It's a War Effort Now and I'm Joining Up.

Thoughts on writing as a tool and a weapon. It won't be enough, but can it be something?

Photo by Антон Дмитриев on Unsplash

I’m writing more these days on the situation our country faces as I watch what looks like a complete and inevitable takeover by a madman and his complicit civilian army. I’m concentrating on what I’m witnessing, trying to make sense of the nonsensical, of the evil at hand, of the shocking realization that those who could save us are showing us they won’t.

As a political writer, I probably read more about politics than many of you, and that may be okay with you. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to stay out of it. It’s hard on the head and the heart to be so immersed in so much angst, especially when there’s so little any one of us can do.

As a child during WWII, I learned early on that my duty as a citizen of my country was to help the war effort, even if it just meant saving newspapers or crushing cans or buying war stamps. If we all did our part, we could win. And we did.

I never got over it.

I’ll confess it’s harder on me than I expected. I cry a lot. I rage even more. I wake up in the middle of the night with a pain in my gut, grieving for what should have been, but never will be now.

I yell at my TV and my computer screen whenever someone lies to me or tells me I should calm down. I yell loudest when they make normal or trivial those things that are set to ruin us. Real people will suffer. Real people are already suffering. And that, we’ve known since BEFORE the election, was the plan all along.

I can’t watch Donald Trump go on what amounts to a national wrecking spree without grieving for the country that used to be. My country. But now a country so wracked with powerful propaganda and deliberate confusion millions of our citizens actually turned over our most powerful positions, the presidency, the Congress, and ultimately the Supreme Court, to an incompetent madman whose only reasons for wanting the job were to stay out of jail and to extract revenge.

And they’re not sorry.

I can’t read, as I did today, and ignore the very real fact that Ukraine is probably lost because Donald Trump is president. He talked with Vladimir Putin for ninety minutes yesterday. He wants Ukraine to make peace with another madman. I don’t yet have the words to describe what that means, because I’m still taking it personally. All of my hopes that we would be the good guys saving that desperate country, a country that did no wrong, are smashed now.

We aren’t coming to Ukraine’s rescue, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the past year’s election run-up. A vote for Trump was a vote for Putin. Always.

I’ll never understand why it happened.

There’s a lot I don’t understand, and every normalization of Trump’s choices, his edicts, his threats, hits me where it hurts. I’m trying not to become a basket case. For some foolish reason I think what I do here is a job worth doing, and it feels like the loneliest job in the world.

As a citizen, as a woman, as a mother, as a human being, as a writer, I’ve always seen my job as one of caretaker. But this job—trying to save an entire country—is beyond me. It’s not the first time I’ve come to that conclusion, and it’s not the first time I’ve confessed it, but it is the first time I’ve felt in my bones that this patient is not just dying, it’s being murdered.

So I can’t quit now. I can’t. All I can hope for is that more and more people—and that especially includes writers—will become witnesses, will become activists, will become citizens with enough love for their country to try and stop what amounts to attempted murder.

I marvel at, and sometimes envy, those writers who can stay away from this kind of folly—the thought that anything I write might make a mighty difference—but I can’t be them. I’ve never been them.

So this is where it stands here at Writer Everlasting, at least until there are signs that we’re gaining control over the criminals. That has to come first, and I’ll be working at it most often at Constant Commoner, my other Substack publication. I’ll be publishing here, I’m hoping at least once a week, but some of what I publish will be older pieces that didn’t get an audience yet might have relevance for you as writers.

Some of it will have relevance to what I’m witnessing as a political writer. Be forewarned.

To those of you who are still with me, still subscribing, still paying to support my efforts here, I can’t thank you enough. I never want to let you down. I started this as a place for writers who want a community, a safe place, a haven. I did it because I want that, too, but above all, I wanted a place to be honest. And I’m being honest now.

I care about you all in ways you can’t even begin to know, but there are bigger things I have to attend to now. I won’t abandon you, but I feel like the mother who puts the child most in need above the others until the crisis is over. She loves them all, but she’ll need to make them understand her priorities. They won’t always understand.

I get it.

If you’re with me on this, thank you. If you’re not, I wish you well. But here it is. I’m like a factory retooling for the war effort. It’s only temporary. I hope.

I’m looking for more subscribers to Constant Commoner and I hope you’ll join me there. I want to build a force, and I can’t do it without the numbers. I’ve also started a list of journalists and others who have signed up for this battle and are working hard to get the word out and to help us understand. It’s here:

Ongoing List of Helpers in the War Against Fascism