Ghost of Braunschweiger

FeaturedGhost of Braunschweiger

Jones sliced Braunschweiger leaped out of the cold cut case into my cart as if a Jack in the Box had sprung to life. Cold cuts, processed meat, have disturbed my exhausted old innards for years. I never wander into that part of the grocery store. 

My mother, Agnes, loved Braunschweiger, a sort of evolved liverwurst. Whenever it lay in our refrigerator waiting for her rye bread and mustard, there was danger for curious young epicureans. Agnes’ nonverbal eyeball warning, “I’ll kill you if you touch this,” reminded us that children eat their bologna, not her Braunschweiger. 

I was thinking of Agnes because her youngest daughter’s daughter had her own daughter and I wanted to tell her about  another of her great grandchildren. At home, I quietly celebrated with Agnes’ forty-year old ghost over the just-purchased Jones’ Braunschweiger and Coca-Cola, whispering sentimentals about her girl’s girls. An interloper may have mistaken this for a seance.

Agnes loved babies. As an alcoholic, she had to choose scotch and beer over mothering her four children. I can’t speak for my siblings, but she gave me a love for babies too. The youngest of Agnes’ grandchildren, her three year-old granddaughter visited me with her mother, my sister, in Chicago thirty-seven years ago, I wanted to sweep up the cutie in soft hugs and protect her from the world, like Agnes would have done if she’d been able.

But even as a three-year-old, she did not need protection. My sister and I took her to a fancy toy store atop a new vertical mall at 900 North Michigan Avenue. Her mother hadn’t spoiled her with a house full of toys. They lived in rural Vermont with real, not stuffed, animals. There was no reason to think she’d be one to grab at the display toys. No, we went for fun, to watch a little girl we loved explore new things. 

As her mother and I walked around, exchanging family gossip, we kept watch over the blonde-haired blue-eyed self-possessed three year old. All of a sudden she disappeared. My sister called her, escalating her pitch each time — over and over. No answer. I ran out to the concourse to demand the security officers lock down the building. Everyone in the toy store erupted with their own anxiety. We could not utter our worst fear—that she’d been taken. My sister, unable to express a word, turned more shades of red than exist in the color wheel. Older and presumably wiser, I tried so hard to reassure her. She couldn’t hear a word I said and honestly I’m not sure any real words came out of me.

Then, a tidy shopper looked over her glasses from the children’s books and pointed, “I think she’s over here.”

We rushed to the corner of the store where every kind of doll imaginable stared at us from floor to ceiling shelves. Tucked away under the bottom shelf gurgled my niece, Agnes’ granddaughter, my sister’s little girl, hugging a baby doll. She wouldn’t come out. Her eyes filled up. Through her gulps and watery lips she blubbered, “Don’t take my baby.”

That’s a girl who was born to mother. 

And so she is. 

Thirty-seven years later.

80th Birthday Celebration: Justice for Wrongly-Accused

Featured80th Birthday Celebration: Justice for Wrongly-Accused

Eighty years ago this week, my father, a lawyer, was in the middle of a complicated trial in the military court at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Throughout my childhood I’d heard that my father asked for a pause in the trial to visit my mother and newborn me in the hospital. My birth was announced in the newspaper as part of the daily coverage of the court proceedings.

When I was old enough to ask, I heard from both parents that my father defended Navy personnel for stealing from supply depots. They created a sympathetic narrative, as if the defendants were either wrongly accused or were poor and the crime was justified. When I was old enough to brag about my father to my friends I added color to the defendants’ stories—petty officers sending necessities home to their poor families.

In my fifties I searched the archives in the Naval Academy Library for the article announcing my birth. Before I started rolling through microfiche, I called my father and asked for some common names and dates to research besides my birth date.

“I can’t remember,” he said, “call me when you get home.”

Newspaper articles from 1946 report details of my father’s part in the trial. In the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), he worked not as a defender of the disadvantaged but as a prosecutor.

The day my birth interrupted the trial, June 13, 1946, my father was about to call an important witness to testify against former Chief Steward Walter W. Rollins. Rollins, “a Negro”, was accused of throwing an all-night party in his basement quarters of the Officers’ Mess with five White people. As the trial continued, the witness testified they all played penny-ante poker from 1:30 am until 9:30 am, but no money changed hands. The unsubstantiated charges against Rollins included adultery with a White woman, a morals offense, gambling, embezzlement, misconduct and theft. He reportedly took a jug of whiskey from the Officers’ Mess. Rollins was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

None of the White people involved were held accountable, though trial records indicate Rollins felt pressured into submitting to the demands of the White partiers. After twenty-seven years of service to the Navy, Rollins was demoted to First Mate and received a bad conduct discharge.

