I have a lot going on in my personal life right now. I’m moving out of the Muir Beach home I’ve inhabited for 17 years of my life, the home where I raised my daughter, who has now left me with an empty nest that is not the home I raised her in. My book edits for my book RELATIONSICK are due May 1 and I’m far from done. My daughter will be home from her gap year in July and I’m trying to build a new home for her. My partner Jeff just started a new psychiatry job at Santa Rosa Hospital so I’m trying to support him. And my housemate April, who has lived with me for 13 years, helped me raise my daughter, and has been like a sister to me, just moved to New Hampshire to be closer to her family. And I can’t find housing in Muir Beach, where all my friends and community live. I’m now plopped in Sonoma County in a short term housing situation provided by the hospital for locum tenens doctors, in a lovely cottage with chickens and a garden near the Russian River in wine country, where I don’t really have any friends or sense of belonging.
But I love the Russian River area. We’re trying to look at this as an extended vacation, during which we are so privileged to be housed by the hospital during uncertain economic times. We are so fortunate and aware of many unearned privileges. That doesn’t diminish the degree to which I’m also grieving the loss of Muir Beach and my community there, on top of the empty nest. I have no idea where Jeff and I will live six months from now, but I’m praying something we can afford opens up in Muir Beach before then, as we watch our limited savings evaporate.
With all this going on in my personal life, I should be focused on sorting out my own life.
But honestly, y’all, I cannot focus on the tasks of my own life right now, because I am in shock and horror about what’s happening to the people in my country like Kilmar Ábrego García and his wife and 3 kids, and the other 238 immigrants sent to an El Salvador prison, and their families, who are facing way more shocking changes than I am, under the guise of the “Alien Enemies Act,” which hasn’t been evoked since WWII.
We should all be in shock and horror. The absence of due process, the flagrant disregard for rights clearly stated not only in our Constitution, but in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights- it makes me feel really distracted and frightened for so many vulnerable people in our country- and for myself, if I’m honest, since I’m speaking out publicly against the Trump administration.
If our President can just kidnap people like Kilmar Ábrego García, who was in the US legally, and ship them to another country, and then ignore the Supreme Court’s demand to bring him back, and then claim to have no power to force El Salvador President Bukele to return him, then what’s to stop him from rounding up US citizens he doesn’t like, shipping them to El Salvador without due process, and then claiming to have no power to return citizens to their own homeland?
How is this not a prelude to the horrors of Nazi Germany, rounding up innocent people who were legal citizens of their own countries from their homes and workplaces, putting them on trains, sending them to concentration camps, forcing them into labor trafficking, and then exterminating them? How is this not treason?
What’s to make us think he won’t do the same thing to Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton or Mike Pence or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Maine governor Janet Mills- or any “homegrown criminal” who stings his fragile little ego by thwarting his agenda? What’s to ensure that he doesn’t make historian and patriot Heather Cox Richardson disappear, so she’s forced to stop broadcasting the truth about what the Trump administration is doing? If he can’t silence dissent by threatening law firms and universities financially, what’s to prevent him from just rounding up dissenters and deporting us to El Salvador prisons?
In case you missed Trump’s recorded comments on Bukele’s publicly released video yesterday, as reported by Heather Cox Richardson:
Trump said, “We want to do homegrown criminals next…. The homegrowns.” Trump told Bukele. “You gotta build about five more places.” Bukele appeared to answer, “Yeah, we’ve got space.” “All right,” Trump replied.
Rather than being appalled, the people in the room—including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi—erupted in laughter.
Legal analyst Harry Litman of Talking Feds wrote: “What we all just witnessed had all the earmarks of a criminal conspiracy to deprive Abrego Garcia of his constitutional rights, as well as an impeachable offense. The fraud scheme was a phony agreement engineered by the US to have Bukele say he lacks power to return Abrego Garcia and he won’t do it…
As Adam Serwer wrote today in The Atlantic, The “rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law…”
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained the larger picture: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.” He compared it to the Nazis’ practice of pushing Jews into statelessness because “[i]t is easier to move people away from law than it is to move law away from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones…”
You can read the rest of HCR’s post from yesterday here.
When I posted about this on Facebook, Taz Eem pointed out that this behavior is not only like the early days of Nazi Germany. It’s also what’s happening in present time in Gaza. Taz wrote, “Pushing people into statelessness and then killing them….sounds familiar. And again I’m wondering how many of these protest events and initiatives will continue to conveniently sidestep the genocide in Gaza and instead redirect all our attention towards what European Jews (as well as other groups) went through in Nazi Germany. The selectiveness and compartmentalization that I’m seeing on many political pages is astounding. And it ignores how victims can become perpetrators.”
I agree with Taz. Indeed, as we know in the field of trauma, it’s not uncommon for the oppressed to become the oppressors once they acquire the power to do so. And it’s not antisemitic to call out oppression against any marginalized people, even if a small group of terrorists committing horrific atrocities on October 7, just like we experienced on US turf on September 11. If we’re going to be appalled at the human rights violations happening in the US right now, we have to be equally appalled when it happens elsewhere, whether the innocent people getting harmed are Jewish, Palestinian, or from any other country. No state-sponsored genocide of innocent people should be permitted, no matter who thinks they’re entitled to drum up support for war crimes against innocent people. And I say this with all sensitivity to my Jewish friends who have a hard time seeing this truth and to my American friends who think war against Afghanistan was justified after 9/11.
