend, ally, and trading partner. We’re lucky to have a peaceful border on our long northern flank. Mirror mirror: Let’s pick a fight with Canada.

Here’s where it gets really personal. I have close family in Canada, namely my American daughter, her Canadian husband, and their newborn son, a dual citizen. Everyone in my binational extended family needs to be able to cross the border easily. The prospect of tense relations between the two countries gives me the shakes.

The take-away

If my experiences have shaped my values, then the same must be true of Trump voters. They have reasons for what they believe, and those reasons are rooted in the lives they’ve lived, as well as the information they consume. It’s something I try to keep in mind when I’m knocking on doors and come face to face with a voter whose views I find distasteful.

If I lived in a small town or isolated rural community, struggling to make ends meet, might I view immigrants as economic rivals and cultural threats? Foreign aid as a giveaway to distant others when my own family and community have dire unmet needs? It’s possible. If Democrats want to connect with voters beyond the educated professional class, they can begin by trying to understand the lived realities of others.

But the MAGA coalition isn’t monolithic. The tech CEOs and venture capitalists who’ve flocked to Trump aren’t motivated by economic insecurity or class resentment. They want less regulation and taxation of their industries, and they want to make money off AI and crypto. They have billions; they want billions more. It’s not about values. Some people just have none.

Note: It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but my excuse is a good one! My grandson Dylan James Lane was born in March and I’ve just returned from Toronto, where I ran errands and fed cats while my daughter and her husband wrangled their newborn. Grandparenting is a joy.

Twice a month, a queue wraps around the brick plaza in my neighborhood as needy residents, mainly immigrants from Latin America, await a Catholic charity’s distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables. On a recent morning several of us worked the line, handing out small red cards with advice on what to do if federal agents knock on your door. “No abra la puerta, no conteste ninguna pregunta, no firme ningún documento sin hablar con un abogado,” I suggested, following the text on the cards. Don’t open the door, don’t answer any questions, don’t sign anything without talking to a lawyer. I ran out of cards quickly. People are scared.

And not without reason. Just last week, immigration agents showed up at a nearby elementary school and tried to detain the school nurse. School personnel asked the agents for a warrant; they didn’t have one, and left without making an arrest. But elsewhere in the city and its suburbs, ICE has taken people away.

Doing crosswalk duty outside my neighborhood school, I got to chatting with a fellow volunteer, Mike Seifert. While my efforts to support immigrants have been sporadic, Mike has worked closely with migrant communities for four decades, first on the southern border and now from his home in DC. I asked him how his work has changed under Trump and how his own perspective has evolved in this stage of life.

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CATHY: When did you start working on the border?

MIKE: I was ordained a priest in 1986 and went to work in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. People had moved to the area after a dam project flooded their lands years earlier, and now they were living alongside the Pan American Highway, a major drug trafficking channel.

I worked with an Australian priest and three North American nuns, and I quickly realized that we were not much help there. People would come to the parish and say, “They took my son. Can you help me get him back?” I didn’t know who “they” were, or what kind of language to use for offering kidnappers the expected bribe. Also, we were there on tourist visas, so we knew we could be removed at any time. We started looking into doing projects along the Mexican border, and in 1989 I moved to Harlingen, Texas.

I worked with three populations: residents of the Rio Grande Valley, at the southern tip of Texas; Mexicans who lived in Matamoros, a city just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville; and people passing through the area after crossing the border. Among the latter were Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans fleeing the Central American wars. They were being described as “terrorists,” with President Reagan warning that the Sandinistas were “just two days’ driving time from Harlingen.”

My first task as a priest there, besides pastoral work, was helping people apply for asylum in the United States. Again, I found myself doing something I wasn’t prepared for. But people needed help, and they couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer. I stayed in the Rio Grande Valley as a priest until 2009. It’s the poorest region of the country apart from Indian reservations, and I loved working there.

I met my wife, Dr. Marsha Griffin, in 2008, when she was a pediatrician at a community health center in Brownsville. We were collaborating on an elective for medical residents, helping them understand how to advocate for their community.

CATHY: You had left the priesthood by that point?

MIKE: I had taken a leave of absence to help my dad nurse my mom, and I realized that I was being offered the gift of a family. I felt at peace leaving the priesthood after 24 years of service. And so I married and was blessed with the treasure of my wife.

Organizing along the border

MIKE: In 2009 I started working with the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, supported by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. I coordinated the work of 12 local organizations that were active in poor communities on both sides of the border. They helped people build social and political power by turning out the vote, showing up at county meetings, and advocating for issues like education, health care, and housing. I was the “network weaver,” working with the powerful Brown women who ran these grassroots organizations.

We came up with some interesting projects. The most vulnerable people were the domestic workers, the maids. They didn’t have papers. They’d be paid next to nothing, and subjected to abuses. The only time we could get them together was Sunday Mass, because the employers would let them go to church. I would say, “We need people to help prepare a breakfast for after Mass.” It was an excuse to get them together, away from their bosses.

Over time that became a working group, and they developed a model contract for someone who’s going to work in domestic service. One member objected that employers would ignore such a contract, but a wise woman pointed out that there were many new wives who had no idea how to organize a house or work with a maid. “This is how we teach them – and protect ourselves.” The group grew to about 250 people and got linked into a national domestic workers coalition.

Family separation under Trump

MIKE: By 2017 I had taken a position with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas. Trump had just been elected, and I was charged with tracking conditions on the border and organizing responses. We decided to start a simple project, courthouse witnessing. At the first hearing we attended the courtroom was packed with defendants. They were all being charged with “entry without inspection,” a misdemeanor that previously had almost never landed someone in federal court. But Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions had implemented a zero tolerance policy. At the end of the first hearing, the judge asked if there were any questions. A woman shouted out, “Where are my children?”

We discovered that the federal government was separating children from their families. The parents would be taken to court, and while they were in court, the children were declared “abandoned” and taken away. Working with the Texas Conference of Churches, we spread the word that the US government was, essentially, kidnapping children. A couple of months later – not soon enough – the policy ended.

But the Trump administration continued to target asylum seekers. The ACLU of Texas asked our team to take testimony from people camped out on the Mexican side of the border. The stories were astonishing. One woman told us, “Two weeks ago, people showed up at our house in southern Mexico and told me they wanted to put my 11-year-old daughter on layaway. I said what does that even mean? The guy says, ‘Well, my 13-year-old son likes your daughter. When she comes of age, he’s going to buy her. So we’re putting her on layaway.’ I’m like, no, we’re not doing that. The guy says, ‘Okay, you know what happens next.’” She continued, “I didn’t understand. But some neighbors said what happens next is they lock you in your house and burn the house down and you all die. So that very afternoon we sold the 45 chickens I had just bought, and a brand new refrigerator. And I came to the border.” She added, “If you turn around carefully and look under that light post over there, you’ll see three men. They’re part of that game. They’ve come here looking for us.”

It was one story after another. People were desperate, but also hopeful. We’d ask, “Why are you coming to the United States?” And they would say, “Because we trust you.” Thank you. Thank you for that.

Beyond the border

MIKE: In 2021 our daughter, who lived near us in Brownsville, moved with her young children to DC. About six months later, we woke up and realized we didn’t have any family anywhere near. So we decided to move.

I’ve continued my work from DC, both remotely and through border visits. Toward the end of the first Trump term, a coalition of advocacy groups set up “welcoming committees” along the border from Brownsville to San Diego. I work with the Brownsville committee. We coordinate by Zoom, bringing in various groups – Doctors Without Borders, the ACLU of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and others. Our committee has helped many asylum seekers reach some bit of safety, despite the opposition by both Biden and Trump. We also provide remote support to shelters in Matamoros and Reynosa.

CATHY: Both those cities are on the Mexican side?