No wonder my father dodged the truth about his JAG history at Annapolis. Until late 1944, he had been in the elite Naval Air Corps, trained on the prestigious Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber. Headquartered in Key West, he patrolled the Florida Straits for German submarines. He’d been arrested for drunken brawls and jailed for extended periods leaving his New Jersey bride alone in a strange town with no friends or family. He acquired illegal Cuban rum, cigars and dry goods, flew the contraband back to Key West and sold it to his fellow sailors.

After the war, as a new law school graduate, he reported for duty to the military court at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He had just been commissioned a Lieutenant Commander, had been a scholarship student at Georgetown University and Law School. For all his college and post graduate years, he secretly funded extracurriculars with illegal money he earned at all-night high-stakes bridge games.

White privilege saved my father, a conspicuous law-breaker, from prison. I hope he and my mother were so ashamed of his part in ruining Rollins life that they lied about it for the rest of their lives. As a lawyer he never took on trial work again.

Walter W. Rollins was the father of Jazz legend Sonny Rollins. On his sixteenth birthday, Sonny, his mother and brother watched their father get hauled off to jail for two years. My father surely knew what I discovered in the Naval Academy archives. When I returned home to Chicago with my old newspaper printouts, I had questions. He refused to discuss it. I never overcame fear of my father’s wrath in his lifetime — not sure I’ve done so even now– and this was clearly an issue I had not the courage to pursue.

Sonny Rollins spent decades trying to clear his father’s name. In September, 2025, the Secretary of the Navy finally reversed the court-martialed conviction. Sonny died on May 25 at the age of ninety-five. One of the last things he saw was a draft of an article in The Nation reporting the story of justice for his wrongly-accused father. It appears in the July-August edition.

I’m deeply grateful for visits, gifts, celebrations and tributes for my eightieth birthday. However, reading about Walter R. Rollins’ overturned racially motivated conviction, prosecuted by my father eighty years ago, thrills to a depth I’ve never known.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it does indeed bend towards justice.

Jesus, Pokemon and Ethiopianism

FeaturedJesus, Pokemon and Ethiopianism

At Chicago’s Harold Washington Library we waded into a steamy sea of book fans side-stroking their way toward venues of favored authors. The American Writer’s Museum had given us a full free day of writers, a literal, literary event. 

Jen Hatmaker, podcaster and author of fourteen books, slipped a throw-away into her talk about leaving her church because of patriarchy and racism. My companion and I gave each other the curious huh? look. The uninteresting story of her divorce that followed soaked up the rest of the hour. We wanted more scuttlebutt about her leaving the church, but no time to meet her — our next talk had already begun.

Navigating our way onto an elevator to the third floor for “Faith, Connection and Social Change in Black Chicago” we sat in curious anticipation. Reginald Blount, director of the Center for the Church and the Black Experience at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, interviewed Kai Parker, Assistant Professor of African American Religious History at the University of Virginia and author of City of Black Souls. These two heaved weighty thoughts onto a head-shaking well-informed audience.

Professor Parker anchored his talk to the late 19th and mid-20th century African American Protestants in Chicago. He said Ida B. Wells and others gleaned ideas from ethiopianism. She wrote that the movement for Black freedom was not just a struggle against Jim Crow, but a wider, global liberation movement against Western imperialism and racial hierarchy. Having never heard of ethiopianism, we huh?ed each other again. Parker’s words floated way above my uninformed curiosity. But no time for questions. We had thirty minutes to chase down a sandwich before the next talk. 

We broke out of the building onto four-lane Ida B.Wells Drive. All corners teemed with Pokemon people (were they at all curious about the street name?). Some wore foam hats of the Pokemon mascot, Pikachu. But the dead giveaway was the huddled groups walking while diving into their phones. Another huh? moment and no time to stop and ask for a Pokemon explanation. 

Rushing back to the monstrous Harold Washington Library, we found each other in the auditorium’s front row looking up at fast-talking six-foot-tall John Fugelsang. A stand-up comic, his book, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, established his bible bona fides through stories about his mother, a Catholic nun, and father, a Franciscan priest. 

