In the next week or so, multiple food banks in New Jersey will be having a huge grocery distribution event for furloughed and unpaid federal workers in the parking lot at MetLife Stadium, the place where the Giants lose. That's everywhere in America now. The food banks are bracing for the massive surge in need when Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits run out at the end of the month because of the government shutdown. When SNAP is gone, millions of families will face what one NJ food bank official called "No Meal November." People will starve, including kids. That's America now. Add to that the cost of health insurance as much as doubling for those in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace due to the end of tax credits that reduced premiums, and we will have many more sick and starving families very, very soon. That's America now.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, untrained Immigration and Customs Enforcement goon squads are using tear gas to terrorize neighborhoods, including one that was about to have a children's Halloween parade this weekend. The goons are violently swarming homes and businesses and streets, all to arrest people for the misdemeanor of being in the United States without proper documentation. Chicagoans have organized so that they try to block ICE or blow whistles to warn others that they might be rounded up and torn from their families. Kids in schools are afraid their parents will be gone; parents are afraid their teenagers will be disappeared. That's America now, and it's happening everywhere, sometimes with the help of National Guard troops, and it was has the blessing and frothing encouragement of the president and the majority of Congress.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is building up its forces in the Caribbean and off Venezuela, with an aircraft carrier carrying advanced bomber jets, ships carrying forces for land invasions, and many, many more ships, vehicles, and troops, readying for a ground and air attack on Venezuela and likely Colombia. It is, frankly, madness, and it's the prelude for what seems like an expansive view of US hegemonic power in the region, wielded violently and harshly. Apparently, Trump is going to meet with congressional leaders to tell them about his war plans when he returns from Asia, and the GOP members are fine with putting troops in harm's way because of delusions about drug cartels, regime change, and, let's face it, oil. That's America now. All this is occurring as the US continues to drone missile boats in the same seas, murdering people without charge or trial, under completely unproven suspicion of carrying drugs for cartels, as if Trump was tired of "the drug war" not being a shooting war. That's America now.
Meanwhile, the Republican-run Congress has ceded all of its constitutional authority to Trump, allowing him to do whatever he wants with funding that Congress passed, depriving states of infrastructure spending, depriving schools and institutes of research funding, depriving so many others of money they were budgeted and expecting. Trump today called himself "the speaker and the president," meaning that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is, at best, a marginalized figure, and, at worst, Trump's enthusiastic semen depository. The shutdown is happening because Republicans refuse to restore funding for Medicaid and Medicare that was cut in their savage recent bill and refuse to continue those ACA tax credits, and Democrats in the Senate won't allow a vote on those principles. But it doesn't matter, really, what funding is passed because Trump can simply cancel or redistribute funding under the broad banner of "national security" and his enthusiastic semen depository won't even squeak about it. That's authoritarianism in its purest form, when all power rests in a single dictatorial figure, and that's America now.
Meanwhile, we are waiting for myriad cases making their way through the judicial system on everything from deportations to tariffs to the extortion of universities and law firms to reach the corrupted Supreme Court. Almost certainly, the radical right-wing majority will go back to its obscenity of a decision in Trump v. United States and restate that the only actual check on a president is for the Legislative branch to impeach and remove the president and that otherwise Trump can wage lawless warfare on the American people and the world as much as he wants. And, well, the aforementioned semen depository won't budge on impeachment. That's America now.
On and on this could go, with the attacks on medical science and food safety and education and so much else, the gutting of everything that made America America, the reduction of this country to a shadow of itself in less than a year, a diminution that will continue as we face, quite literally, starvation, war, and disease. We are in dark, dark times. That needs to be acknowledged. We are in a great deal of trouble, and waiting and hoping that somehow the 2026 midterms will bring us back to the light is putting a great deal of faith in a system that hasn't been able to prevent any of this from happening so far.
I know you're waiting for the happy part, the part where I tell you that we need to just keep marching like we did last weekend (which was absolutely a good thing), but that's not going to be enough. I don't know what the next steps are. The wealthy and powerful people who could speak up are afraid of Trump turning his government against them, afraid of his MAGA idiot hordes coming for them. Yes, there are some Democrats putting up a fight, and it's great when Democrats have decent messaging, which they often don't. But it just seems like flea farts in a hurricane. If I were to offer any idea, it would be a general strike, but I'm sure they're hoping for that so they can call it an "insurrection" and unleash the military on us. Mostly, I'm writing this to have a marker of where we are right now, to say, "This is how dark it is now. You want it darker?" (Yeah, I know, it's a Leonard Cohen line.)
Yeah, I know I haven't mentioned the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, although it's perhaps more important historically that the East Colonnade, which dates back to Thomas Jefferson, was razed. That's because, at this point, the symbolism is so thuddingly obvious that it's embarrassing. We are a shameful nation, but we are led by the brazenly shameless, and they don't care what they wreck as they turn this America into their golden ballroom where there are only those dancing and those serving the dancers as the world outside the gilded walls burns from fires they started. That's America soon.
