Recent news coverage has focused on the chaotic decisions of the Trump Administration. Tariffs imposed on Mexico and Canada, then paused for four weeks, then threatened again a day later. Federal workers fired in droves, given hours to clean out their desks, then asked in some cases to come back. Comedic portrayals of Elon Musk, wild-eyed, wielding a chain saw in preparation for obliterating yet another federal agency.

      Beneath the surface of this helter-skelter story line, however, lies a far darker, sustained and relentless rush by Donald Trump to exact revenge, purge opponents, silence critics, and impose authoritarian controls. He’s replaced multiple levels of the FBI hierarchy, the military and the Justice Department; deserted allies; threatened the news media; stripped $400 million in funding from a single university; silenced his own party, and divided Democrats.

      Nothing, however, is more sinister than the administration’s systematic and spreading efforts to whitewash words and phrases off websites, documents and other federal communication. . . .

This piece first appeared on Jerry Lanson’s Substack: “From the Grass Roots.”

Melvis Acosta, although he is not a member of Our Generation, played a crucial role in helping us set up this website. We are proud to post a video here Acosta wrote and reported for Mother Jones—on President Trump’s executive order that, the President says, makes English the official language of the United States. You’ll find Acosta’s story here.

Acosta writes: “In the executive order, Trump called the action a way to “promote unity” and “cultivate a shared American culture,” but critics disagree.  “The Congressional Hispanic Caucus responded to the executive order on X, formerly Twitter, by saying that the country “has never had an official language” and that the order was an “attack on our diversity”—and also that the tens of millions of Americans who speak other languages aren’t “any less American” for it.

“67.8 million Americans, to be exact. . . .

Acosta’s story on Trump’s order is, of course, in Spanish (with English subtitles).

Click here for Melvis Acosta’s video—in Spanish, with English subtitles.  

      On March 13, 2020, five years ago, the U.S. government declared a nationwide emergency because of a new viral disease starting to spread across the country. The virus was called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2. The disease was called COVID-19, the number for the year in which it was discovered.

      Most of us just called it Covid, and it has changed our lives like perhaps nothing else in our memory.

      It is up there with what had been perhaps the defining moment for our generation, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is there with the attacks of 9/11. It is, like them, a before-and-after moment, an axis, where almost nothing was as it previously had been.  

      Covid altered the world, transformed our country and particularly changed our generation. According to the most recent statistics, nearly 25 percent of those who died in this country from Covid—a quarter of a million individuals—were from our generation. . . .

. . . . Twenty years ago, I worked in arts administration and philanthropy in San Francisco while creating disability-inflected videos and essays. I married my husband and rekindled a childhood love of Shetland ponies. With equine in tow, we moved to Vermont in 2010.

      Seven years ago, I retired from running the Flynn Center in Burlington and served two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. Writing and media projects continue, along with exercise and daily chores at the barn. I am steeped in the realities of aging.

      In each of these decades, optimism raged during boom times as well as despair in downturns. While political, demographic and environmental forecasts appear dystopian, I am buoyed by the grass-roots resistance and resiliency experienced in my lifetime.

The political scientist Brian Klaas wrote an essay considering what it might mean for Donald Trump to turn the United States into an authoritarian country more than a year ago. We believe this excerpt provides a useful framework for our fears. We encourage you to read the full piece and consider subscribing to Prof. Klaas’ Substack.

     ….What many people picture when they imagine a dictatorship—tanks on every corner, the total abolition of elections, and systematic mass killing—is less likely in the United States in the short-term precisely because America already has a comparatively robust democratic system, which is not usually the case when democracy dies. So, what [might Trump do]?

     To understand the risks of modern authoritarianism, you must first understand modern democracy. Many people wrongly think of democracy as a binary—a country is either democratic or it’s not—instead of as a system of governance that exists along a spectrum. . . .

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

       We’ve already covered the 1940s and the 1950s and continue today with the 1960s. These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

      Let the arguments continue. . . .

1960s:

“Nothing But A Man” (1964) . . .

      Might I suggest that we briefly interrupt our horror at what the Trump-Musk gang are doing to our country to focus on one undeniably good thing that has happened over the course of our lifetimes.

       Life has continued to grow safer.

       Yes, you can still be hit by a car or fall victim to a pandemic.

       And the bellicose, neo-fascist alliance-smashers now at the helm of the ship of state—and their anti-science cronies—may very well succeed in reversing some of the progress I am about to recount.

      But that progress has been real.

      I have made use of GPT-4o to locate most of the statistics that demonstrate that. . . .

This piece first appeared on Jerry Lanson’s Substack: “From the Grass Roots.” We invite you to share this with Republican friends and family.

