Motherhood in Kyiv in war time

Ukrainian journalist Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova is choosing to have a child now, in the midst of war and air raids.

Why I’m giving birth in a warzone:

... Andrii, my husband, and I had talked about having a child for a long time. But no one prepares you for what it's like to wait for new life while others are dying every day.

At first, I was silent, even to him. It seemed better to keep it to myself – a secret, small light in the great darkness. But I knew I couldn't stay silent for long. This news, so big and so fragile, was about to break.

That evening, I prepared dinner — something tasty and homemade: potatoes baked in clay pots with meat and sour cream (I would say it's a traditional Ukrainian dish). ...

That evening, there was silence in the candlelit apartment, with no sirens – a miracle in itself. I handed him the box, holding my breath as if I were about to jump into an abyss. He opened it... and remained silent.

The silence seemed to last forever. Then he looked up: "Is it true?"

No, I'm f**king kidding, I thought, but instead I nodded in the affirmative.

His face conveyed it all – joy, shock, but mostly fear. Not just of becoming a father, but of raising a child in a war-torn country.

This wasn’t just two lines on a pregnancy test; it’s a vow – to protect our child, and to endure. And that vow feels even heavier than the emergency suitcase we usually grab during an air raid. ...

Read it all here.  

Smoke rises in the sky over Kyiv after a Russian missile strike on Sunday morning. Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

I now have only two months left before I give birth... I just hope everything works out — that I make it to the hospital, that Andrii is there, and that there are no Russian attacks that day.

But despite everything, I believe that everything will be alright, and I will give birth in Kyiv.

... Being pregnant during the war presents another challenge. Have you ever been in a bomb shelter? If you haven't, I hope you never have to. The closest bomb shelter to my house is the subway. If you have ever been in the subway, you know that it is very cold, especially in winter. Additionally, there is limited seating space, making it challenging for pregnant women to stand.

Usually, my husband handles it — he wakes me when explosions shake our apartment in the night, checks how serious the attack is, and decides whether we need to rush to the subway. Last time, we drove because I was already walking slowly.

Carrying two cats, a blanket for warmth, and a chair to sit on makes getting to the shelter a struggle. I can’t imagine doing it all with a stroller.

... Having a child during a war isn’t just about fear and uncertainty; it’s about endless love. It’s the realization that, even though we are afraid, we are also ready to protect a whole new world from all the bad things out there. ...

Brave woman; brave nation.

Mother's Day 2025 rogue's gallery

Here's my mother, Martha Sidway Adams, posing with her offspring (me). This is probably about 1950. I suspect we had come from church. She looks happy and proud. I look rather miserable in those clothes, not surprisingly.

Here's my grandmother, Amelia Roberts Sidway, formally posed with her offspring in 1910. This photographer knew how to frame a shot. The standing child, my aunt Margaret, likes the pose, while my two year old mother looks a little discomfited. As was common at the time, my grandmother had already lost two children to childhood illnesses. She had reason to be happy and grateful for these healthy specimens.

Standing up for law and the Constitution against two-bit fascists

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, reamed Donald Trump's preening cabinet secretary Kristi Neom in a budget hearing last week. Apparently there is no part of her job she's actually doing -- except play acting tough girl for the cameras and Donald.

Murphy is unremarkable to look at, but he's prepared and knows his stuff. This is longer than clips I usually post, but absolutely worth watching as a lesson in how government is supposed to work. 

Not only that, Murphy is morally outraged by Noem's complicity in the Trump regime's disappearing unlucky migrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to foreign torture prisons. Worth your time!

The crypto scam: still nothing but a con for crooks

Mission District, SF

According to NBC News:

Today a growing number of people in the United States have crypto kiosks at their local grocery stores or gas stations. There are roughly 30,000 bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) in the United States, according to Coin ATM Radar, a website that tracks them. The Coinstar machine where they haul in loose change for cash might now also sell bitcoin. Bitcoin Depot, North America’s largest BTM operator, has kiosks in 48 states and is still expanding. The operators can charge users hefty transaction fees, and the stores often receive payment for hosting the BTMs.

These machines (and other brands) are in every corner store in my home neighborhood which is full of poor workers and immigrants. Can't blame the folks who take a flyer on this thing; I've even seen charities boasting they'll take contributions in crypto. It must be real, right?

Nope, it's not. Here's economist Paul Krugman with the true story: 

Crypto Is Still for Criming

... the entire crypto enterprise is corrupt. Money-laundering and scams that exploit naïve investors aren’t unfortunate behavior that taints a potentially useful enterprise. For crypto, they are the whole game, more or less the only reason cryptocurrencies exist.

That may sound like an extreme statement, but you should bear in mind that Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was created in 2008. That makes cryptocurrency ancient by tech standards — not much younger than the iPhone, much older than Apple Pay. Ever since crypto’s invention, enthusiasts have promised that blockchain tokens will find widespread legal use cases, displacing conventional means of payment, any day now. But it keeps not happening.

At this point, 17 years after crypto arrived on the scene, there are still no — I repeat, no — significant legal use cases. This is despite many efforts to make crypto a real medium of exchange. ...