What This Portends
If the Trump administration can just illegally kidnap people like Abrego Garcia, who was in the US legally, and if Trump and his cronies think they are above the law, even when the Supreme Court orders Trump to return Abrego Garcia, and if they refuse to exercise their power to force Bukele to return Abrego Garcia, and if Trump actually gets away with this, what’s to stop him from kidnapping and deporting any other legal US citizens he has bad blood with, which is pretty much all Democrats and anyone who dares to defy him? If Trump doesn’t believe due process is a necessary Constitutional protection, and if those who voted for him agree with this, then we’re all at risk- red, blue, and everyone in between. There but by the grace of God go we. If they can do this to Abrego Garcia, they can do it to you and me and other people we care about.
As we know with sociopaths, you might be in the “in group” one moment, but one wrong move, and you’re out. Then you’re also at risk of getting kidnapped and disappeared- any one of us. Even Elon Musk. Especially Elon Musk, because his days are numbered and you can bet Trump will scapegoat him one of these days, just to feed his wolves when they need someone to hate.
So here I sit, in the place that will be my temporary home for the next six months, wondering why so many people voted to put this criminal in the most powerful office in the entire world, when we have every reason to believe he’d do exactly what he’s doing- destroying our country, tearing apart our democracy, violating the human rights of our citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants, bullying our Ivy League universities, tearing apart our government regulations, and destroying all of our economic futures (except for his oligarch cronies who are now guilty of insider trading, at the whims of his on-again-off-again tariffs).
I know we’re all supposed to be stunned into passivity, paralyzed with grief and helplessness, ashamed of our own powerlessness, and too dysregulated to organize resistance. But we can’t indulge those parts right now, even if they’re dominant in our internal family systems. We have to find ways to rally together and prevent another Holocaust or world war.
What Can You Do When You Feel Helpless & Powerless?
We have to keep protesting, keep doing what we can, keep exercising our First Amendment rights as long as we have them, keep shouting out on social media and anywhere we have power and influence, keep caring about the people who are worse off than we are, keep our empathy alive and vibrant.
We have to exercise our power where we have it, speak out against what’s happening because silence is violence and helps the oppressor gain power. We have to help out those we can where we can, just like Germans who hid Jews did. Even small acts of kindness can help us remember that WE are the majority, not those who seek to oppress us. WE have the power of the collective and morality on our side. WE can have each other’s backs as long as we don’t get complacent or mistakenly think fascism and the devastating impact of authoritarian hostile takeovers of a country won’t harm ALL of us.
- RESIST & PROTEST. The next national protest day is this Saturday, April 19. Find your closest local event at 50-50-1.
- BREATHE, PUSH & PRACTICE REVOLUTIONARY LOVE. If you’re not following Civil Rights lawyer and author of See No Stranger Valarie Kaur, follow her. She’s leading three “Love As An Antidote To Authoritarianism” events to help us all breathe and push. The first of these by donation only events Love For Others is tomorrow (register here). The second one Love For Our Opponents is here. The third Love For Ourselves includes IFS founder Dick Schwartz, which you can register for here. Let’s come together to practice revolutionary love, breathing so we can push as a collective, so we can keep ourselves afloat for necessary resistance without collapsing into learned helplessness.
- DONATE. Give money to Indivisible, Move On, 50-50-1, Valarie Kaur, or any other good cause that supports equal human rights for all and is helping move the needle on this stuff.
- PRACTICE INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS. I also invite you to join us for our twice weekly IFS community of practice LOVE SCHOOL. We need each other, and we need healthy relationships, in times like this. We welcome you to make LOVE SCHOOL your twice a month respite, where you can focus on your own parts, your relationships, and being a healthier member of your community- so you can breathe and push, with love. Yesterday, Debbie Rosas, the founder of Nia, joined us as a special guest and led us through an amazing embodiment experience, which you’ll get access to, along with other past recorded sessions and future live ones if you join now.
In our next session, my Harvard psychiatrist partner Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv and I will be leading a session about how to walk the relational tightrope, balancing between the needs of others and the needs of your own parts, how to avoid being too codependently focused on others or too selfishly focused on yourself. We’ll be exploring how to hold onto your true Self in the presence of others, without losing yourself and also with great care, reverence, kindness, and respect for the dignity and needs of others. Finding this kind of relational balance is one way you can stay sane in insane times like this.
- PRACTICE EMPATHY & ALTRUISM. During Nazi Germany, some altruistic people with empathy and kind hearts hid Jews and other at risk people. Others turned a blind eye and decided to stay out of it. Science later showed that the ones who hid Jews were the ones whose parents practiced empathy and modeled morality, without beating their kids or exercising undue power over them. If you have any opportunities to practice altruism like this, now is the time to prove who you really are and which side of history you’ll have chosen to be on. Some things are worth taking enormous risks for, because the alternative is too awful. As Civil Rights activists throughout history have shown us, some things are even worth dying for.
At the Hands Off protest I attended in San Francisco, one sign said “Too many WTF’s for one sign.” And that’s how I feel. Too many WTF’s for one blog post. So I’ll just stop there.