MIKE: That’s right. Matamoros is the twin city to Brownsville, Texas, and Reynosa is the twin city to McAllen, Texas. For example, one of the women running the Reynosa shelter told us recently, “The washing machine and the freezer broke. And we’ve got 200 people here to feed and clean up after.” So it was my job that day to put out a call to our mailing list of a couple thousand people. Get the money, but also find somebody who could buy the darn thing and bring it to the shelter. A week later, she sends pictures. “Hi, thank you. Here’s the freezer. Here’s the washing machine.”

CATHY: How do you see your practice evolving in Trump’s second term? Given that people are not coming across the border, but ICE is ramping up actions inside the United States.

MIKE: There’s no one crossing the border now. You see the activity shifting away from the immediate border to the interior. The border is now the entire country. We’re trying to figure out what the next steps are. We’ll continue to focus on harms to children, especially children in detention. In addition to our work with the welcoming committees, my wife and I help run Community for Children, which seeks to cover gaps in medical care for migrants on the border and across the country.

I also volunteer with a group called SAMU First Response, which helps asylum seekers and migrants in the DC-Maryland area. We do little practical things: drive somebody somewhere, get furniture. I do marriages. Did one yesterday in Takoma Park, Maryland. The marriage was performed in the back of my car, which was a bit odd, but it was freezing cold and sleeting. The couple was grateful and gracious and lovely. They came from a small island off the coast of Venezuela, so we talked about seafood, and they waxed nostalgic. Here, they have no job and very little hope. They’re desperate, but talking about home seemed to make them feel better. And seeing that spark of life is a quick way past all of the numbing statistics.

The power of informal resistance

CATHY: Have you changed your practice as you’ve grown older?

MIKE: As anybody in the third age realizes, you know a lot of things. And one of the important things is that it’s often good to keep your mouth shut and listen. And pick a moment to say, “Oh, I’m not so sure.”

If everybody in a meeting speaks Spanish, you can say, “Please do the meeting in Spanish. Don’t do it in English because it’s not going to be as effective as you think.” If you have a group of well-meaning, smart, passionate people from both countries, the language and the tenor and the weight of the meeting will always go to the United States. In our Zooms I advocate for the Mexican members of the group. I translate for them and urge them to speak up. They’ll have important information that needs to be known, but the Americans are talking over them, so I interrupt. The Americans on the call are really fine people. They don’t intend to do this, but it’s just the nature of those kinds of meetings.

If somebody asked me, what is the attitude you most appreciate at this point in your life, it’s going to be gratitude, but gratitude in the sense of being able to pay attention to the moment that you’re in. And what helps that attention? A mother or dad or a neighbor who’s worried, and they trust you enough to speak about that. If you’re involved with a family, a community of people, it grounds you.

Since I’m retired and no longer employed by an institution, I don’t have to get my comments screened by anyone. I don’t have to go before somebody’s board and worry about affecting our funding. That’s a liberating thing. There’s a lot of power in informal resistance. This is what people across the world have struggled with, and now it’s our turn. So it’s an interesting moment for sure.

Given events since the inauguration, the destruction of our democracy no longer seems a far-fetched notion. I’ve been thinking about what democracy means, how we keep it, and what it would be like to lose it. Although I’m a word person, in this post I defer to the awesome power of pictures.

Sue Dorfman is a contract photographer for ZUMA Press. You may have seen her work in outlets like the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and Mother Jones. Sue overlapped with me at Oberlin, though we didn’t know each other then. Now 70, she’s still traveling the country with her cameras, capturing this moment that feels so unreal to us all.

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Here in DC, Sue is everywhere. This month she photographed protests against Trump’s and Musk’s actions at the US Treasury, USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education. Sidelined with Covid, I couldn’t show up at any of these, so I appreciated Sue’s photos all the more.

Growing up in upstate New York, Sue took for granted that everyone had the right to vote. Not until she spent time in South Africa, photographing the anti-apartheid struggle, did she realize that not everyone had that right – and that some would fight and perhaps die to get it.

A few years later she documented Black voter mobilization in Selma, Alabama. While the Voting Rights Act had passed two decades earlier, the legacy of Jim Crow voting restrictions remained – conditions that echoed her experiences in South Africa. This led her to interview people in Mississippi and Massachusetts on what voting rights meant to them. The result was a short documentary film, Dying to Vote.

She later worked as a media strategist for voting rights organizations, with a focus on election protection. In 2020 Sue launched her nonpartisan photojournalism project, Documenting Democracy. She logged more than 24,000 miles across the country, photographing voter registration, voters, ballot counting, political rallies, candidates, and demonstrators.

In 2022, Sue and I collaborated on a photo essay for the Oberlin Alumni Magazine. More images from those years can be seen on her Documenting Democracy website and in the Carnegie Reporter Voting Issue (winter 2022), published by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Last year, Sue again crisscrossed the country to photograph voters, canvassers, poll workers, and candidates ahead of the November 7, 2024, elections. “I aim to show what participation in our democracy looks like in different parts of the country, and to tell the stories of those involved,” she says.

Outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Sue accompanied me and other canvassers as we knocked on doors for Harris, Walz, and down-ballot Democrats. Though the outcome was disappointing, I treasure these photos of an experience I won’t forget.

I asked Sue how her work has evolved and about what lies ahead.

CATHY: How has your photography practice changed over your lifetime?

SUE: I started shooting photos in my teens. I then took my career in other directions for a few decades, but I always used photography as a tool in whatever work I was doing. In my 60s I returned to my original path, and I’ve been photographing professionally since then.

In terms of technical evolution, I started out with regular film cameras. When my son was young, I closed my darkroom and began shooting with small, auto-focus “idiot cameras.” When I returned to using “real” cameras, in my case Olympus, I found the skills I had developed by pushing idiot cameras to the max also transferred to shooting on my iPhone. My eyesight isn’t as good as it once was, so I tend to do more close-ups rather than wide-angle shots. I do miss shooting film. I’m old school and still adjusting to digital.

CATHY: In this new political landscape, what do you plan to photograph, and how will you disseminate your work?

SUE: I believe it’s critically important to tell the stories of how this administration’s policies impact people’s lives. I will also continue documenting democracy. While many states are advancing voting rights, some are not, and equal access to the ballot may be severely curtailed. As far as dissemination, ZUMA Press wire distributes my photos internationally. This spring I’m on assignment to photograph programs that amplify civic participation and awareness. I have four books in various prepublication stages. And, of course, I’m always looking for new photo contracts.

CATHY: You’re 70. Why not retire?

SUE: I can’t imagine not photographing. It’s how I see and am present in the world. It’s how I can share what I’ve seen and experienced and, perhaps, change hearts and minds with new understandings.

Where to see Sue’s photos

• Documenting Democracy website: https://docdem.suedorfman.com

• Instagram: @suedorfman8

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sue.dorfman.9

To request permission to use an image or to see more, message Sue on any of these platforms, or contact me and I’ll put you in touch.

Hotels here in DC are sold out, and metal fencing has gone up around the Capitol. Trump will hold his victory rally downtown on Sunday and be sworn in Monday. There’ll be a protest, likely small. In 2017 I joined the Women’s March after the first Trump inauguration (on crutches, having fallen down my kitchen stairs two hours before). It felt important to perform our opposition before the country and the world. I don’t plan to march this year, though I wish the best to those who do. The mood among activists I know has shifted: we’re less performative, more deliberative than eight years ago.

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That shouldn’t be confused with acceptance. Given the muting of street protests, a Guardian reporter jumped to conclusions:

Democrats have found the resistance movement that took off among liberals in the wake of his 2016 win no longer resonates in today’s political climate ... They have adopted a more conciliatory approach in confronting the incoming president’s agenda.