But if crypto has no legitimate uses, why are crypto assets worth more than $3 trillion? Well, the marketing of crypto has been brilliant, with many small investors in particular still being sucked in by the combination of technobabble and libertarian derp. Promotion of crypto by legitimate enterprises, which profit from crypto sales, has been relentless. Venmo is a digital payment system that actually works and is in widespread use — even the fruit and vegetable stand around the corner from me takes it. But every time I use Venmo it tries to sell me crypto:

And while crypto has failed to find legitimate uses, it has flourished as a vehicle for illegitimate uses: extortion, money-laundering and, as we’ve seen, bribes to politicians....

Ah, now we know why Donald Trump and his merry band of crooks have become crypto evangelists. Just another way to rob the American people ...

For the papal election

Not sure where I grabbed this, but it seems appropriate for the moment. For good or ill, the institution of the Roman Catholic Church will do what it does. The message of Jesus will be made more widely accessible in consequence. Or not. That does not depend on the Church as institution. Dorothy would hate my saying that. But she knew it. God and humanity are complicated and messy.

UPDATE: Well, who'd have thought it! Time will tell.

Genders diverge

In the contemporary USofA, girls and boys take different paths. The following visuals document the different life choices and life trajectories of the two genders.

Only in Vermont are boys keeping up with girls in high school completion. The South is notably weak in getting boys through high school.

It probably should not come as a surprise: Black and Hispanic boys lag behind all others in high school completions, while White boys only graduate at a slightly higher rate than Black girls. Everyone else is way ahead.

When it it comes to college degrees, the gap widens. Since 1980, women students have been increasing their share of BAs and MAs -- can dominance in PhDs and professional degrees be far behind?

The increasing dominance of women in the high school teaching profession may have something to do with whether boys believe completing education is important. Or it may not? But if we're not willing to pay teachers, a picture like this is not surprising. Teaching is hard; we don't pay for it. And you can still get women workers for less ...

I'm all for women getting ahead, but the divergence has to exacerbate the tensions which give us the Know-Nothing MAGA moment.

We need boundaries and a new aspirational consensus

Once upon a time, it used to be possible to assume that most Americans had, if not a considerd opinion, still an instinctive revulsion against Nazis. Those were the bad guys ...

No more. Elon, his incel acolytes, and his fanbase get their jollies from playing at fascism. One has to assume that many of these guys (yes, they are mostly guys) know little of what they are aping, because there's no evidence they know much about anything. Elon may be a deeper case; the South African class and milieu from which he emerged was often authentically fascist as they struggled to hang on to their white European privileges over the nation's Black majority.

Thomas Zimmer is a German, a professor of contemporary history at Georgetown University. He knows a thing or two about fascism. He reports that many in German society are trying to hold the line against resurgent neo-Nazis:

News broke Friday morning that Germany’s domestic intelligence service is now officially classifying the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” group. The decision came after three years of investigating the party and was presented in a 1,100-page report. ...

Zimmer explains carefully that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) can be accurately called "neo-Nazi" by US readers. All the other German political parties, much as they oppose each other, agree not to work with the neo-Nazis which made electing a coalition Chancellor, the Conservative Friedrich Merz, a messy process. But German civil society got it done; for the time being, their neo-Nazis are excluded from power despite winning 20 percent of the vote in the last election.

No surprise -- JD Vance and the MAGAts love them some AfD and disdain Merz.

Zimmer then looks at what the rise of German neo-Nazis might imply about parallel developments in US politics: 

This is a remarkable moment in U.S. history. The fact that a movement that openly embraces the German Far Right, the party of German Neo-Nazis, was able to first take over the Republican Party and then the American government signals the complete dissolution of something we might call an anti-fascist consensus. 

The term is imperfect and perhaps even problematic. There was certainly never a universally shared consensus in America that the key elements of Nazi politics and ideology were bad. But there was nevertheless some agreement across the mainstream political spectrum that America had fought a righteous and noble war against Hitler. American society celebrated and revered its “Greatest Generation” and the soldiers who defeated the Nazis; American popular culture used the Nazis as a representation of ultimate evil. Anyone openly siding against this agreement would have had to expect to pay a price – politically, socially, and culturally. 

In post-1945 America, this was obviously never enough, in and of itself, to turn the nation from a racial caste system to a fully realized multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But it did provide those who desired egalitarian pluralism with a strong argument they could deploy in their struggle against rightwing extremism – it helped police the boundaries of what was considered acceptable within mainstream politics and “respectable” society.

That is evidently no longer the case. MAGA is now in power. This breakdown of boundaries did not happen overnight. It took decades for the most extreme factions to pull the entire “conservative” coalition further and further to the Right – and for the more moderate people, all those who might have objected to the idea of supporting German Neo-Nazis, to be ostracized. 

It will likely take decades to get the country out of this mess, which requires not just political change, but a fundamental reform of political and social culture. If a stable democracy that deserves the name is ever to emerge from this, America will have to restore some boundaries. We need to reimagine an anti-fascist consensus not in service of a purely restorative project, but as a reminder of the nation’s egalitarian aspirations, as a plea to finally defeat those anti-democratic forces in our midst and push America forward. 

You are siding with the German Neo-Nazis? That makes you the bad guys. In a society that cannot hold even that basic line, democracy stands little chance.

I'm up for giving democracy a chance. No more MAGAts and Nazis!

No comment

Nothing more to say. Are you happier now?

When some evangelizing seems a right move

Fred Clark writes The Slackivist where he urges seekers and other ex-evangelicals to  "Test everything; hold fast to what is good." He is as horrified as so many of us are by the dragnet Donald Trump and this ghoulish assistant Stephen Miller are letting loose against migrants.