Fugelsang entertained us with how to talk to MAGA Christians about religion and politics.

“People get God and religion confused,” he said. “I think God is a bit too hip to join any of his unauthorized fan clubs.”

We were not confused. He was hilarious. No time to ask, “were your parents married?” and other naturally nosy huhs? about his upbringing. The next talk with Reza Azlan required settled attention.

Remember the book, Zealot? When Reza Azlan hoisted his blockbuster on us in 2013, religion teachers and leaders throughout the land were rending their garments answering boatloads of questions about a new idea of Jesus, the politically conscious revolutionary. 

Reza packed thousands of entertaining facts into the allotted time. He went overboard answering questions about how the historical Jesus has seeped into the collective psyche, evidenced by many who offhandedly say, “Jesus was political.”

Library staff herded us out of the closing HWL onto the sidewalk to — guess what? Pokemon. The Pokemon Go! Fest drew 40,000 people a day to the city. 

Exhausted, more mentally than physically, we went our separate ways home without a wrap-up coffee shop chat and chuckle on ethiopianism, Jesus and Pokemon. On the standing room only bus, chill revelers from a free day at Millennium Park’s Blues Fest were asking the bus driver how to get home.

You really gotta love Chicago.

Awesome Death Anxiety

FeaturedAwesome Death Anxiety

Journalist Kara Swisher has a six-part series on living forever or, not dying too early or some such idea. Last week, I woke from an unplanned late afternoon nap to hear her CNN interview with a wild-haired scientist about the fear of dying.

The scientist proclaimed the fear of dying motivates every human, all day, all night, from the beginning of time. Obsessive acquisitions of money, power, big houses and boats is a reaction to the base fear of dying.

The antidote to this death anxiety is awe. Awe. A.w.e. Awe.

Awe revitalizes the deep need to be alive. Embracing awe unlocks the idea that death is not just bondage but an opening. Holding both thoughts at once reduces the subconscious but crippling anxiety of death.

Sitting under a leafed-out hawthorn tree on a park bench, I hung onto these thoughts as I savored the look and the smell of a nearby lilac bush. Awe was working. I felt death anxiety dissipating.

The sound of a crackling branch overhead should have startled me, scared me. In the distance I saw a shouting seventh-grade-size boy running toward me. 

“What?” I inquired of myself.

“@#$%^&*” was all I heard.

He hurried up to me pointing at the tree. A midsize branch had broken off the top of the tree trunk. The mishmash of boughs below caught the crackup before it fell on me. But it was slowly crunching its way toward the ground.

I jumped off the bench into death anxiety. The boy, smiling with relief, picked up a previously grounded limb and threw it into the tree to dislodge the broken branch.

“Vamos! Vamos!” The boy yelled as he threw the branch at the suffering hawthorn over and over. 

I stood back and watched the joy-filled seventh grader doing his part to make the park safe for passersby, dog walkers and bench sitters. Awe. Some.

Along came two coutured men with their two French Bulldogs. One rushed to the boy to stop him, as if he were vandalizing the park.

“No. No. No.” I stepped in front of him. 

“That branch almost fell on me and he saved me! He’s trying to knock it out of the tree onto the ground.” 

The men were puzzled. Looking at me, back at the boy, their eyes betrayed a lifelong preconceived notion of a pre-teen Hispanic boy. I engaged them with curiosity about the dogs. Men with cute little boutique dogs love to talk about dog pedigree. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the branch come down and the boy skip away to join his family on the other side of the park.

Awe. Some.

Winter Rabbits in the City

FeaturedWinter Rabbits in the City

Rabbits are born and live out their stories in the same patch their entire lives. The lineage of the fat rabbit I see in the spring may have begun sixty-seven generations back, when the park was first established. After a month or so of observing her in April, she allows me the honor of seeing her two small cottontails, the next generation. They’re never in sight for long before they scurry away to the low brush.

My dog Elsa has old eyes. They may catch the bunnies on the run. Yet, her little legs tire as soon as the furries stop moving. Neither can her thinning olfactory glands sniff out their burrows. I’m pretty sure the rabbits are on to her as they don’t go far. All to say, the wildlife in the little city park seems safe.

Except it isn’t.

On a chilly November morning, I approached the far side of the park with Elsa. I wondered if the rabbits had burrowed in for the winter. I glanced over to the street side of the park to see gardeners unloading a backhoe from their truck. They wasted no time starting that thing up and ramming through the waist-high boxwood hedge to the middle of the garden, ripping out vegetation where the rabbits live.