I don’t know who she talked to, but I don’t know a single person who’s feeling conciliatory. Many are angry. Invade Panama? Annex Canada? Stage an immigration raid in DC to make a big show? No one knows whether these are real threats or just bluster intended to distract and intimidate – to “flood the zone with shit,” in the words of Steve Bannon.

Still, there’s a grain of truth in the Guardian comment. Anand Giridharadas writes, “My strong sense is that a great many people who felt drafted into a resistance posture last time around do not feel so drafted this time. This does not mean they support Trump.” Rather, he says, people are wrestling with the question of what posture to adopt:

Some are retreating, focusing on the things they can control: digging into community, making art, reaching out to friends. Others are turning away from national politics and going local. Still others are jumping into the long-term work of rebuilding a pro-democracy movement that can win. And many are rethinking their priors, adopting a posture of curiosity instead of certainty.

Clearly we need to do all of these, though I wouldn’t use the word “retreating.” Nor do I agree that emphasizing the local means ignoring national politics. Quite the opposite: I believe that robust organizing at the local level is our path to success at the national level. Below are a few thoughts, resolutions if you will, that I’m keeping in mind as I try to figure out how to live and make a difference under Trump 2.0.

Rest and regroup

Giridharadas writes, “As the new year dawns, dread porn abounds.”

Like many people, I’m trying to limit doomscrolling. Some say they’ve stopped reading the news, but as a journalist’s daughter, I can’t do that. Bill and I continue to read both the New York Times and the Washington Post in print every day. I do limit the online newsletters and blogs I read regularly to under a dozen. And I’m pretty much off social media.

A pause is not the same as retreat. Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas, who lived through the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey, advises Trump critics: “Don’t panic. Don’t disengage. The answer to political defeat is not to disconnect, but to organize.” She reminds us that autocracy takes time to consolidate and that the United States’ decentralized system of governance provides resilience. Trump will overplay his hand, she says, and we need to be ready.

Connect locally

Digital organizing has made possible vast national outreach and collaboration. But as we’re finding out, it doesn’t substitute for the in-person contacts that lie at the heart of strong organizational ties. Writing in The Nation, Pete Davis describes the hollowing out of civic life nationwide, as entities with local chapters and members give way to impersonal, top-down operations. In the early 20th century, he says,

civic life was mostly based in mass-membership organizations – religious congregations, unions, fraternal organizations ... They were made up of local chapters that hosted in-person meetings, managed annual calendars of neighborhood events, fostered friendships between members, and contributed to the places where they were based. ... But American civic life started changing in the latter half of the 20th century. Mass communication became easier – and civic leaders fell in love with direct-mail fundraising campaigns. ... “Membership” no longer meant meeting up with one’s neighbors; it meant being on a list.

In other words: you send them a check, they send you a tote bag, followed by incessant demands for more donations. Commenting on Democratic Party outreach, Micah L. Sifry laments “digital organizing choices that have verticalized us into big lists that can be farmed for money or volunteer time instead of local, horizontal networks of people who know each other’s faces and concerns.” Meanwhile, MAGA world attracts followers through the evangelical churches, hyperlocal entities whose organizing power springs from intense, emotionally driven, face-to-face interactions.

I think about this every Friday afternoon as I stand guard outside our neighborhood elementary school, wearing my dorky reflective vest. Working in shifts, our volunteer team closes off the block in front of the school at pickup and dismissal times each day, keeping car traffic at bay. It’s cold out there on the barricades. But as I chat with my fellow volunteers, many of us older, and with young families heading home from school, I feel the warmth of a multigenerational, multiethnic community.

My crossing guard gig, organized through our neighborhood association, isn’t entirely disconnected from national politics. Last fall, conversations among volunteers often turned to the election and what we planned to do. Through that and other networks, I connected several friends with canvassing opportunities in Pennsylvania. In the days before the election, the canvass launch site in Harrisburg filled with volunteers from DC, at least a dozen of them from my neighborhood.

Then there’s my grassroots political group, NOPE. It started in 2017 with a dozen neighbors meeting around someone’s dining room table in Northwest DC. Today we reach 6,000 activists nationwide through email and Zoom. But core members continue to gather in person for potlucks, letter-writing parties, and carpools to out-of-state canvasses. There are similar groups around the country, some affiliated with networks like Indivisible and Swing Left, others freestanding, but most meeting in person at least some of the time. Personal relationships, grounded in mutual trust and care, are the root from which dynamic organizing can grow.

Engage the debate

That raises a difficult question, one that goes beyond the scope of this post: What exactly are we organizing for?

There aren’t easy answers. To defend democracy? Certainly, but that isn’t enough; a fair election can bring to power an autocratic figure like Trump. To elect Democrats? They’re better than the alternatives, though I don’t agree with Democratic candidates and office holders on every issue. At its top levels the party seems increasingly in thrall to ultra-wealthy donors, as is, of course, the GOP.

The drift of working-class voters away from Democrats last November is troubling. The Harris campaign leaned hard on Trump’s threats to democracy, but many voters cared less about that than about unaffordable food, gas, housing, and health care. Fairly or not, they saw Democrats as oblivious to their struggles. When I was canvassing in Harrisburg last October, voters sometimes asked me how Harris would help them. My answers fell short. One man responded, with a wry smile, “That’s all you got?”

We need to tell voters what our candidates would do to make their lives better. That means the party must come to grips with the root cause of voter anger, namely the decades-long restructuring of the economy to channel wealth upward. Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Democrat, held his seat in a Pennsylvania Rust Belt district last fall, running on a pro-union, anti-corporate platform. He says, “People are mad at the system. They’ve seen social mobility get worse.” Last fall voters across the country, including many in red states, passed ballot measures putting in place a $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, and protections for the right to unionize. They told us what they wanted, even as the Harris campaign backed away from an economic populist message for fear of appearing too far left.

I hope the recent loss spurs Democratic Party decision-makers to rethink, and I hope that local organizers and volunteers will be part of that conversation. The party’s organizing model and messaging set the constraints within which we work, yet we have little voice in shaping them. Information almost never flows up. Pennsylvania’s Rep. Deluzio has little use for the election postmortems being churned out by professional consultants. Instead, he insists, “Talk to people who worked on the ground, union organizers, volunteers – talk to voters. That’s the most useful thing the party can do if it’s trying to understand what happened.”

It no longer makes sense to focus our outrage on Trump, the man. He can’t run again. And he’s surrounded by billionaires who are funding and driving the MAGA agenda for their own ends. It’s that agenda and its harms that we must resist. Trump is not going to meet his voters’ expectations for lower prices or anything else. When frustration builds again and another change election looms, will Democrats have something to offer?

It’s not the holiday we hoped for. Trump’s already president for all intents and purposes. Or maybe Musk is. Their cabinet picks are set to burn down the government, and the revenge tour has begun. From the Senate to the FBI to giant corporations like Disney, those on the receiving end of Trump’s threats are already bending the knee. Have they not read Timothy Snyder’s 20 lessons for resisting autocrats? Lesson 1 is: Do not obey in advance.

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As for those of us who worked to defeat Trump last fall, we’re pausing to rest and regroup. Walking in the woods, writing this blog, and spending time with family and friends are all restorative for me.

We’re also starting to talk about where we go from here: that is, how grassroots activists can make the most of the next two years, before the 2026 midterms provide the first real chance to swing the balance of power away from MAGA. I have some thoughts about this, and I’m working on a longer reflection that I’ll post early in the new year.

Meanwhile, I’m getting on a plane for Toronto tomorrow morning to spend Christmas week with my daughter and her husband – and their three cats. Those pampered creatures are enjoying the newly purchased nursery furniture, which they seem to think was acquired for their benefit. Along about March, they’ll be in for a rude surprise.

I wish you all a peaceful and relaxing holiday and look forward to continuing this conversation in the year ahead.