He recounts the story of the Oklahoma woman and her kids put out half naked in the rain while unidentified agents who trashed their house and stole their money -- all only to realize that the person the agents sought had moved on. (Homeland Security is now claiming lamely there had been human traffickers at the address previously.)

Clark has a suggestion, only a little tongue in cheek, for resistance to this kind of thing:

Doxxing the Secret Police to call them to repentance

The secret police of ICE know they’re the Bad Guys. That’s why they wear masks and don’t carry badges and refuse to give their names.

And so ... it is necessary for us — and for them — to unmask them, to use their names, and to identify them publicly. To make them famous. This is needed to save our freedom and to save their souls.

Refusal by such "agents of the law" to say who they are and who they work for seems to indicate fearfulness ...

... But what are the secret police afraid of? Who are they afraid of? Why are they hiding their faces and their names?

They are afraid of us — of the majority of normal, decent people. And they are hiding their faces and their names because they know that what they are doing is wrong and shameful and bad. They know that they are the Bad Guys in this story. That is as obvious to them as it is to you and so they cannot face you. They cannot do what they are doing and save face, so to do what they are doing they must hide their faces.

So let’s see their faces. And their names.

In asking to see those faces and names, some fear I’m also asking thereby to learn their addresses, which seems to imply a hint of violence or, at least, the threat of such. (“We know where you live” almost always seems to be an implicit threat of violence.) But violence is not at all what I’m suggesting and not at all what I have in mind

Clark has experience meeting people who didn't expect visitors at their houses ...

What I have in mind, rather, is Evangelism Explosion. What I have in mind is what I learned and practiced in youth group at my white fundamentalist Christian church growing up — the spiritual practice my white evangelical tradition shares with the Latter Day Saints and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m talking about door-to-door evangelism.

Most of you reading this have only experienced this from the other side of the door — as the knock-ee rather than as the knock-er. I’ve been on both sides. Neither one is pleasant.

The one positive thing from my experience conducting door-to-door “evangelism” was probably that it made door-to-door political canvassing so much easier for me. Sure, an undecided voter might not welcome a random knock at the door, and, yeah, they might not favor the candidate I’m campaigning for, but even the worst case scenario here isn’t as bad as the essential premise of the conversation you’re trying to have when doing door-to-door evangelism. 

That involves standing on the front porch of a stranger and saying, “Hi. You don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I know you’re a sinner who deserves to suffer for eternity in Hell.”

... you can kick the boy out of evangelicalism but you cannot completely kick the evangelicalism out of the boy. And so when I think about these secret police masking themselves in their shame — when I think about a group that already understands that they are sinners in desperate need of repentance and salvation — I can’t help but think it’s worth giving this a try.

...  the names and addresses of our secret police should also be treated just as all those Evangelism Explosion training sessions taught us to treat the names and addresses of our “unchurched” neighbors.

We should be knocking on their doors.

We should smile and tell them we’re there with the good news of salvation, because even though they are damnable sinners, repentance and redemption are still available. The repentance and redemption they need are still possible. The salvation they already know they need can still be theirs.

After all, they are already admitting to guilty consciences with the masks and gear ...

... The Bad Guys may choose to continue being the Bad Guys, but we cannot allow them to deceive themselves about the fact that that is what they are choosing.

Our “Evangelism Explosion” training taught us more tactful ways of saying that. But still, that’s what we were saying.

Caveat: The political canvassing training I've had nowadays is, perhaps, a little more sophisticated and a little less ham-handed. The model promoted by the union UniteHERE calls on canvassers at the doors to share, empathetically, what motivates them to do anything so odd as knock at the house of a stranger. "I'm here because I'm afraid a Trump administration might screw up my Social Security ..." for example.

But Fred is onto something. Reaching out directly, non-violently, to the consciences of the agents of a rogue state seems a right idea. Probably not simple or easy, but one right approach among many. Takes some courage, but so does everything these days.

What's wrong with these people?

From where I abide, that's the chronic question I come to when I take in what MAGA Republicans seem to want. Their fury against my life and that of my friends and neighbors seems inexplicable. What matters to them?

Okay, I know some people react to human differences by wanting to erase the unfamiliar. Perhaps that was adaptive for small wandering bands of early humanoids -- though I doubt it. I bet the ones who learned new ways to get along with differences survived better.

But for MAGA, strange people who they experience as different from themselves are not all they want to erase. They also want to erase science, knowledge itself. Economist Paul Krugman attempts to explain this strange mania for destruction.

... why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. Medical research may tell you that vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Energy research may tell wind power works and doesn’t massacre birds.

And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either. So they really want to destroy science.

Again, this isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not about the long run. American science is being gutted as you read this

There's a human impulse to kill the thing you don't understand.  But that impulse has never contributed well to surviving and thriving.

May Day in Vineyard Haven, Mass.

The crowd at Five Corners had a lot of issues with the present regime. Trump 2.0 offers a wide spectrum of harms to be called out.

This family came out to express historic May Day issues. May Day in the United States is descended from Chicago's 1886 Haymarket Market demonstration where cops violently broke up a protesting crowd and the emerging socialist/labor movement called for a general strike. Contemporary oligarchs may drive us there one day.

 

Generalized protest of the Trump regime's crimes was common.

What could be more straight forward?

So was the shout out to horrors past.