“Hey! Stop!”

With Elsa at my heels, I  barged through the boxwood on my side of the park, flailing my arms. I was about to jump in front of the moving machinery. The driver stopped. His companion came to me.

“What about the bunnies?” I shouted.

“No English!” he shrugged.

“The rabbits! The rabbits! They live there!”

He laughed at me and signaled to the backhoe driver to keep going. They were having a ball.

That was it. I had no choice in the matter. The feral gardeners yanked all the underbrush, faded lilies and droopy irises. They removed the clumpy hostas that cover wild animals and the prairie asters that catch goldfinches and warblers. The backhoe dug holes for six newly planted baby trees. 

December is here now. Arborists removed honey locusts and hackberries that no one realized were distressed. The winter trellis of bare branches is spare. Above and below the wide open space leaves no comfort. No place to hide. The left-behind soft brown and grey prairie grass, goldenrod and hydrangea are fallow and forlorn.

But all will be lovely in the spring. And the ancestral rabbits will return. 

Whenever one of my dogs died I experienced profound grief that turned to sadness, for a time. A season of sadness. These days, sadness lasts longer. It’s not because my dog died but because so much is out of my control, like the displaced rabbits. I pray not for the sadness to leave me, but to manage to live with it. I have a sense many seasons of sadness are afoot. All may not be lovely this spring.

I wish I had saved those bunnies.

Cops at the Door

In Resma Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands, we learn that racialized trauma lives in the bodies of White Americans. Not Europeans. Not Asians. Not Russians. White Americans. There’s evidence that the DNA of Black African Americans and, in a different way, of White Americans, has changed as the result of enslaving Black Africans within the past four centuries. If you’re a White American, the trauma has been passed down from your White ancestors and will be passed along to your White progeny.

Reading this introduction, I paused. For a long while. Did I want to go this deep in recognizing and ridding myself of my own racism? Not really. I’m exhausted by introspection on racism, which I’ve been drawn to and stuck on since the murder of George Floyd. But my book group is engaged in a six-week study and I like them.

Its unclear whether certain strings of DNA draws generational traumatized people to law enforcement. Or, do we all have the same traits, and then police work brings out reptilian responses managing Black bodies? In White neighborhoods, policemen jump to a heightened state of control and figure out a way (legal or not) to remove Black people, well, really young Black men, especially when they’re sighted walking down the street hooded and slouched.

When the police go to court to defend these arrests, they say, “residents were afraid for their lives.” If they’ve roughed up, maimed or killed a Black defendant during the arrest or in the jail cell, the judge and jury are persuaded it was self defense with the simple words, “I was afraid for my life.”

This chapter in the book, “White-body Supremacy and the Police Body” seemingly had nothing to do with me. As an old White woman, I have little interaction with the police. But during the meditation exercises at the end of the chapter a memory busted out of my subconscious.

In the mid-1990s I answered a knock at the door to two White policemen. They questioned me about an altercation I had that morning with my car and a new BMW. Both of us were squeezing into one lane of an off-ramp and I banged into her car. She rolled down her window, screaming obscenities, yelling at me to pull over. I did not. I sped up, drove straight home, closed all the curtains and dove into a pint of ice cream. The police plainly stated my actions could be a hit and run. My lizard brain impulsively launched into a devious defense.

“Did you see her?”

“Well, you must see how afraid I was? She scared me to death. I was afraid to pull over. What if she had a gun?”

She was Black. The policemen backed up, put away their notebooks.

“We understand. Don’t worry. She doesn’t have your address. We won’t pursue it.”

The book begins with a quote from Charles M. Blow: “One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding is sufficient.”

MLK Jr teaches this. So does Jesus. And now, reminded of that ugly part of me, I have to learn the practice of empathy and understanding.

Someday.

How Orban’s Defeat Reflects on Trump’s Leadership

How Orban’s Defeat Reflects on Trump’s Leadership

Victor Orban doppelgängers tread the sidewalks, take the bus, greet diners and volunteer at the shelter. And why wouldn’t they? Chicago has the second largest Eastern European residents in the U.S. If you live in Manhattan, you must see sixty two year-old, jowled-faced, grey-haired Orban lookalikes all the time. Of course, I hardly knew his face before he lost it in the recent Hungarian election. 