Shock, anger, exhaustion, grief – I’ve cycled through all of these since the election, along with everyone I know. Understanding what happened and how to go forward will take time. For now, we’re holding each other close and collectively holding on.

I don’t regret my weeks of canvassing in Pennsylvania. Not at all! While we lost the White House and many down-ballot races, the margins were slim. Each thoughtful conversation with a voter, and there were many, felt like a small reason for hope.

Election postmortems are coming thick and fast, and I’m not going to add to them. (I recommend this roundup by Waleed Shahid.) Instead, I’m pausing to turn inward and find some peace and even joy. And what could be more joyous than looking toward the arrival of a grandson in March?

My daughter, who lives with her husband in Toronto, is eying the coming upheaval in her life with excitement and some trepidation. Occasional questions have come my way. (“But what does the baby do all day?”) My childrearing tips are decades out of date, and she’ll get better help from other millennial parents. Of course, that doesn’t stop me. I recently wrote up some thoughts in the form of a letter, which I offer as a glimpse of light in our post-election gloom.

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Dear Cynthia,

All new parents find themselves short on sleep. What’s not in short supply is advice – most of it unsolicited, some of it misguided, from grandparents, aunties, friends, neighbors, and strangers who accost you in the supermarket.

But, you asked! And I am happy to respond.

Keep in mind the limits of my perspective. Bill and I raised you in a different place and time. There was no social media in the early 1990s, and digital technologies hadn’t yet infiltrated every aspect of our lives. Gun violence existed, but the Columbine massacre, which launched the era of mass school shootings, lay in the future. Parents didn’t yet fear sending their children to school.

You’ll be raising your son in Canada, which differs from the United States in important ways. Canada has fewer guns and stronger gun regulations than the US – indeed, stronger regulations in many spheres of life. The social safety net is robust: 18 months of parental leave, I can’t even imagine it! The Canadian political spectrum includes conservative parties and politicians, and a right wing exists, with ties to the US far right. But its influence is limited, and the undercurrent of violence that marks the United States under Trump is not widely felt in Canada.

So my views on childrearing are shaped by my experience, which will differ from yours. Still, there are certain core principles that I think hold true.

Control tech

I applaud your intention to limit screens. Society is just starting to understand the ways in which social media and texting can harm some children and teens. Of course, your son will need to learn advanced digital skills, but for a 2025 baby that should happen naturally. As he matures, your ability to control his media consumption and communications with peers will lessen. But you can do much in the early years to shape his habits and expectations.

To reduce screen time, look for toys that engage him intellectually, creatively, and physically, that foster curiosity and kindness. A mechanical toy that squawks when you press a button will hold a young toddler’s attention for about 30 seconds. But a few saucepans from your kitchen are endlessly entertaining. He can fill them with objects and dump them out on the floor. He can nest the saucepans or try to stack them. He can bang them together, getting on his parents’ nerves. Fun!

Wooden blocks; wooden puzzles; Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs; fingerpaints, tempera paints, crayons, sidewalk chalk; Play-Doh or homemade modeling clay; little people and animals (remember the Weeble Farm?); a dollhouse with dolls and furniture, yes, for a boy; wooden trains and tracks; a wagon; a tricycle – all are low-tech, tried and true.

Read to him

Perhaps the most powerful antidote to social media is books. Start reading to him early. A six-month-old baby can listen to the words and focus his eyes on the pictures as you point to them. Reading to your child builds his language skills, exposes him to ideas, and widens his world.

It also creates closeness between you. The last book I ever read aloud to you was Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. You were 11 years old – quite capable of reading to yourself – and the date was September 11, 2001. When the world came crashing down around us, we curled up on your top bunk, and you asked for the one thing that had always meant love, safety, and security: read to me.

Avoid the kiddie rat race

We sent you to public schools, and it was the right choice. But even those schools were test-driven and competitive. Along with praise for your achievements came pressure – from the schools, from us (however unwittingly), and above all from yourself – to do everything perfectly. I didn’t understand until later how much stress this placed on you, how exhausted you became. I don’t know if Canadian schools differ from US schools in this respect, but I hope so.

Be sparing with your criticism – children are extremely sensitive to it – but also with your praise. Kids don’t need a participation trophy for everything. Encourage your son to do activities he enjoys but doesn’t excel at, so he can see that failing sometimes is fine because nobody succeeds at everything all the time.

Immerse him in nature

To escape the achievement treadmill, head for the woods. Your time at nature study camp, nestled in a West Virginia wildlife sanctuary, calmed you. It also helped set your life’s direction as a hiker, birder, and veterinarian. So take your son outdoors and teach him to love and respect the natural world. Amaze him with birds and animals, forests and mountains, lakes, the ocean. He’ll be growing up in a time of unprecedented climate peril, with a climate change denier occupying the most powerful office on Earth. Youth are leading the way in climate action. But action has to be grounded in values, and those values are learned early.

Teach kindness

So, you’re having a boy. Perhaps that seems a bit intimidating right now. As women, you and I might assume we’d have an easier time raising a girl. What do we know about how to be a boy? Fortunately, your son has a dad who has some knowledge in that regard.

The concept of masculinity has become distorted under Trump. He models the worst of male behavior: arrogant, domineering, misogynistic. That’s all the more reason that those of us who hold different ideals of manhood should bring boys into the world. Expect your son to do simple chores at home from an early age. Insist that he treat everyone with respect, including – especially – girls and women, and people of other races and nationalities. Encourage him to recognize and respond to emotions in himself and others, because that’s how empathy begins. Teach him to be gentle with younger children and animals, beginning, of course, with your three cats!

All my advice is based on hindsight. I didn’t necessarily follow it at the time. I blundered my way through parenting, as parents do, and hoped for the best. You’ll figure it out as you go along. And you will do just fine.

Love,
Mom

Making pizza in the communal kitchen, chatting late into the night, sharing a room with single beds: it all takes me back to Oberlin in the ’70s and my co‑op days at Keep and Old B. Except that now, a half century later, we’re drinking red wine legally, late night means 10 o’clock, and everyone in the bunk room snores, because the youngest of us is about 67 and the rest range upward from that.

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Welcome to the Hotel Pennsylvania, an Airbnb set amid rolling hills by the Susquehanna River north of Harrisburg. It’s our home base for a month of canvassing to get out the Democratic vote in this battleground state. Volunteers are rotating through the house all month, most of us coming from Baltimore or DC. Of the 20 or so people signed up to spend nights here, all but three or four are women.

Smashing my stereotypes

We’re canvassing for the top of the ticket – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – and for Janelle Stelson, who’s running for Congress to defeat MAGA warrior Rep. Scott Perry. Each day we report to campaign headquarters in downtown Harrisburg to receive our voter lists. I load mine into the canvassing app and drive to my assigned “turf,” 50 or so addresses clustered in some corner of the city or its suburbs.

In these final weeks before Election Day, we’re mainly contacting Democrats to make sure they vote. But the targeting isn’t perfect, and you never know who will open the door. I can find myself face to face with a Trump voter, an undecided voter, or – all too often – somebody who sees voting as futile and says they just don’t care.

Standing on a doorstep, I size up the house and voter – age, race, gender – and form an expectation of the response I’ll get. But I am regularly surprised.

In a Harrisburg suburb, I approach a ramshackle house with a large American flag. My knock is answered by a scowling older white woman and her aggressively barking dog. Trump voter, I think to myself. But the woman sends the dog inside and proceeds to rip into Trump. He talks trash about immigrants, but look who he hires at his clubs! He wants to tell women what to do with their bodies! We need more women in office, and we need term limits, because half those guys in Congress are just too old! She bends my ear for 10 minutes. Glancing again at the yard as I leave, I see that what I took to be junk is actually a curated, if quirky, display: artificial flowers, Halloween ghosts and jack-o-lanterns, a five-foot-tall lighthouse, and more.