This morning, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Kamala Harris, once again finding her voice:

She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn't belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”

Vineyard folks have not forgotten.

Happy May Day!

Let's keep up the good work. Quite a slide there.

Via The Guardian: They’re the sort of damning reviews that would give any normal person pause for thought. But Trump is not a normal person and is not known for self-reflection. Instead, he ignored the scathing verdicts and immersed himself in the rightwing mirror world, spending most of Tuesday retweeting increasingly hyperbolic praise from Republicans.

“The limits of tyrants,” Frederick Douglass said, “are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

See you at a May Day demonstration. We'll be at one near us. Will you?

We're an unruly and unruled people

After reading at least twenty 100 Days of Trump appraisals of the regime, I think I give my prize for doing the distasteful subject the most justice to historian and opinon writer Jamelle Bouie (gift article).

Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. 

You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.

If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a failure....  Even though Trump seems to think he is issuing decrees, the truth is that his directives are provisional and subject to the judgment of the courts as well as future administrations. And if there is a major story to tell about Trump’s second term so far, it is the extent to which many of the president’s most sweeping executive actions have been tied up in the federal judiciary. The White House, while loath to admit it, has even had to back down in the face of hostile rulings. ..

... MAGA propaganda notwithstanding, Trump is not some grand impresario skillfully playing American politics to his precise tune. He may want to bend the nation to his will, but he does not have the capacity to do the kind of work that would make this possible, as well as permanent — or as close to permanent as lawmaking allows. If Roosevelt’s legislative skill was a demonstration of his strength, then Trump’s reliance on executive orders is a sign of his weakness. 

Roosevelt could orchestrate the transformative program of his 100 days because he tied his plan to American government as it existed, even as he worked to remake it. Trump has pursued his by treating the American government as he wants it to be. It is very difficult to close the gap between those two things, and it will become all the more difficult as the bottom falls out of Trump’s standing with the public.

Bouie warns that Trumps' relative failures in his first 100 days are no reason for incautious confidence that we can hold off his attempt, abetted by tech bros, to end our democratic experiment.

Do not take this as succor. Do not think it means that the United States is in the clear. American democracy is still as fragile and as vulnerable as it has ever been, and Trump is still motivated to make his vision a reality. He may even lash out as it becomes clear that he has lost whatever initiative he had to begin with. This makes his first 100 days less a triumph for him than a warning to the rest of us. The unthinkable, an American dictatorship, is possible.

But Trump may not have the skills to effect the permanent transformation of his despotic dreams. Despite the chaos of the moment, it is possible that freedom-loving Americans have gotten the luck of the draw. Our most serious would-be tyrant is also among our least capable presidents, and he has surrounded himself with people as fundamentally flawed as he is.

On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump seemed to be on top of the world. One hundred days later, he’s all but a lame duck. He can rage and he can bluster — and he will do a lot more damage — but the fact of the matter is that he can be beaten. Now the task is to deliver him his defeat.

About ten days ago, I began to sense that people and institutions were pulling themselves together to fight the MAGA authoritarian onslaught. Folks are taking on Tesla, immigration prisons, even the defense of ultra-rich Harvard. We going to be badly damaged in this fight; some people -- as usual those who were always in the most need of support from society -- will not make it to another side. But there is no reason to give up the fight now.

Victorious Canadian leader brings more than sticking it to Trump

I was so glad to pass along that Canada had repudiated Donald Trump in an election in which the American bully had made himself an issue, I didn't do much research on Mark Carney, the guy who led the Liberal Party victory. 

It turns out, according to US environmentalist champion Bill McKibben, Carney is not just some smart, central banker turned politician who grabbed a chance to save his party from electoral purgatory and stick a nationalist finger in Donald Trump's eye: 

... though he was elected a little by accident (albeit after a brilliant campaign) it means something far more: in Carney we now have the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power. He may turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide.

I’ve been watching Carney for a long time. A graduate, of course, of both Harvard and Goldman Sachs, he was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and performed admirably enough that the queen asked him over to run the Bank of England.  (It’s probably not quite how that works, but close enough). While in that job, he had the fun of trying to deal with the UK’s Brexit decision, and by all accounts again performed better than one might have expected. So now he gets the task of cleaning up after Trump’s insane tariffs. 

But actually it’s the much bigger mess—the one in the atmosphere—that I suspect has long interested him most. In 2014, at a World Bank panel, he quite forthrightly pointed out that we would need to leave the “vast majority” of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we were at all serious about holding the increase in the temperature of the planet below two degrees. This was, on the one hand, clearly obvious to anyone who had looked at the physics, but on the other hand not something that most leaders were willing to say at the time, or to this day. Those of us who had recently launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign found it to be a great boost—one of three or four crucial moments that turned this into one of the largest anti-corporate campaigns in history. 

McKibben credits Carney with helping win the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, the high water mark of international recognition of the planet-wide emergency we are living. 

[Carney] now finds himself leading a nation hard hit by climate change: Canada has a front row seat the melt of the Arctic, which is the fastest-heating part of the earth; it has watched its boreal forests burn like never before in recent years. ...

... I’d say that the rest of the world is going to recognize Carney as the most likely person to midwife us through this transition. I think he’s not done playing a world-historical role, and for that if nothing else we can thank Donald Trump.

• • •

Karen Kelly pointed me to this updated version of a Canadian nationalist statement even more appropriate to the moment. Enjoy.