For a few days Victor Orban appeared on every loopy screen in hotel bars, hamburger joints, doctor’s waiting rooms-everywhere I went. Orban touted his government as an illiberal democracy, one devoid of woke freedoms, gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights and protections for immigrants. Others described it as a kleptocracy, a mafia state. The Heritage Foundation fashioned their destruction of democracy after Orbanism and called it Project 2025, the Trump Administration’s roadmap. Orban’s loss was so monumental that freedom fighters the world over rejoiced.

Donald Trump’s role model as a loser created a shift toward a glowing hope in the world while cornering an animal in the Oval Office. More and more credentialed people started speculating that our President is sick, demented, mentally ill. MAGA podcasters turned on him. White Christian Nationalists turned on him. Republican talking heads turned on him. And he’s gotten crazier. Reports suggest he was kept out of the Situation Room while the high-stakes military operation in Iran to extract the downed pilots was underway.

Wall Street Journal, April 18: Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.

The entire month of April, Trump has been so weird. Orban’s loss is his loss. His ignorance of war strategy in Iran humiliates him. Bumbling diplomatic efforts in Western Europe, the Middle East and China belittle his leadership. Elites talk about his failures. He’s a hot table of delight for late night comedy. His reaction to getting backed in the corner is to post an array of crazy, from an AI photo of himself as Jesus to yelling about wiping out a whole civilization.

From sea to shining sea, Christian pastors are condemning Trump’s Jesus and his spiritual advisor Paula White for comparing him to Jesus at a White House event. Other preachers pride themselves on keeping politics out of the pulpit. But Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who lays Jesus on every military helmet, have brought the pulpit to politics. MAGA Christians like Paula White preach Trump has a divine mandate to rule. Divine.

If Trump were our relative we’d be huddled at the kitchen table scheming on how to take the car keys away. The last thing we’d do is rejoice over all the bad things happening to him as a result of his damaging behavior. Nor would we be kneeling down to say “God will take care of us” as he lit the house on fire.

But we can’t take away the keys. Or the matches.

God help us.

 

Mow the Grass War Tactic

Mow the Grass War Tactic

God and Nature teamed up to give Chicago a few 70 degree days in March. On one of those days, Elsa hopped into the back of a Flash Cab, happy to be going anywhere in a car, even to the vet for a shot. She gave the vet a kiss, because Elsa loves attention, even if it stings. Afterwards, sunshine accompanied us on a mile walk to the park. Elsa chased a few squirrels then jumped on the bench next to me, laid down, eyes open to the sky, blinking away sleep.

I’d been softly observing the small periwinkle clumps popping out of the fallow ground here and there. Hyacinths. They were rebelliously making themselves known far away from the boundary where the rest of their family sprouted. Did you know the hyacinth root is poisonous? Yep, if Elsa digs up Hyacinths with her snout or teeth, it would precipitate an emergency vet visit. 

These Hyacinth bulblets multiply slowly over years. When you see them out there on their own, you can bet the root system is strong and ancient. It’s impossible to get rid of. They always come back in the least expected place. When the grass grows an inch or two Chicago Park District employees arrive with monstrous noisy machines that gleefully mow everything down, including errant Hyacinth cells.

“Mowing the grass” is an Israeli war term coined in their conflict with Hamas in Gaza. These days we hear about the mow-the-grass theory with Trump’s war in Iran. It’s a violent approach meant to weaken Iran’s, or Hamas’, capabilities through intense surface bombing. Mow-the-grass implies that our beef with Iran is intractable. We can only manage it, akin to the Park District gardeners regularly chopping the heads off the relentless hyacinths. The roots are never destroyed. Iranians have unending seedbeds of henchman whose aim is to destroy Israel and terrorize the United States, just as those poisonous doggie land mines remain beneath the surface. Mowing the grass provides temporary relief. There is never, nor will there ever be, lasting freedom from danger. 

Meanwhile, the Iran war has distracted us from Israel’s mowing the grass in the West Bank. “Settler Mind” has become a buzz word describing Israeli soldiers (IDF) who kill and maim Palestinians on their own property. The Israeli Settlers have been given free reign to burn out their Palestinian neighbors. 

The US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, avowed Christian Zionist, has stated on Israeli radio (before the explosive Tucker Carlson interview) that “biblical lands” belong to Israel. He insists on calling the West Bank “Judea and Samaria”, biblical names. Have you wondered lately why the US policy on Israel has shifted away from Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict? The US is sitting on the park bench softly observing Israel mow the Palestinian grass.

