We Zoom most Tuesday afternoons with my brother and his wife, something we started during Covid and which has become a regular thing. We get caught up on the goings-on of the intervening week, and we always close with sharing what each household is prepping for supper. Pretty mundane stuff, for the most part.

Every now and then, tensions rise because someone lets slip something that can be taken as political commentary. My wife and I are in one camp, my brother and his wife are in another. There is an intentional effort to avoid such discussions because they bear no fruit and become tension-filled very quickly.

This was close to happening toward the end of our time yesterday, and it really bothered me, for some reason. No voices were raised, but it became fairly obvious that the session was hastened to its completion, finished until next week.

And I began thinking about this dynamic.

It was good that we didn’t keep talking– for one thing, they had plans for supper they needed to tend to– but the dis-ease left me pondering the massive divide that exists between family members. Our situation is a microcosm, indicative of so many households across the country. Feelings and opinions are kept at bay so as to keep the peace, but everyone realizes that we’re only one stinging comment away from verbal fisticuffs.

It all feels dishonest, in a way, though I’m convinced that silence and avoidance are the best way to go, since the likelihood of a breakthrough, without a moderator present, or a significant change of heart, is low. There’d be a lot of shooting from the hip, red faces, raised voices and blood pressure, both sides armed to the teeth with purported facts and opinions, along with quips and quotes from their favorite news sources.

And then it would be necessary to calm down, back away from those heightened emotions and find a way to return to some sense of equilibrium and peace, for the sake of the relationships.

I think it’s the tenacity with which we hold onto our opinions, as if we’re always right and the others are always wrong. Yet the possibility of sharing some middle ground, besides feeling remote most of the time, also seems somehow unsatisfying, less a compromise and more a surrender. Until that changes, we’ll be dealing with at least two camps.

And I will go on believing that Donald Trump and Fox News have been intentionally poisoning the water and pushing a cockamamie agenda that many are still buying. Lock, stock, and barrel.

There are, of course, a million different things to write about. But Donald Trump often emerges as a topic because he’s always doing or saying something so monumentally shocking or dumb, considering the position he holds and the fact that he’s running roughshod over long-held norms and expectations, promising the world and delivering nothing but misery and embarrassment.

The fact that he doesn’t care about any of this is apparently still a plus for a lot of people—even with the evidence before us that he’s trying to topple whatever pillars once existed.

The only conclusion one can reach is that there are many who prefer we tear down the Statue of Liberty, or at least remove “The New Colossus,” with its invitation to the poor, huddled masses. The powers that be, currently, aren’t interested in any poor, huddled masses. For one thing, they don’t want to work that hard to welcome them. But more significantly, they harbor this destructive notion that desperate people looking for a better life are not to be trusted. The only ones who will do are white people from northern Europe or white “refugees” from South Africa.

It’s hideous on the face of it—that we let this mindset through the door, allowed it to fester and spread to the point where the cost of freedom for all of us is rising by the day.

The alarms have been sounding for a while now, but just since the beginning of the new year, there has been a whirlwind of activity. Well, more a cyclone of debauchery and nonsense. The human refuse pile we know as Donald Trump is ratcheting up the insanity, which, incredibly, is still possible after all the ratcheting that’s already been done. Whether or not this has anything to do with distracting from a focus on the Epstein files is anyone’s guess, but either way we find ourselves as a country dealing with historical and hysterical (not funny) possibilities, maybe even eventualities.

Threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, assuming the Presidency of two nations when he can’t handle one, threatening Greenland with annexation and worse, jeopardizing our relationships with Canada, Mexico, western Europe and our membership in NATO, gaslighting all of us with a rush to judgment regarding the circumstances surrounding the killing of Renee Good. And to top things off, Trump’s willingness to accept the Nobel Peace Prize from the person who actually won it. All since January 1. All unilaterally.

The hedge against further decay and dereliction of duty is a blue wave in November, but that is still ten months away. There is no guarantee that Trump and the brain trust around him won’t have sufficiently tilted the playing field and sabotaged the voting apparatus by then, or even tried to cancel the elections. That they will try is a sure bet.

We can’t wait until November. Congress has to act out all those euphemisms we toss around—grow a pair, grow a backbone, etc.—and stand up to Trump, hand him a few losses. Now. That ought to really mess with his already fragile sense of himself, deflate the balloon of invincibility that has held him aloft for way too long already, piss him off to the point of attempting something so rash that no one will indulge him any longer.

One has to hope that even Republican loyalists will finally have had enough of Trump and Miller and Vought and Vance and the god-awful direction they are trying to take this country. Maybe clear-headedness will yet prevail, and someone will finally look into the price of eggs.

There are so many questions.

How many of these ICE agents are offenders from January 6 who Trump pardoned a year ago? Why do they wear masks? Do their Moms know where they are? Why do they not have search warrants? What are they being told is their mission? Did they indeed respond because they stood to be paid $50K and they don’t like immigrants? What kind of training have they had?

Why isn’t Congress stepping in and confronting Trump with his abandonment of and lack of respect for checks and balances? Who are the voices he either listens to or gets his orders from? How can so many in this administration seemingly be so convinced of the propriety of what we’ve been watching unfold? What are Trump’s intentions in the long term? Is there an end game, and what might that look like?

Is there any polling that legitimately reflects the climate among voters? If Trump is polling poorly, does that even matter? Do politicians not see any wisdom in trusting the polling and acting accordingly? Is anyone going to stand up to this and forcefully say No More? How soon before we start battling in the streets and looking like Iran?

And one more thing… who in Trump’s position covets an award he doesn’t deserve, and ends up with anyway? In what universe does this pass for mature behavior?

Have we not seen enough?