Canada strikes back

The election up north demonstrated that our neighbors aren't having any of the Orange Bully. 

This is old, but I think captures the sentiment:

 

Doing democracy

I've never been very good at the necessary task of agitating my own Congresscritter for more action for better policies. I think I've been on two visits to Congressional offices in the last 35 years  -- of course for me the target has been Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi which gives me a sort of an excuse: for most that period her real constituents were not her local voters but more the recalcitrant members of her fractious Democratic caucus. As constituents, we felt a little beside the point and we were.

But I love reading accounts from people newly inspired to do this work of direct democracy. In the present moment, agitating slow poke Democrats and useless Republicans is part of the necessary struggle.

At my core I’m a storyteller. I love probing the past and the present to learn the “story of us” and how these true-to-life tales might inspire us to become better humans.

Dr. Jemar Tisby is an historian of religious faith focused on racial justice and a prolific writer and preacher. But he'd never done a Congressional visit before this past month: 

People Power

I'll be marinating on my time visiting offices of representatives and senators for a long time.

This was precisely what our government was set up to do--provide an avenue where constituents can let the elected officials who represent them know their concerns and have a reasonable expectation of being heard.

In its most basic sense, democracy means "people power."

That day I felt like a person who at least had the power to express my views to the people empowered to make policies.

The experience made the work of the federal government less opaque and intimidating.

At the end of the day, all the bills, all the laws, all the deliberations are done by people.

Regular human beings.

They are imperfect, they have fears, hopes, and worries.

They can also be influenced.

The most frequent refrain I heard throughout my day on Capitol Hill was, "Your voice matters." ...

... when we speak, we disrupt complacency. We remind officials and politicians that the people still have power.

As I looked back at the marble of the Capitol, I felt it again: this is our building, our Congress, our country. Our democracy. And we must never let them forget it.

If we can possibly stand it, more of us need to do it! Or at least call these reps up, frequently.

• • •

Tisby is author of several books. I've just finished reading one as an audio book and looking over the young adult version of the same material snagged from the wonderful Cape Cod library system.

Both tell stories of individuals central to the US Black experience -- central to "doing democracy" in the context of the long freedom struggle -- that may be unfamiliar to most white readers. Tisby is particularly attentive to the roles and accomplishments of women. Highly recommended.

When the people lead, our leaders will follow

It was great to see that House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Cory Booker held a "sit in" on the Capitol steps this Sunday morning to denounce the Trump regime's budget plans. 

“Republicans in Congress are proposing cuts that will take food from children, health care from the sick, and dignity from those already struggling," Booker said. "It's wrong. To stop it, we all must say so — clearly, courageously, and together. Speaking out and speaking up is how we will convince four Republicans in the House and Senate to do the right thing and vote no.” NorthJersey.com

Senator Chris Murphy reported one phase of Democratic Senators' push back.

Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted. In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that. ...

So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here.

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice ....

Dems don't have the votes to completely stop Republican priorities, but they've gotten around to fighting. Angry constituents in town halls and all those phone calls are making a difference.

Senatorial signs of life follow Cory Booker's 25 hour filibuster at the beginning of the month and Senator Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to check on abducted Marylander Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Several Congressional reps followed after Van Hollen. 

It's notable that Trump doesn't even bother to try implement his wish list by passing laws, instead issuing a blizzard of executive orders. He can't rule with even the pretense of regular process. Republicans have tiny, fractious majorities and couldn't pass most of this stuff. And a multitude of people's lawyers are doing a lot to stymie the executive orders.

Meanwhile Representative Jaime Raskin and Senator Richard Blumenthal are demanding that the big law firms which have capitulated to Trump's threats to their business must reveal what they've promised to our law-breaking president. Legal ethics complaints in the states where they have business could seriously impact their standing; so could the refusal of law students to seek jobs with them. 

Harvard University's vigorous pushback against the Trump regime's attempt to control institution has freed up nearly 500 colleges and universities to affirm their intent to maintain free speech and free inquiry under the First Amendment.

As Josh Marshall has reminded us: All political power is unitary. ... It’s all one thing. Everywhere that Trump/Musk/MAGA meets resistance helps every other form of resistance to tyranny. That's the other side of Republican's "flood the zone with shit" strategy; as the push back grows, they'll find a free people sniping from every side. 

We are doing this. Find a May Day rally near you.

The disappearance of Andry José Hernández Romero

One of the fascinating findings in the slew of polls surfacing reactions to Trump's 100 day bundle of blunders is that people now recognize the name Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The story has broken through of the Maryland sheetmetal worker deported illegally (and in error?) to a Salvadoran torture prison. Kudos to his wife and his lawyer for their continued legal agitation for his return. 

And kudos to Senator Chris Van Hollen who dared to travel to El Salvador to see a person taken from the state he represents. His mission alarmed me; I'm old enough to remember when Congressman Leo Ryan attempted such a mission to the Guyana jungle and was murdered for his pains. 

Following Van Hollen, several other members of Congress have made the trip. They have not been allowed to see the prisoners, but they can help make us all more aware of these kidnapped men.

On of those Congresspeople, Representative Robert Garcia, a gay Democrat from the Long Beach area, is trying particularly to bring light to bear on Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay, 31-year-old Venezuelan makeup. Hernández Romero was classified as a gang member because he has tattoos that say “mom” and “dad” with crowns....

no one ... heard from Hernández Romero, who has been documented to have no history of criminal activity, since March 14.