If the White House doesn’t remove Ambassador Huckabee soon, the Arab countries will deem the United States a non-player in any constructive role in peace in the Middle East. Their only regard for the US will be in whatever corrosive deals the individual Gulf states are cooking up with the Trump dynasty. Is that the real strategy?

At the moment, even those corrupt deals look bleak. For who can trust a small-fingered discrepant mean old would-be king?

State of the Union? You’re Kidding, Right?

State of the Union? You’re Kidding, Right?

Why did so many people ask me about watching the State of the Union speech? And not just me. Local news reporters asked people on the street.  I’ve Had It Podcaster Jennifer Welch asked Resister Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut if he was going.

“Well, hell no, I’m not going. He’s made a mockery of the State of the Union. And we don’t need to be a backdrop to his histrionics.”

Honestly, it’s not like the speech was the U.S. Women’s Hockey finals at the Olympics. It was Donald Trump’s State of the Union. The news about the number of Democratic Members of Congress and Senators not heading over to the House Chamber in the Capitol was interesting. However, it was expected. We didn’t need to see breaking news headlines about each boycotter pop out of our phones all day.

Resister Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia preached at Trinity Church in Chicago Sunday. His sermon was titled I’ve had enough. Using the Hebrew Bible’s Isaiah, he reminded us of wicked kings. These kings and wannabe kings erase anything that looks like diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

“Don’t act like this is politics as usual. This is not just politics, it’s spiritual wickedness in high places. Haven’t we had enough?”

Senator Warnock said God hates solemn assemblies that normalize this political spiritual wickedness. God hates?

“Wickedness in our lifetime is being facilitated and approved and applauded by people who are sitting in somebody’s church this morning,” preached Warnock. I’d hate that too if I were God.

Last summer, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson gathered some of his boys in prayer. They met in the basement of the Capitol. They emerged from their subterranean huddle to vote on the bill that kicked 15 million people off health care. Warnock questioned who those boys prayed to. Who did they talk to?

Senator Warnock did attend the State of the Union speech. Good for him. His ministry of solemn presence condemns the MAGA religion of those boys in the basement.

Trinity Church’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III and Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock are alum of The Auburn Senior Fellows. They are two of twenty-five top leaders who bring justice-centered faith into the public square. An unprecedented cohort of changemakers, they were brought together by Auburn Seminary in New York City. You’ll see them in places like Minneapolis and Alligator Alley, No Kings rallies and detention center protests. No matter your religion or no-religion, if you ever get a chance to see one of them, go. Just go. They are listed here. 

The titles of Jennifer Welch’s podcast I’ve Had It and Warnock’s preaching I’ve Had Enough are misleading. Yes, they’ve had it, had enough. But they keep going, keep speaking out, keep organizing, keep preaching. 

Because they haven’t had so much that they quit. 

 

Why Vote? To Be in That Number

Why Vote? To Be in That Number

The first vote I cast was against the Viet Nam war. It didn’t matter who the candidate was. I voted to stop the killing and maiming of Americans and Southeast Asians fighting on the other side of the world. Every vote since then has been for others. Oh, I could say I’ve voted for women’s rights, my own civil rights, or to keep Social Security and Medicare, but I’m a privileged white woman. In reality, my rights have never been directly threatened as a woman. And, though I have no personal or family wealth, I’ve never feared Social Security and Medicare cuts. My Plan B was, and is, simply to “go without.” 

The Chicago Board of Elections notified me recently that I’d be receiving my mail-in ballot for the March 17, 2026 primary.  Mail-in voting is perfect for me. I always know who I’m voting for. I mark my ballot, then drop it in the mailbox long before Election Day.

Most of the votes I’ve cast were for candidates who vow to protect the rights of others. The rights of women, gay rights, the civil rights of Black and Brown people all figure into my sizing up candidates for all the years I can remember. 

This year? Jeez, is this year different.

I’ll mark the ballot for all my favorite candidates, but that’s a secondary reason for voting. Present times call for me to vote for myself, to be in the number, to exercise what’s left of Democracy. The witless words of the current president of the United States make me aware of the precariousness of my ballot. The other day he fantasized aloud about nationalizing elections. Here’s what those words said to me: Hey Regan, I’m not going to count your vote.