I’m a Democrat, and a liberal to boot.  But I bet we can agree on some things: That our country needs a stable economy. That it needs decent medical care and coverage.  That we need to treat our veterans with respect. And that we need at least enough of a government to keep us safe, warn us of approaching storms, and help care for our kids and aging parents.

There’s mounting evidence the Trump Administration is breaking down safeguards in all these areas – and fast. So I’m writing to ask for help in convincing your GOP representatives to tap the brakes even as they (and you) press forward with the perceived need to shake things up.

Let me ask some questions to make my point:

 1)    Do you believe tariffs are going to lower prices?

The Trump Administration this week imposed and then lifted 25 percent tariffs on most products arriving from our two strongest trading partners –Mexico and Canada. At least for four weeks.  These chaotic actions have caused a stock market rollercoaster ride that’s mostly pointed sharply downhill. . . .

      Where are the demonstrations, the protests, the angry outbursts, the furious gatherings, the outraged marches? Where are the acts of civil disobedience?

      Didn’t the disgraceful performance at the Oval Office the other day finally make something click? Didn’t the bizarre 90-minute speech to Congress, full of lies and craziness, do it? Haven’t we finally realized that our democracy is being stolen, our privacy is being ransacked, our national reputation is being ravaged, our judges are being intimidated, our American soul is being sold and … pretty much nothing?

      Well, some of our reps dressed in pink for the speech, and when one of them was escorted out of the chamber they angrily … held up paddles. And some of us decided the other day that to express our outrage, we wouldn’t shop at WalMart or Amazon. That’ll show ‘em!

      Look, I didn’t buy anything during the economic boycott. My only economic activity was I ate lunch with a friend at a locally owned place and paid in cash, my (very) little thumbing of my nose at the rapacious corporate oligarchy that had eliminated DEI practices. . . .

      My late mother, the former Carmela Casullo, whose family came from a dirt-poor southern Italian town in Puglia, instilled in me her sense of fairness with one word: honorable.

      “That wouldn’t be honorable,” she’d say. Or: “You have to do what’s honorable.”

      Even though I only was in grammar school, I knew that the word came fraught with more meaning than mere “right” or “wrong.”

      In Italian, it’s ‘Onorevole’ (‘Own-oh-RAY-vo-lay’), one of the highest compliments, meaning among other things: just, principled, respectable.

      Funny how her simple code for living has stayed with me for more than seven decades.

      Funny, too, how I thought of it again after our supposed president shamelessly, traitorously—and, of course, dishonorably—stabbed the president of Ukraine in the back . . . .

      When Donald Trump first took office, in 2016, I felt depressed and defeated. On that inauguration day, I began posting a series of opinion-driven quatrains on Facebook.

      On day 2, still unable to climb out of my funk, I wrote another, and then another, and another, eventually writing 365 doggerels for every day of Trump's first year in office (plus one for the anniversary). I published all of them eventually in a book, “Humpty Trumpty Hit A Brick Wall: Donald J. Trump's First White House Year in Verse.”

      Now, once again with Trump back in the White House, I'm writing a daily poem—call it doggerel, as that's what these are—on the new D. C. administration.  I didn't think I'd do the same this dreary time around but decided, okay, I'll write just one in (dis)honor of the first day.  

      I did so and then couldn't stop. . . .

Click here for the doggerels

      So read the headline in The Bulwark after the Trump administration eviscerated the US Agency for International Development. 

      Other massive cuts are on the horizon: Threats to eliminate two-thirds of EPA staffing, half of Social Security staffing, perhaps the entire Department of Education. Taken as a whole, it’s all starting to look like a bloodless coup, driven by one man who lied his way back into the White House and another elected by absolutely no one. Non-violent or not, the assault on our democracy is real, brutal and spreading rapidly.

      The crippling of USAID topped the cruelty index. The Supreme Court helped the administration carve out 2,000 more jobs late at night on a glide path that The New York Times reported ultimately will leave the agency with 290 jobs of an original 10,000. The administration froze 10,000 USAID and state department contracts and grants in their tracks, ranging from funds for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to funds for urban rescue teams who rush to countries struck by devastating earthquakes.

      The numbers are big. But big numbers too often leave us with a shrug and a sigh, before we move on to something else. Data doesn’t punch us in the gut.  For that we need stories and powerful images that move us. . . .

(This is a story from Jerry Lanson’s Substack blog: “From the Grass Roots.” It’s free and has a single goal: To share stories from across the country about those who’ve been hurt by, or are pushing back against, the chaotic and often cruel policies of this administration. We encourage you to subscribe.)

         Long-time arts editor, film critic and historian Bruce Dancis gives us his highly informed takes, decade by decade, on those films that have had the most impact.