Jonathan Blitzer, a journalist at The New Yorker, found out a lot about tattoos and young Venezuelans. 

Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who’s reported extensively on criminal groups in Venezuela, published the definitive book on Tren de Aragua. “The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist,” she told me. “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.” In Rísquez’s view, tattoos are a completely unreliable indicator of someone’s criminal proclivities; rather, they reflect contemporary fashions and socioeconomic class. “Most young people in Latin America these days have tattoos,” she said. ... Rísquez went on, “People get a tattoo because it means something particular to them.”

Andry’s tattoos have an immediate significance to the people in [the small Venezuelan town of] Capacho. For a hundred and eight years, the town has held a special festival for the celebration of Three Kings Day, replete with elaborate theatrical acts, sets, costumes, and casts of dozens. The holiday is observed widely across Venezuela (and indeed throughout much of the Christian world), but the production in Capacho is legendary in the country and has been awarded distinguished status as a national patrimonio, or heritage. “This work represents for the community of Capacho the greatest cultural expression of street theatre,” Jorge Cárdenas, a leader of the Foundation of Reyes Magos of Capacho, told me earlier this week. “To speak of Capacho is to speak of the Reyes Magos.”

Cárdenas has known Andry since he was a boy, when Andry participated in the festival’s program for children. When we spoke, Cárdenas described Andry’s contributions to local theatre, including all of his roles in the festival itself, before leaving me a series of messages brimming with literary and religious detail. Andry was one of the thirteen main actors in the show, a makeup stylist for the others, and the costume designer for nearly two dozen dancers. One of the principal symbols of Three Kings Day is a crown. “Andry is a great lover of the festival, and the two crowns on his wrists are a tribute to his passion for it,” Cárdenas said.

Nobody has been able to speak to Hernández Romero since ICE secretly flew him away.

Andry’s American lawyers are caught in something of a paradox. They’re vocal about sharing the details of his disappearance, because, if he fades from the news, his situation may grow even more dire. Yet Andry is also an asylum seeker. Disclosing the full identity of someone fleeing persecution is inherently risky. ...

[Lindsay] Toczylowski and her colleagues had debated whether disclosing that Andry was gay would make him a target inside the Salvadoran prison. They decided it was pointless to try to hide it, and that maybe it would make the public more sympathetic to his case. Ordinarily, this would be a conversation they could have had with Andry. Under the circumstances, all they could do was discuss it with his mother. She told them, “Do absolutely everything you can to get him out of there.”

Congressman Garcia, himself an immigrant who came to this country as a child from Peru, gets the level of danger to Hernández Romero. 

“He clearly was scared for his life because he was gay,” Garcia said. “And then we picked him up and sent him to this horrific prison. He hasn’t had any access to his family or legal counsel or really anyone.” ...

...  Garcia said the situation is growing more alarming by the day, particularly in light of the Trump administration’s continued use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove immigrants without hearings — even after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency order blocking further deportations under the statute.

“Right now, Trump is still defying the Supreme Court,” Garcia told The Advocate. “He’s doubling down on the idea that Andry is not coming back when the Supreme Court is saying that he should.”

... “We have to highlight his case and make sure people know.” 

The Trump regime would like nothing more than for its victims to simply disappear. We can't let them get away with this.

Resistance is NOT futile

A new NYTimes poll [gift link] confirms what my spidey sense has been feeling: Trump is sinking in the esteem of the people as he blunders to the 100 day mark of his term. Even FoxNews has noticed he's stuck below recent presidents. That doesn't mean he's no longer dangerous, but there is a shift.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles project can come across as a little hokey. He's an FDR Democrat, forever believing that Democrats will someday push a social welfare state over the finish line. But in the present political situation, he deserves credit for building one community of resistance activists whose intensity is second to none, folks who diligently and strategically push Dems to act as their best selves instead of cowering in confusion. 

He sums up the present moment this way: 

... magical thinking in Trump’s diseased brain about how his “strength” will force the American people and the world to bend the knee is crashing hard against reality. He sees himself as a hero. The nation and the world increasingly sees him as a villain - a foolish, weak, failed, and ridiculous man with his painted face, orange hair and a girdle working overtime. A big blubbery baby man as we like to say here. ...

Like Putin’s delusional miscalculation in underestimating Ukraine’s fight and resolve, Trump has grossly underestimated the resistance he would face here and abroad. It doesn’t mean he won’t keep arresting judges on Trumped-up charges; or deporting an American citizen child with cancer; or keep trying to send people to his Salvadoran Gulag; or unraveling our public health system; or waging war against science, research and learning. All of that may continue and we have to keep fighting it all as hard as he can [fight us]. But this early version of Trump 2.0 has failed.

They are constantly in retreat. They’ve lost the country. Folks are not bending the knee. A majority of the country has come to understand the Emperor has no clothes, and has pulled the curtain back from the Wizard. Without his “strength” what many are seeing now is a desperate, pathetic old man, far more a fool, a fuck up and a lame duck than the strongman he sees in the mirror when he applies his spray tan in the morning.

... So, finally, friends, let us on this Saturday remind ourselves of where are now:
    •    We are stronger, he is weaker
    •    We have to continue to act with great urgency as he is breaking things that will be hard if not impossible to repair
    •    In seeing public opinion break against Trump we are getting confirmation that our work matters, that minds can change, things can be different and even - shall we say it - better?