Information and disinformation

While individuals defy profiling, certain patterns stand out. Across neighborhoods, older African Americans, especially women, are the most reliable Harris voters. Many are well informed on politics and history, viewing the present through the lens of the past. Still, it’s not policy proposals that animate most Harris supporters. It’s visceral disgust with Trump and everything he stands for, and fear about what his return may bring.

In the poorest neighborhoods, disinformation is rife. Many people believe that the pandemic stimulus checks bearing Trump’s signature came from him personally – the exact deception he intended – and hope that if he is reelected, another check will arrive. That money was approved by Congress, I told one young woman, who stared at me blankly and asked, “What’s Congress?”

A glimpse of other lives

In 2016, after days of canvassing in York, Pennsylvania, I wrote:

What I saw there will stay with me always. Boarded-up houses, block after block. Broken furniture piled on the sidewalk. Shattered windows, crumbling steps, doorbells dangling from wires. A front porch held together with spray-on foam.

I hadn’t yet seen Harrisburg.

To be clear, I’ve no doubt that most big cities have neighborhoods like this. I live in central DC, but the area is economically mixed, and I seldom see such abject poverty in my daily life. Canvassing brings me face to face with it. What I witnessed in Harrisburg, within view of the state capitol building, hurt my heart.

Rounding a corner can take you from a relatively stable block of working-class families to one where a quarter of the voters on your list have moved and every fourth or fifth house is vacant or condemned. Porches are piled with rotting trash; a musty smell and a sense of hopelessness hang in the air. Many people in these neighborhoods don’t plan to vote. And why would they? Both parties make promises, they say, but nothing ever changes in their lives. There’s little I can say to this. They’re not wrong. One man tells me he doesn’t vote because he’s waiting for the Rapture.

When I see an opening, I press gently. A young mother has never voted, but she’s willing to talk. It’s about his future, I say, gesturing at the baby on her hip. Democrats want to help families that are struggling, and Trump only wants to help himself. She agrees with this, at least the last part, and says she’ll think about it. Maybe next time. Who knows.

Persuasion sometimes works

From the above, you might wonder if canvassing is worth it. I would say yes – absolutely. Each day I have several conversations that leave me thinking, “I just may have gotten a vote.”

Changing minds is difficult but not impossible. A white suburban voter tells me she’s undecided between Harris and Trump. “Interesting!” I say. “It sounds like you see some good on both sides. Can you tell me something you particularly like about the Democrats?” She replies, “They would protect the ACA [Affordable Care Act]. Our two adult kids are on our health insurance because of the ACA.” “It sounds like that’s important to your family,” I say. I then press from another angle: “Is there something that worries you about the Republicans?” It turns out the voter is pro-choice and doesn’t want the government making decisions for women. By the end of the conversation she says, “All in all, I guess you could say I’m leaning toward voting Democratic.”

Not all my conversations go so well, but in this case I refrained from making my own arguments in favor of Democrats and tried instead to elicit hers. Rather than convince her, I wanted her to convince herself. I got better at doing this as the week went on. Also helpful was a book titled The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers, written by longtime canvasser (and my fellow Obie) Elizabeth Chur.

Helping voters vote

The easiest way to secure votes is to help Democrats make a plan to cast their ballots. We want to turn an intention to vote into an actual vote. On Front Street in Steelton, a gritty borough south of Harrisburg, I encounter a young white man and his Black wife or girlfriend, both heavily tatted and pierced. They want to vote for Harris but are unsure of their polling place. I open GoogleMaps on my iPad to show them the location, a few blocks away. They’re grateful and offer a bottle of water to see me through the hot afternoon.

A few people want to vote by mail or vote early in person, and here the rules can be complex. An older African American woman is helping everyone in her extended family vote. At least one relative is disabled and needs to vote by mail, and we review the deadlines and process for this. My most challenging conversation is with a Spanish-speaking woman who says that she and her husband need to both register and vote. There’s still time, I explain in my rusty Spanish, but you need to act fast. I urge her to go in person to the Bureau of Elections, where the couple can register, request ballots, and vote in one visit. I open my browser to vote.pa.gov and select “español” to show her voting guidelines in Spanish. She promises to go the next day.

The difference eight years makes

In 2016 in York, I could knock on doors from late morning to early evening and be just fine. Those days are gone. Climbing front steps at house after house, I find I’m short of breath. I sit down on a stoop, sip some water and eat a few bites before pushing on. After about 50 doors – three hours, roughly – I’m cooked.

At the Airbnb each night, we chat about canvassing but also about our adult kids and grandkids, about aging solo (at least five women in our group have outlived husbands, some by many years), and about health concerns, large and small. We don’t know how long our canvassing days will last. For now, we’re just happy to be here.

NOPE, the all-volunteer group I work with, is canvassing in south-central Pennsylvania every weekend and some weekdays from now until the election. If you’re within driving distance of PA, please consider signing up. Everyone is welcome, and we’d be glad to have you.

Note to Bill, who I’m sure is wondering what the title of this post could possibly mean: the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” from 1977, is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. Listen here. Lyrics here.

The agent at the checkpoint between Calais, Maine, and tiny St. Stephen, New Brunswick, peered at me suspiciously. “What brings you to Canada?” he asked.

I said we planned to spend Labor Day weekend in St. Stephen because my husband had scheduled a Nexus interview on Tuesday at the border crossing point. (Nexus is a “trusted traveler” program between the US and Canada, and an in-person interview at the border is the last step in the application process. I have my Nexus card already; it facilitates visits to our daughter and son-in-law in Toronto.)

“Are you bringing anything with you that you plan to leave in Canada?” the agent inquired. “Such as” – he paused – “weapons? Especially coming from Washington, DC,” he added pointedly.

I said we weren’t carrying any weapons. Despite living in DC, I said, “I’ve never seen a gun except in the holster of law enforcement, and I hope to keep it that way.” Offhand remarks usually aren’t helpful at border crossings, but this answer seemed to satisfy the agent, who nodded approvingly and waved us through.

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Later, I thought about the exchange. It’s true that I’ve never seen a gun. It’s also true that there’s gun violence in my part of DC nearly every day, and more than once I’ve heard rounds fired on the street outside my window at night. My lack of up-close encounters has been a matter of luck.

Our weekend in St. Stephen was serene. I walked each day beside the St. Croix River, which forms the boundary between Canada and eastern Maine. I gazed across the river at Calais – also a very small town – and wondered if life felt different there. The quietness of St. Stephen (pop. 4,510) was surely due in part to its size, but it felt like more than that. Just as you don’t notice a refrigerator’s hum until it shuts off, it took the sudden absence of Trumpism and its undercurrent of violence to make me realize how it’s become a constant backdrop to our daily lives.

It's the "damn guns"

The day after we crossed back into Maine, a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, left two teachers and two students dead. The shooter, a 14-year-old boy, used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle – the weapon of choice for mass murder. His father gave him the gun for Christmas even though the boy, then 13, had already made online threats to shoot up a school.

Giving a loaded, unlocked, semi-automatic rifle to a child is perfectly legal in Georgia, so far as I can tell. The Republican-controlled state does not have universal background checks for gun purchases, safe storage laws, or a red-flag law, and you don’t need a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public. Though Georgia stands out for its lax gun laws, so do many states, and school shootings happen across the country.

Asked what policies he would support to prevent further mass shootings, the Republican vice presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, proclaimed that “strict gun laws is not the thing that is gonna solve this problem.” Mental health was the issue, he said. A different view came from the shooter’s own grandfather, who described the boy’s troubled family life but pointed out, “If he didn’t have a damn gun, he wouldn’t have gone and killed anybody.”

The stakes this November

The election is eight weeks away, and when it comes to gun violence, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed the first significant federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years, which closed some gun law loopholes. The Democratic Party’s 2024 platform goes further, calling for a ban on assault weapons, universal background checks, a national red flag law, and safe gun storage requirements.