Among the “Ice Out” and “Remember Renee and Alex” signs carried by activists in sub zero fields of love across the Upper Midwest in January, slogans like these bobbed up and down in the snow-drenched crowds:

What Happened to Love?

If You’re Family’d Been Taken You’d be Here too

Hate Never Made America Great

Dark Skin is not a Crime

ICE is for Drinks not Communities

Resist the Cruelty

Never Again is Now

Grandmothers and fathers, programmers and poets, priests and ministers, rabbis, imams, and buddhists all risked their lives, reputations, livelihoods and freedoms to raise their voices in nonviolent outrage. For others.

Millions of us have always voted for others.

I’m a lesser fan of the Christian bible but there’s a passage in the gospel of Luke that goes like this: Then Jesus turned to the crowd and said, “When you see clouds beginning to form in the west, you say, ‘Here comes a shower.’ And you’re right. When the south wind blows, you say, ‘Today will be a scorcher.’ And it is. You know how to interpret the weather signs of the earth and sky, but you don’t know how to interpret the present times.”

For you and Alex and Renee and all I’ve ever cared about, I vote. For civil liberties, justice, and freedom, I vote. 

But I see that present times call for selfishness.

Present times call for me, and you, to vote first for ourselves.

Doomsday Prophecies: From Hal Lindsey to Trump’s NAR

Doomsday Prophecies: From Hal Lindsey to Trump’s NAR

In the early 1970s the doomsday prophecies in Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, stoked my Toms River, New Jersey, Christian fundamentalist cult. Little did I know that the prophesies of the cult religion of my youth would come true through a new religious movement, the National Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Fifty years later.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations, Hal Lindsey connected end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies to current events. In his view, Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches—both in 1948. 

Converts, like me, of the 1970s Jesus movement, still flash-backing to acid trips, saw signs of the end times around every corner. In our small church community, anti-globalism was our protest because Satan was using the banks to form a global economy. We boycotted the Bank of America. We refused to use credit cards. We wrote letters condemning the birth of the European Union. An increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism. All these signaled the diabolic end of the world, the coming of the Antichrist, or some kind of unearthly vision that terrified vulnerable young comfort-seekers.

I left the Christian cult after sobering up in Alcoholics Anonymous, divorcing an abusive husband, and moving 1,500 miles away from the scene. 

Starting in the 1980’s, unbeknownst to me, Christian fundamentalism slowly morphed into the New Apostolic Reformation. The prime NAR chronicler, Matthew D. Taylor, describes the NAR’s leadership as a “spiritual oligarchy” of apostles and prophets. Apparently God has told NAR adherents that Donald Trump is their spiritual leader. You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself, but the results are obvious. 

The NAR apostles and prophets tell Trump his job is to “advance God’s earthly kingdom so Christ can return.” Advancing the earthly kingdom is outlined in Project 2025. The elimination of abortion and women’s rights; same-sex marriage and gay rights; dismantling USAID as a stand against globalism—all the shockers in the first year of Trump 2.0 are advancing the earthly kingdom.

Venezuela is the biggest shocker so far, at least for me. Fifty years ago I learned that the Book of Revelations prophesied God would make the United States, Russia and China the world’s three spheres of influence. The United States would get the entire Western Hemisphere. Russia gets its region, and Europe. China gets all of Asia, India, Africa. This is the umbrella of national sovereignty, the opposite of international integration and the seeds of anti-globalization.

A radio broadcaster startled me on Saturday morning, January 3, with the news that the US invaded Venezuela. The long-forgotten voice of myself as a 25-year-old Jesus Freak bellowed, “Uh. Oh. Wake up. It’s happening.” 

Donald Trump, in a 2017 speech to the Joint Congress, announced he was not the President of the world. Instead, he stated, he was the President of America. These words sent a signal to anti-globalists and end-times prophets around the world.  It was a declaration that the US will once again dominate the Western Hemisphere. Vladimir Putin confidante Alexander Dugin, heard the call and issued a statement that traditionalism had won, globalism lost. 

Anthropologists say pandemic uncertainty, virtual reality, environmental issues, old-age anxiety, border disputes, memory disorder, and gender trouble put society in a self-protective liminal state, a state betwixt and between. Perhaps these unsettling markers ushered in Donald Trump as the leader of the new world order. Now that we’ve fallen over the threshold, what do we do?

I don’t know. 

But holy shit. 

Wake up. 

It’s happening.