Let's keep the pressure on from all our very different communities ...

Playing for the USofA: The Trump regime ignores the "L"

It's not just lily-livered libs who are worried. 

Mike Florio, who has written ProFootballTalk (now part of NBCSports) since 2001, took time out from his prep for the NFL Draft to express his distress about the lawless behavior of the Trump regime:

A quick break from football, for something more important

... Our country currently is in a crisis. It’s blossoming in multiple ways, through multiple pieces of litigation. The main issue that has been weighing me down mentally and emotionally in recent days is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

My concerns are irrelevant to whether he’s a member of MS-13. Or whether he should or shouldn’t be deported. Or whether he is or isn’t a good husband and father. The source of my stress is that his case exposes a basic, fundamental threat to our system of government.

It’s hard to type those words without regarding them as over the top. I wish they were. They aren’t. At the core of all of the rhetoric and rambling and ad hominem attacks and both-sides, “what-about?” bullshit resides a core question of whether the executive, legislative, and judicial branches will continue to be co-equal. As the founders intended. And as the country has operated, for nearly 250 years.

... I worked in the legal profession for 18 years. When you win, you win. When you lose, you lose. You may not like losing, but you’ve lost. You deal with it, and you move on.

Not this executive branch. When this executive branch loses, the judges are vaguely threatened with impeachment. They are attacked as impeding the will of the government. And their orders are ignored.

Yes, they’re appealed. And appealed. At some point, the appeals have been exhausted and the “L” must be taken and respected.

... In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — and in other cases — that’s not happening. The executive branch is openly refusing to honor the orders of the judicial branch....

He cites one of the judges who have tried to get the Trump regime to play by the rules.

... “We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos,” [conservative US Circuit Court] Judge [J. Harvie] Wilkinson wrote. “This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.”

The language is beautiful and poignant. The message is dire. Unless and until the executive branch commits to respecting all decisions of the judicial branch, our system will begin to disintegrate. And the executive branch will become a monarchy, an authoritarian regime, a dictatorship.

I know it sounds hyperbolic. In this case, it’s true.

Again, it’s not about the facts of any one case. It’s about the outcome of a process that has been in place since the birth of the republic to resolve disputes. In every case that is resolved by the courts, someone wins and someone loses. In the Abrego Garcia case and others like it, the executive branch has realized that a win remains possible, in the form of ignoring that it has lost....

... We’re playing for the United States of America. And if the current executive branch refuses to acknowledge the basic truth that it is, or should be, playing for the United States of America, the system has necessarily commenced its collapse.

Judge Wilkinson clings to the hope that the executive branch will abandon its current course. All Americans who truly love this country should have that hope. And we all should pray that it comes to fruition.

We might have known this was how Trump would treat the courts and the law. After all, he lost the 2020 election fair and square yet still tried to use a mob of dupes to overturn it. 

The NYTimes reports today that the ACLU is trying mightily to get the courts to curb Trump's lawless attempt to apply the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to a situation that is not a war, nor in any rational understanding "an invasion." Sheet metal workers and make-up artists are not enemy soldiers. 

Trump is flailing

Today's polling tells a story of the Trump regime's growing vulnerability and instability. Some morsels via Newsweek:

In a Pew Research Center poll,  

Trump has an overall approval rating of 40 percent compared to a disapproval rating of 59 percent. The survey shows that 44 percent of men approve of the job the president is doing compared to 55 percent who disapprove.

Trump fares worse with women, as 37 percent approve of the job he's doing compared to 62 percent who disapprove.

The president's approval rating is underwater with white, Hispanic and Asian Americans but none more glaring than his approval rating with Black U.S. adults. The survey shows that only 14 percent of Black Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as commander in chief, versus 82 percent who disapprove.

The survey was taken from April 7 through April 13 among 3,589 respondents. The poll has a margin of error of 1.8 percent.

The poll also details Trump's approval rating among age groups. Again, Trump is in the negatives with every group. Among those ages 18 to 29, 36 percent approve of the job Trump is doing compared to 63 percent who disapprove.

That's brutal for the mad king. And it serves all of us well to never let him forget it. 

• • •

Henry Farrell teaches international politics at Johns Hopkins University, so presumably he's at least adjacent to the experience of the Trumpian threat in research institutions. He has some useful thoughts on strategy for the growing resistance.

The Trump regime does not impress him as being especially competent at the domination game. 

... authoritarian rulers devote a lot of time to preventing unrest from breaking out. Their best strategy for survival is to actually be popular. But that is hard to keep up. Acceptable substitutes include preventing people from discovering how unpopular the regime is, controlling media (to prevent coordination), and deploying the threat of physical violence to intimidate.

... The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make their success seem like a fait accompli. [Farrell uses a female generic pronoun in this piece; I find it more annoying than enlightening in this context, but here goes.] She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves.

... That process of persuasion becomes more difficult, the more unbounded the ambitions of the wannabe authoritarian are .... The more powerful and unruly the authoritarian becomes, the more readily they can make promises or threats. Equally, the less credible those promises or threats become, both to allies and to enemies. Absolute power implies absolute impunity: if I enjoy such power, I have no incentive to behave trustworthily to anyone.

For just the same reason, no-one has any incentive to trust me. You will not believe my promises, and you may fear that if you give in to my threats, you will only open yourself to further abuse. Thus - as I, as an aspiring authoritarian move closer to unbounded control, I need to artfully balance the benefits that my power can bring to my allies with the fear those allies may reasonably have over what happens should that power be turned against them.