Trump, by contrast, has vowed to roll back gun-control measures. He warns his base that “if the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns.” He’s promised the NRA that in a Trump second term, "no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

The race remains perilously close. Harris has been running about 3 percentage points ahead of Trump in national polling. But the election outcome doesn’t depend on the national popular vote, only on the Electoral College, which remains structurally biased toward the GOP. According to analyst Nate Silver, a 3 percent edge for Harris in the popular vote means a tossup in the Electoral College. And her narrow popular vote lead may be evaporating. Democrats can win – but only if we do the work.

Cutting through the noise

If you’re like me, you’re already bombarded with appeals from candidates and organizations, by email, text, and phone, asking for donations and volunteer hours. To cut through the noise, I rely on NOPE, the all-volunteer group I work with, to tell me where my limited resources can have the biggest impact. Our fall kickoff meeting is on September 18 over Zoom. Everyone’s welcome, and I’d be delighted if you’d join me. RSVP here.

The election will likely be decided in seven battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. These are the states where outreach to voters – in person, over the phone, or by letter – can really pay off. Pennsylvania is considered the likely “tipping point” that will determine the outcome of the presidential race. If Harris and Walz win Pennsylvania, they have a clear path to 270 Electoral College votes and the White House. If they don’t, their path is much more difficult.

Our meeting will focus on Pennsylvania, with Senator Bob Casey as our guest. I hadn’t realized this, but Casey is an interesting (and rare) example of a politician who changed his stance on guns, coming to favor restrictions despite the widespread affinity for firearms in rural areas of his state. The Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 changed his mind, he writes. Now he’s up for reelection, and his seat is essential to holding the Senate. Along with Sen. Casey, we’ll hear from Pennsylvania’s Janelle Stelson, who's challenging MAGA fanatic Scott Perry for his seat in the US House, and Jordan Harris, part of the Democratic leadership in the Pennsylvania legislature.

NOPE’s data-driven targeting team will update us on key races across the battleground states, and we’ll learn about specific opportunities to get involved by donating, writing letters, making phone calls, and knocking on doors. I hope to canvass in Pennsylvania, if my arthritic ankle permits. If it doesn’t, I’ll choose an option that can be done from home. At the Democratic National Convention last month, Michelle Obama implored us to “do something.” Each of us can only do our small bit, but together it adds up. I hope to see you on September 18.

A defining theme of the third age is reflection on events that have shaped our lives. For Bill Minter, my husband, a seminal experience was growing up on an interracial cooperative farm in Mississippi and the farm’s downfall at the hands of white racists in the Jim Crow South.

Delta Cooperative Farm was founded in Bolivar County, Mississippi, in 1936. It was backed by Northern philanthropists with ties to Christian socialism and an interest in cooperative models in other countries. Many of the Black and white sharecroppers who moved to Delta had been evicted from plantations across the river in Arkansas and were involved with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Among the farm’s white residents were two professional families, the Minters and Coxes. 

Poor soil, floods and droughts, and faltering management eventually ended operations at Delta. Its successor, Providence Cooperative Farm, started in nearby Holmes County in 1938. Providence was a smaller venture, as many of the Delta sharecroppers left Mississippi during and after World War II. 

After serving as a malaria control officer in the Pacific during the war, Dr. David Minter returned to Providence Farm with his family in 1946. With the help of Lindsey Cox, a nurse, Dr. Minter ran the farm’s medical clinic, which served residents of the surrounding area. The farm had a co-op store and credit union that were managed by Gene Cox and Fannye Booker, a local Black schoolteacher who also held classes on the farm for Black children and youth. 

By the mid-1950s, backlash to national civil rights pressure was surging in Mississippi and throughout the South. In September 1955 the local White Citizens Council summoned Dave Minter and Gene Cox to a community meeting, where some 500 whites angrily accused the two men of being communists and preaching racial equality. They voted, almost unanimously, that the Cox and Minter families should leave Holmes County.

Waiting at home for Minter to return were his wife Sue and their three children, including Bill, then age 13. I asked him how growing up on Providence Farm and bearing witness to its end shaped the values he holds and the choices he has made throughout his life.

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CATHY: What are your early memories of Providence Farm?

BILL: The farm was on the edge of the Mississippi delta, up in the hills. To get to Tchula, the nearest town, it was six miles of dirt road, and then you turned left onto the highway for two miles. The school bus came out to get us. Six to 10 of us white kids on the farm went to the white school in town. It was segregated, as all Mississippi schools were then. When the road was flooded a portion of it became impassable by car. So we’d be driven up to the flooded part, and we would wade or be carried across to meet the bus.

The Providence land was no good for cotton. The farm had a few cattle, a few small fields of corn or vegetables, but not real farming. It consisted mainly of a medical clinic, run by my father, along with a co-op store and a credit union. It was an intentional social justice–type community, supported by liberal philanthropists in the North, including Sherwood Eddy and Reinhold Niebuhr. It wasn’t a self-sustaining operation.

My father treated both Blacks and whites. Local mythology is that there was no segregation at the clinic, but as a matter of fact there were two waiting rooms. They were not marked as white and Black, but by custom, most of the white patients sat in one and most of the Black patients sat in the other. However, the one for white patients, who were far less numerous, was smaller and not air-conditioned, and it was the larger one for Black patients that was air-conditioned at one point. 

CATHY: What kinds of medical problems did your father treat? 

BILL: Pretty much everything, but two very common things were malaria and venereal diseases. I still have his handwritten clinical journal, showing each patient’s name, the diagnosis, and the charge, paid or not paid. The charges were 50 cents or something.

A team of nurses from Alpha Kappa Alpha, the country’s oldest Black sorority, which Kamala Harris later belonged to, volunteered in Holmes County every summer for many years. They also donated equipment, including an x-ray machine. When I returned to the site of Providence Farm in 1987, I found the machine abandoned and rusted in the old clinic, which was still standing although not in use.

CATHY: As a child, were you aware of racial segregation and tensions in Holmes County?  

BILL: It was obvious that we went to separate schools, and as young children we took for granted the racial separation in the schools and town. The cooperative was a different world. Black and white families ran the farm together, and my sisters, particularly, remember playing with the farm’s Black children. My parents insisted that one should treat everyone with respect, regardless of race, calling all adults Mr. So‑and‑So, Mrs. So‑and‑So. I became aware of racial tension in the county only in the mid-1950s, when I was around 12 years old. My sisters, four and five years younger than me, were not aware of it at all.

During the school year of 1954–55, I was sent to boarding school in Tucson, Arizona. My asthma was one of the reasons, but I now suspect that it was also because of the increasing tension. However, I came back and spent my freshman year at the segregated high school in Tchula. One of my classmates was the son of the local sheriff, whom my father had testified against in court. The sheriff had shot a Black man in the leg and my father had treated the wound. That was one of the incidents that brought hostility against Providence Farm into the open.

CATHY: Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 desegregation ruling, didn’t have any impact on your schooling? 

BILL: No, no. It was not implemented either there or elsewhere in the South for many years. What it did was to ignite the organized resistance of white racists. The White Citizens Council was a supposedly “respectable” version of the Ku Klux Klan. Its members included businessmen, bankers, and clergy – “Ku Klux Klan in suits” was the nickname. The chapter in Holmes County was the second in the state, I think. It did in the open what the Klan had historically done wearing sheets. 

The white racist reaction was growing throughout 1954 and 1955. It led to the killing of Emmett Till in August 1955. It also led to a less violent attack, but still an attack, on Providence Farm a month later.

CATHY: What were the charges against the farm?

BILL: That Blacks and whites had supposedly swum together in a pond. Actually, both whites and Blacks had swum in that pond, but not at the same time. Basically it was that there was mixing going on between whites and Blacks, and that therefore people on the farm were communist.

