A Decent Sense of Outrage
I am incredibly sad. What’s happening in our country feels like a collective sense of powerlessness to tyranny. Every day brings more news of self-serving, inhumane and deadly government-sanctioned actions that hurt people. People who are just doing their best to get by in a country that has become more autocratic by the hour.
What’s more, there will be longstanding consequences of this presidency’s depth of corruption, injustice and greed. Ones that will harm our children and our grandchildren (and their future generations) in countless brutal ways. Such grief.
The disorienting reality that our country has lost its way stands in stark contrast to the hope that can be cultivated by genuine leadership.What happened to John F. Kennedy’s clarion call, “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country?”
Yet, here we are more than sixty years later, and (what should be) our government is in the midst of dismantling democracy and purposefully marauding basic human rights. Those in charge have withheld food assistance, health insurance and disaster relief from U.S. citizens in need. We’re not just talking budget cuts, but reckless shutdowns and gutting of crucial government services and agencies. The kind that causes rampant hardship and, in many cases, death.
Meanwhile, the president-profiteer asks, “What can this country do for me?” Or more accurately, his wallet. Apparently a lot. This January, the New York Times editorial board called Trump’s “hunger for wealth brazen,” reporting, “Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion,” and made it clear that is an underestimate.
New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, reports, using conservative estimates, that Trump and his family have made almost $4 BILLION dollars “off the presidency” in this second term. That figure was as of August 2025. I can’t imagine the total today.
Can “we the people” hold this number in our mind - the near $4 billion that the president and his family have pocketed - while we hold in our heart those who can’t afford to put food on the table or go to the doctors?
Right now, it’s probably hard to hold anything, especially after Renee Good, a woman who was trying to move her car in an attempt to follow the orders of masked ICE officers was shot in her forearm, her right breast and her head. Murdered. A woman whose last words to ICE agents before being gunned down were “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
Nor can we bear that Alex Pretti was shot by ICE at least 10 times at close range WHILE being restrained, held down by at least four men. Is that not an execution?
This from “our” government. And yet, there are no eulogies nor smatterings of respect from the president and his followers. Instead, they led smear campaigns, spreading lies and daring to call Good and Pretti terrorists and insurrectionists - even though we have seen the video evidence to the contrary.
I recently read about the dearth of outrage in the Trump era. I can’t believe that’s true when I watch the streets of Minneapolis and the brave crowds of people taking a stand to save their city and their people. Their commitment makes me cry, as does what the president calls governing.
Clearly, outrage is still alive and well - though tested. There’s no doubt we’re fatigued by this presidency that inundates us with atrocities daily: the vilification of immigrants, the killing of American citizens who are protesting (a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and threat of taking Greenland, his vile misogynistic treatment of women reporters and his nonstop attacks on freedom of the press, Trump’s audacity of putting his name on the Kennedy Center, and, just recently, the president’s astounding call for his party to control voting. His words: “The Republicans should say: ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting…”
The list goes on purposefully, to keep us in a whirlwind of chaos. Overwhelm as a strategy.
And yet, I remember the day Obama was eviscerated for wearing a tan suit. Or when our own Governor Howard Dean was ostracized for exclaiming a “Whoo!” My, how times have changed since a convicted felon took office.
I suspect our rightful outrage may be shellacked with grief. The sorrow we feel is an understandable response to all of the above. At a loss myself, I’ve been thinking lately about wailers. For how else to express legions of grief?
I’m talking about moirologists, professional mourners hired to grieve through wailing.
Perhaps we need a lamentation of loss: for the ideals of democracy - for the pride of being a country shaped by generations of immigrants, and for the love our Declaration of Independence itself - our unalienable rights of life and liberty, the fundamental belief in equality, and that government is by consent of the governed.
We need to grieve the immensity of what we are living. But let there be no fifth stage of acceptance, because all is not lost. With rooted thistles of hope - this still is “our” government - not his. Not theirs.
So in my outrage and grief, I turn with that bristling hope to the memory of Senator Jim Jeffords when he gave his own Declaration of Independence in 2001 and left the Republican Party to become an Independent to, in his words, “…best represent my state of Vermont, my own conscience, and the principles I have stood for my whole life.”
To the Republican Senators and Representatives of the 119th Congress I ask, what are your principles? I urge you to adhere to the counsel of our founding father, George Washington, “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.” And follow it.