      Here is the second in the series.

—The editors

By Bruce Dancis

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

      We began this series with the ‘40s, and continue now with the 1950s. . . .

      I have been trying to come up with an example in the history of the United States of a new president changing U.S. foreign policy as dramatically and significantly as President Trump seems to be doing on the Ukraine War.

      I have not found such an example.

•       Thomas Jefferson was less worried about the French and was more conciliatory toward them than his predecessor as president, John Adams. However, after Great Britain and France began interfering with American shipping, Jefferson’s Embargo Act restricted trade with both countries. No huge switch there.

•       The election of an abolitionist as president of the United States in 1860 had larger consequences than any other election in American history. But Abraham Lincoln did not bring a change in foreign policy, beyond a concern with making sure other nations did not recognize the Confederacy.

•       Jumping ahead a century, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon promised that, if he was elected in 1968, he would end direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. . . .

Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, has been among this country’s most eloquent and thoughtful defenders of human rights in recent decades. We found his concise response on video to the obscene performance in the Oval Office yesterday by the current president and his acolytes to be particularly important. It is taken from Prof. Snyder’s substack, to which you might consider subscribing. He encouraged people to share the video.

Click here to see Prof. Snyder’s video

      Many people I know—maybe most?—assume I did. They assume a nice middle class, well-read, generally articulate, reasonably knowledgeable professional writer (that’s me, I think) who has worked for major publications and published a dozen or so books surely graduated from college.

      But I never did, and nearing my 79^th birthday, I’m wondering if I should be regretting that.  

      I mean, I could have graduated from college. I was probably smart enough. I just … well, never showed up for many classes. Back in my day, you really had to actually be there to pass the course. None of today’s remote learning stuff.

      But instead of physically going to classes, I went to the college newspaper office. That became my education, my training ground, my obsession. I spent pretty much all my undergraduate time there, writing and editing and bullshitting and making friends for life. . . .

      The children who were pioneers in the attempt to desegregate public education and exercise their right to attend school, to realize the promise of Brown v Board of Education, were met with persistent, violent white resistance in all regions of the United States.

      This happened in our lifetime. Two centuries into the establishment of the republic, one century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment to the Constitution, six years after Brown, Black students in the latter half of the 20th century were subjected to collective disadvantage as schools and communities across America pretended to comply with the orders of courts at all levels of the judiciary.

      But at the personal level, young people of color entered environments that were overtly and dangerously hostile. These courageous pioneers attempted to learn in schools that made little or no effort to welcome them and support them in becoming educated.

      Here are some of their stories . . .

      Within 30 or so minutes of completing my first cataract operation last week, my wife Judy and I were enjoying a nice lunch—albeit sans alcohol, per post-op instructions.
      All went perfectly, said my doc, and I now am eager to get the second one done and out of the way in May (my in-demand surgeon’s next available time.) 

      It is, by far the most common surgery performed in the U.S. and most of the world—three million procedures done in the U.S. each year, out of 20 million worldwide. It is particularly common for our age group—because in the U.S., nearly 1 in 5 people age 65 to 74 have cataracts that affect their vision. By the time they’re 80 or above, more than 50 percent of Americans either have cataracts or had surgery to remove them. …

Here’s some of what we have seen recently that might be of particular interest to our generation. (Apologies for any pay walls.) Send us what you have seen at WritingAboutOurGeneration@gmail.com.

• Early Warning Signs You’re Becoming ‘Frail’—and How to Prevent It as You Age, Kathleen Felton, Self, Jan. 17, 2025.

• Apparently, Boomers Don’t Care Much About the Environmental Footprint of Travel, Scott Laird, Fodor’s Travel, Feb. 6, 2025.

• Maggie Smith’s Face Has Something to Teach Us, Rhonda Garelick, New York Times, Oct. 7, 2024

• Why So Many People Are Unhappy in Retirement, Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, May 7, 2020.

• Sorry, No Secret to Life Is Going to Make You Live to 110, Saul Newman, New York Times, Jan. 20, 2025.

• Lancet Commission identifies two new risk factors for dementia and suggests 45% of cases could be delayed or reduced, Alzheimer’s Disease International, Aug. 1, 2024.

Click for more

We seem to keep losing every battle. We have to keep believing we can still win the war.

      Yeah, things are bad and they do seem to be getting worse. Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, the Gaza travesty, the trashing of the Kennedy Center, the Ukraine sellout, the deportations, the indiscriminate firings, the cuts at the CDC and the NIH and on and on.

      One after another, we fought for rationality, legality and common sense and we’ve been defeated. And yet, the war isn’t over. The battle goes on. It must. …