The White Citizens Council called a meeting in Tchula and ordered my father and Gene Cox to appear. There were some 500 whites there, and they voted with only two or three dissenters that the people on Providence Farm should get out of Holmes County.

CATHY: But you stayed for some months, right?

BILL: We stayed for almost a year. It was a tense time. Anonymous threats came in by phone and letter. The previous spring, my father had been forced out of his positions as an elder and Sunday School teacher at the Presbyterian church my family attended. After the mass meeting, Blacks who lived as sharecroppers on plantations, or who depended on whites for their employment, were told not to come to Dr. Minter’s clinic. Most of those who continued to come were Black small farmers who had some independent landholdings up in the hill country and didn’t depend on whites for survival. My father had a number of white patients, but almost all of them stopped coming. His clinic also lost part of its insurance, which was canceled by the company. 

Finally, the Minters and Coxes decided that they were not helping people by staying, but simply attracting more persecution to them. We moved to Tucson in July 1956 and the Coxes moved to Memphis, Tennessee.

CATHY: How did this experience influence your later life, including your choice to focus on Africa?

BILL: It meant that opposition to white racism was visceral. I wasn’t killed in Mississippi; I didn’t have relatives killed. But I saw racism’s effect and I was outraged by it. Commitment to social justice and antiracism is what motivates my life. 

My first time in Africa was on a junior year abroad in Ibadan, Nigeria, organized through the Presbyterian Church. That determined that there would be an Africa connection. Later, in the summer of 1965, I did voter registration with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in southwest Georgia. And in 1966 I returned to Africa with my first wife, Ruth Brandon, to teach at a school run by Frelimo, the Mozambique Liberation Front, first in Tanzania and later inside Mozambique. Since returning to the States in 1976, I’ve continued progressive advocacy on African and global issues, including through my AfricaFocus Notes. My work today builds on the foundation of my family’s experiences in Mississippi more than 70 years ago.

Further reading on the Delta and Providence cooperative farms:

Robert Hunt Ferguson, Remaking the rural South. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Sam H. Franklin, Jr., Early years of the Delta Cooperative Farm and the Providence Cooperative Farm. 1980.

Fred C. Smith, Cooperative farming in Mississippi. Mississippi Historical Society, 2004.

Hodding Carter, Racial crisis in the Deep South. Saturday Evening Post, December 17, 1955, pp. 26–27, 75–76.

I don’t ordinarily do playlists. But the moment we’re living through is anything but ordinary.

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It’s been a tumultuous few weeks. I’m relieved, of course (you may recall my last post not too charitably comparing President Biden to a worn-out boot). I think Harris will make a strong candidate. But election anxiety continues, layered over the sadness that has lingered since my father’s death. Most of the time I suppress those feelings. But sometimes in the evening I put on headphones, crank up the sound, and play a song or two that I know will not just release my emotions but amplify them. Somehow, it seems to help.

It’s an eclectic group of songs I turn to, most not new but in new arrangements. There are two pandemic-era virtual choirs – musicians in different locations who combine their tracks digitally into a single performance. There are also two “songs around the world” by Playing for Change, which films artists in far-flung countries collectively performing a well-loved song. New technology and the need to overcome barriers of covid and distance have led to new forms of musical collaboration. 

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”

With its soaring melody and impenetrable lyrics, this is one of the most covered songs around. But this version stands out. The choir of Roedean School (SA), a multiracial girls’ school in Johannesburg, recorded the virtual performance in March 2020 after the pandemic forced their school to close. A lead singer, perhaps 16 years old, is backed by a chorus as the camera pans the buildings and grounds of the shuttered school. On piano is Roedean choirmaster Ralf Schmitt, who’s also the choirmaster of the renowned Ndlovu Youth Choir. The performance recalls the grief of early pandemic isolation as the school’s young people struggled to stay “together in spirit and song.” Watch and listen here.

A very different rendition of “Hallelujah” is by Choir! Choir! Choir!, a Toronto-based group known for drop-in singing events. In 2016 they invited 1,500 people to a decommissioned power plant in Toronto and taught them back-up parts to the Leonard Cohen classic. Canadian-American folk icon Rufus Wainwright joined on stage to sing the lead. Watch and listen here.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing”

African American history is American history, and in trying to understand that part of our nation’s past, I often find that music, images, and stories do more for me than history books. So it is with this rendition of the Black national anthem, written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and arranged here by award-winning composer Fred Onovwerosuoke. The virtual performance features Black professional musicians who are members of orchestras around the country or hold teaching positions. The music is set against a backdrop of historical and contemporary photos of Black freedom struggles. Watch and listen here.

Playing for Change

In Songs around the World, “musicians come together, transcending language and cultural boundaries, proving how we are all connected.” One of my favorites is Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” It’s performed here by musicians in Hawai’i, California, Spain, Jamaica, and Brazil, including the artist’s sons Dexter Redding and Otis Redding III. Watch and listen here (scroll up).

Manu Chao is a French-Spanish singer/songwriter whose songs often comment on immigration. “Clandestino,” he has said, is about “the border between Europe and those coming from poorer nations.” This version begins with an Oud master in Morocco and Roma musicians in Budapest and touches down in Cuba, India, Senegal, and half a dozen other countries. Watch and listen here (scroll up).

A recording that grabs me and doesn’t let go is the 1967 Bob Dylan classic “I Shall Be Released.” Filmed on a Barcelona street, it features powerhouse vocalist Clarence Bekker, a Dutch national born in Suriname, accompanied by Italian guitarist Roberto Luti. Watch and listen here (scroll up).

Girlyman

This playful, gender-bendy group produced six albums before disbanding in 2013. I love the three-part harmonies in “Easy Bake Ovens,” which conveys whimsical images of a 1970s suburban childhood (watch and listen here).

Mamuse

Drawing on folk and gospel traditions, Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker write songs and perform them a cappella or with acoustic instrumentation. “We Shall Be Known” reminds us to embrace life fully (watch and listen here):  

We shall be known by the company we keep
By the ones who circle round to tend these fires
We shall be known by the ones who sow and reap
The seeds of change, alive from deep within the earth

It is time now, it is time now that we thrive
It is time we lead ourselves into the well
It is time now, and what a time to be alive
In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love
In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love

Similarly joyful are “Hallelujah” (not the Leonard Cohen song; listen here) and “Glorious” (listen here). When I need to work through sadness, I replay “On the 1” (listen here).

“Ashokan Farewell”

This ballad composed by folk musician Jay Ungar became the theme song for the 1990 PBS documentary “The Civil War.” Based on a Scottish lament, the song expresses “a sense of loss and longing,” according to Ungar. Sometimes those feelings just need to come out. Watch and listen here.

So that’s my playlist. I hope you find something here to like. And if you have your own favorites that help you through turbulent times, by all means share. Over the next few months, we’ll need all the help we can get.

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When the pandemic hit in 2020 and normal life was suspended, Bill and I started walking the trails in Rock Creek Park. We’ve continued our near-daily walks since then, appreciating the exercise, fresh air, and quiet. Given my accident-prone tendencies, I wear a pair of light hiking boots on the trail. I bought them over a decade ago, and with the last four years of heavy use, they’ve all but disintegrated. There is no comeback for these boots. So last week I concluded that I had no choice but to replace them.

That brings me to the election (you knew I’d get here). Even before the debate, I was uneasy about Biden’s chances. We all know people in their eighties who are vigorous and sharp, but Biden increasingly appears frail. I don’t think he has four more months of campaigning in him, let alone four more years of running the country.

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Trump, meanwhile, is a compulsive liar who aggrandizes himself by hurting, humiliating, and exploiting others and by goading his followers to violence. How is such a person still in the race? Why is there a chorus of demands for Biden to step aside but no similar demand being made of Trump?

