I am thankful for our rising rage ...

As we come into the Thanksgiving season, I realize that I am heartened by growing rage against the offenses against our country by the Trump regime and oligarchy. These are too many to catalog. The list here is necessarily short and incomplete, but plenty infuriating.

• a deportation dragnet which empowers masked thugs to abduct harmless persons within our country for the crime of speaking another language or having brown skin;

• a plan to turn over our coastlines to oil drillers to pollute; 

• the attempted surrender of the sovereign state of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. (Europe might yet step up; Ukrainians have no choice but to resist. I remain convinced the proper historical analogy is the democracies' betrayal of the Spanish Republic to the fascists in the 1930; the resulting regime of terror lasted 50 years in unhappy Spain.)

• Trump's claim of treason against brave office holders who reminded our military they swear fealty to the Constitution, not Donald Trump;

• and then there are ongoing skirmishes over Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes. Beneath the noise, there's a smoldering blaze sustaining too many watching women, perhaps slow to ignite, but enduring and combustible.

Somewhat to my surprise, the New York Times has given space to a professor of literature and journalism at American University, Rachel Louise Snyder, [gift link] to lay out the case for legitimate fury among women.

... the emails are just a piece of the larger story: the lengths this country and the systems we’ve created — from the smallest jurisdiction to the national stage — will go to maintain the power of men at the expense of women’s bodies. 

... Mr. Trump is right. He has nothing to hide because he stands to lose nothing. Whatever exists in those files surely will not be enough to wrest him from his perch. At least not yet. ... [He] has overseen an era that might be unique in its willingness to sacrifice democratic institutions and American norms to control women.

As I write, there is a White House proposal that aims to lower the Office on Violence Against Women’s stature within the D.O.J. and cut its shoestring budget by nearly 30 percent. This would devastate shelters, advocacy programs and violence prevention measures, and escalate the danger for victims of intimate partner and familial violence in all corners of the country.

At the same time, a report on violent deaths of girls and women from 2014 to 2020 noted that laws constraining abortion providers were associated with a 3.4 percent rise in the rate of homicides related to intimate partner violence. We are being killed for our own lack of choice. An estimated one in 20 women in the United States gets pregnant from rape or sexual coercion, which equates to a whopping six million women with violence-initiated pregnancies. Six million. Two-thirds of the women who became pregnant from rape were injured during their assaults.

Are you as angry as I am yet? The misogyny that is such a casual part of Mr. Trump’s entire modus operandi gives license to systems that prioritize men’s freedoms over women’s lives. ...

We are entitled to demand more from our leaders, to demand an open investigation into the Epstein files, to demand accountability for the perpetrators regardless of political party or cultural cachet, to demand justice for the children and women trafficked by Mr. Epstein, and perhaps more than anything to demand actual real change in which a broken system is compelled to reinvention.

In the meantime, we are entitled to all of our rage, and men, frankly, we would welcome a moment of gratitude from you that we have not burned this whole damn human enterprise down just yet. ...

Stay mad. Rage is dangerous, but it can be righteous. Our lives depend on it.

Posting may (or may not) be sporadic over Thanksgiving week as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away.