... Trump’s strategy has been much less effective than it might have been. Trump has shown he is unwilling to stick by deals. ...The good news is that the Trump administration is playing its hand very badly. If Trump had been more willing to accept defectors into his camp, by sticking to deals that gave them something worth having, he would be in a much stronger situation than he is at the moment. Furthermore, and somewhat less obviously, this may also disrupt his own existing coalition. Wall Street, for example, may worry that it is next for the chopping block. Silicon Valley the same.

That is, nothing about Trump's behavior in asserting his (illegitimate) power should impress his targets as proving he is offering a viable side to play on. He's not. Institutions tempted to try to cooperate with him realize quickly that there is no reliable there there.

But Farrell points out that people building opposition also face challenges. The good news is we're all over the map; the less good news is that we don't necessarily know each other (yet) and that we don't (yet) act in concert.

The bad news is that the opposition is much more disorganized than it ought to be. Coordination is bolstered by shared knowledge that others will coordinate too. We don’t have that, in part because of lack of leadership, in part because of a media landscape that makes it difficult to generate such shared knowledge... 

Our presumptions about what other people think can play an extraordinarily powerful role in shaping how we ourselves think, and what we are prepared to do. And in a country where such presumptions can be grossly skewed, it can be very hard to generate coordinated action. Finally, exactly because the opposition is disorganized, and because humans are human, it faces its own collective version of Trump’s temptation to humiliate and subjugate defectors from the other side, rather than welcoming them in.

Farrell has suggestions that he considers obvious:

•  ... Figure out how to generate common knowledge that will enable coordination. Protests - especially if they are widespread, and especially if they happen in unusual places, or involve surprising coalitions can help generate information cascades. But getting media coverage and broader conversation is important.

• ... Welcome in the strayed sheep, and work on widening the cracks in the other coalition. Leopard-face-eating memes may feel personally satisfying, but they usually do not ease the process of converting disillusioned opponents into active allies.

• ... Help build your coalition as far as it can go. Do everything you can to minimize defections from it, and to maximize defections from the other side. Take advantage of the opposition’s vulnerabilities and mistakes - especially the trust problems that are likely to flourish in a coalition around an actor who aspires to untrammeled power and is deeply untrustworthy 

•... And do what you can now; things are likely to get much harder, very quickly, if the opposition’s victory becomes a self-confirming expectation.

Good stuff this. Thoughts: 

• we're all going to have to generate common knowledge under the mainstream radar until the usual suspects realize we're a force and good for business. Think what Brad Newsham has managed with his beach protests!

 • we haven't got time or space for excluding past irritants and even enemies in the big tent we need. Yes, that means I sometimes have to read David Brooks (barf!).

•  Let's keep working!

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy

According to CNN Business, Elon Musk has been having a bad season in his Tesla business:

The automaker reported its revenue fell 9%, with auto revenue falling 20%. Adjusted income tumbled 39%. Those drops were bigger than forecast. It’s net income, the strictest definition of its profitability, plunged 71% compared to a year earlier.

Tesla warned investors in early April that it had suffered its biggest drop in sales in its history during the first quarter, delivering 50,000 fewer vehicles compared to the first three months of last year. The sales plunge meant that Tesla recorded its lowest sales in nearly three years.

The decline is stunning for a company that until recently was reporting year-over-year sales growth of between 20% and 100% virtually every quarter, which was largely responsible for its lofty stock price that made it worth more than any other automaker in the world.

Europe doesn't want his cars; neither does China which makes better, cheaper electric vehicles. The Cybertruck is a complete bust with eight recalls in 2024 and 2025. Trump's tariffs will screw up the US market. 

Meanwhile #Tesladtakedown protests give ordinary Americans a target on which to take out their disgust with the Trump regime. 

Elon's having a well deserved bad moment.

Rendition returns

Erudite Partner points out: 

Trump Harvests Autocratic Powers Planted by Bush and Cheney

... It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001.  

... In those days of “enhanced interrogation,” I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people.

... One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that “has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists. To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and, in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in this country: Japanese-Americans.

Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now...

Remembering the recent origins of this country's embrace of security theater and rendition to law-free torture as foreign policy should also remind us of the disasters that followed. After 9/11, the US fought two wars in other people's countries; killed massive numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, and US and allied military; and eventually was driven away and lost any enduring influence in those places for its pains. 

Trump is another disaster; we have chosen this one when we could have been expected to have our eyes open. When will we learn better? It's going to be a tough patch for America.

The Patriots who moved the story forward in the US Northeast

Message at Martha's Vineyard rally on April 19

Today is observed as a holiday in Massachusetts -- Patriots Day -- commemorating the battles at Lexington and Concord where revolting American colonials routed occupying imperial British troops in 1775.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson told their story, speaking in Boston's Old North Church at the 250 year celebration of American revolt.

... On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, [Paul] Revere traveled to Lexington to visit [Patriot leaders Samuel] Adams and [John] Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.

Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.

Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.

The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.

The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.

Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.

While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington. ...

Paul Revere was captured on the way and Dawes didn't make it to Concord either, but another man carried their message to the Massachusetts militias. Those militias were ready for the approaching British soldiers and harried the red-coated troops all the way back to Boston.

By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

Richardson concluded:

Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.

The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.

Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.

The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.

What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.

And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.