The politics of dominance

When it comes to leadership, given a choice between a good person who appears weak and a bad person who appears strong, it seems that many Americans, particularly American men, will opt for the latter.

In a new book titled Comeback, M. Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, defines “high-dominance politicians” as those who embrace conflict, take risks, use provocation boldly, and never back down. Trump’s “high-dominance style remains the most formidable tool in his arsenal,” Fish wrote recently in the New York Times.

Appearing weak has long been the kiss of death in US politics. Remember when accusations of being “soft on communism” could destroy careers and lives? The American admiration for displays of brute force, one could argue, is rooted in our nation’s history of conquest, expansion, and enslavement. Whatever its origins, it is still so deep-seated that it may outweigh some voters’ distaste for aspects of the Republican policy agenda.

A leader beyond criticism?

There is a slippery slope from strength to authoritarianism to fascism.

Historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, outlines four core elements of fascism: the cult of personality around a leader, a party that becomes a single party, the threat and use of violence, and a big lie that is used to reshape reality. These elements helped propel the Nazis to power in 1930s Germany, and they are defining characteristics of the MAGA movement today. Snyder warns:

The Biden administration is being held to standards, while the previous Trump administration is not; and Biden personally is being held to standards, while Trump as a person is not. This helps to generate a fascist aura. There must be something special about Trump such that he is different from others: a Leader beyond criticism . . . If you accept that a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.

Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation, sets out the authoritarian vision. Despite Trump’s assertion that he knows nothing about this plan, Trump donors, former Trump staff, and other Trump allies have their fingerprints all over it. To enact a hard-right, Christian nationalist governing agenda, Project 2025 envisions an imperial president and a federal government staffed by loyalists. The executive will be unconstrained by the legislative branch, by nonpartisan regulatory agencies, and – in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling – by the law.

Preventing Trump’s return

Notwithstanding his strongman act, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump. MAGA extremism is not popular, and MAGA candidates have been doing poorly in special elections. The Biden administration’s domestic policies, if not his foreign policies, are broadly popular. So we have something to work with.

I can’t influence whether Biden stays or goes. Here’s what I plan to do:

• Vote for the Democratic presidential ticket in November, no matter who heads it.

• Over the next four months, support Democratic candidates in high-stakes congressional races by volunteering and donating. With a Trump win looking all too possible, it’s crucial that we flip the House and hold the Senate to limit the damage Trump can do.

• Donate to community organizing groups that are working to get out the vote in the battleground states.

An invitation to Third Age readers

To energize us for the road ahead, please join me on Wednesday, July 17, at 7:00 p.m. EDT over Zoom to hear author and historian Heather Cox Richardson talk about the importance of grassroots political organizing. Her newsletter on Substack, Letters from an American, reaches more than 1.5 million readers. The evening is cosponsored by about 20 grassroots groups. RSVP here to receive a Zoom link.

During the evening, there’ll be time for questions. We’ll also have the opportunity to donate to a slate of House candidates who are challenging incumbent Republicans in tough but winnable races. All donations go directly to the candidates through the ActBlue platform. There’s no obligation to donate; everyone is welcome to Zoom in for the program. I’m excited about this evening and hope to see you there.

For Mother’s Day this year, my daughter gave me a subscription to an online story-writing platform that emails me a writing prompt each week. “It seems you are enjoying writing and reminiscing recently, so I thought it would be a fun project,” Cynthia told me. And it is. But sometimes the questions sent as prompts trigger more complex feelings than you might expect.

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Take this recent one: “Catherine, what keepsakes or family heirlooms do you treasure most?” In clearing out our rowhouse in 2022 and my father’s retirement cottage this past January, I’ve stared down a mountain of keepsakes. Just the word itself makes me anxious. Keep them where, for how long? And for whose sake?

Relics of a bygone age

Such questions face many of us in our sixties, seventies and beyond. As our parents pass on, they leave behind items that reflect the styles and values of another era – a time when cheap, mass-produced goods were not yet ubiquitous and people handed down well-made furniture and housewares from one generation to the next.

What to do with these items? The obvious solution is to use them. So the blue Spode Gloucester that was my parents’ fancy china for special occasions now serves as my everyday dishware.

Not everything is useful. A needlepoint sampler made by my great-great-great grandmother, born in Maine in 1817, somehow wound up in our basement in DC. Fortunately, the Maine Historical Society was glad to have it – an ideal outcome, in my view. If I keep something in my sock drawer, no one but me will ever see it, and its eventual fate is uncertain. But if an archive or historical society accepts it, it will remain in their collection, available for others to learn from and enjoy.

But most vintage housewares aren’t rare enough to be of historical value. Nor do they have much monetary value, despite what our parents may have thought. eBay and Etsy are glutted with furniture, silver, and china that boomers want to unload but few young people want to buy. So that leaves sentimental value. If an object had meaning to a departed family member, does that mean I need to keep it?

Not everyone is as conflicted. I just returned from visiting friends, an architectural historian and a historic preservationist in St. Paul. Their stone house, built in 1859, is packed floor to ceiling with books, furniture, artwork, and antiques passed down in their families. Arriving at their house was like stepping into a museum. They’ve even installed rolling library ladders to access the high shelves.

It was fascinating and I loved it, but I can’t quite envision such an approach for my own space. So much history! I’d feel the ghosts of the past surrounding me, jostling me, whispering as ghosts do.

The museum of Dad

My father’s retirement cottage was crammed with objects he treasured. In his instructions to my brother and me, he explained what each item meant to him and admonished us to preserve it:

One thing I would like you to keep is my old Doulton tobacco jar. I bought it in London in 1945 for a few shillings. The war had just ended and I was back on leave from Germany, visiting the lovely Joan Parry in Bromyard. We went to London for the day, tramping the bombed streets and sightseeing. I used the jar for many years until I gave up smoking a pipe.

Dad lamented the current trend toward cheap, disposable manufactures. “I tend to keep things a long time,” he wrote.

Perhaps that is because I grew up in the Depression, when material goods were in short supply. I can look at something and recall exactly how it came into my possession, and from whom. I was never a fan of shopping in department stores for new things, largely, I think, because the quality seems to decline from decade to decade. On the other hand, I can look at something used by your grandparents, or great-grandparents, and somehow feel attached to them, and to their time, merely by having it.

A set of gold-rimmed demitasse cups along with six silver demitasse spoons and a tiny sugar tongs were wedding gifts to my parents in 1948. Again, we were urged not to part with them:

I would appreciate it if you would keep these for your children. They are beautiful and valuable cups. I know, of course, that up-to-date people no longer serve demitasse, although they should.

A wing chair, he wrote,

came from my family’s house on Lamberton Road in Cleveland Heights. It is now recovered, but when I was a boy it was covered in red plush. My father often sat in it with me on his lap as he read Uncle Wiggily to me from the Cleveland Press. Please save this chair for your own children and their children.

What to do? The chair is stiff and uncomfortable, in my opinion. I can’t imagine future generations wanting to sit in it. Furthermore, the memories the chair evokes are not my memories; they’re my father’s, and he is gone. To me, it’s just a chair.

And that’s the problem with heirlooms. An object starts out laden with meaning, but as it’s passed down over generations, its meaning recedes into the distance and finally disappears. When I contemplate keeping such an object, I also have to wonder what will happen to it when I’m no longer here. Each memento becomes a memento mori.

After my father’s death, we had 30 days to vacate his cottage. We took as much of the contents as we could manage, but still ended up donating a great deal. Sometimes I wonder if we went too far. Perhaps the ghosts really are hovering, demanding to know what I did with their stuff.

I kept the tiny silver spoons in their velvet-lined case, along with the note. My brother has the cups. I also kept a sterling silver sugar bowl and creamer given to my parents. I display them as decoration, since no one uses silver tea sets anymore. Although they should.