[ICYMI] There Will Be No Springtime In America

Donald's Desecration of Our Nation Makes Me Want To Clean House

The startling yellow burst of bloom shouting from my neighbor’s forsythia reminds us that seasons revolve, light replaces darkness, a natural order grounds us. The swarm of grackles return to the feeders, dazzling the eye with their iridescence. Another reminder there remains something steady, reliable, and predictable on this increasingly teetering planet.

Anything splendid and anchoring amid this moment in our American history stands in stark contrast to the upheaval we are experiencing. Every spring I marvel at the tiny purple crocuses that bravely push up first through the mud, followed by sexy daffodils making their annual debut like decked out debs, and itsy green buds populating the woodland plants. But this year, while Donald wages a pointless and dangerous war in Iran and his bumbling administration takes a battering ram to our Constitution, I cling desperately to anything that feels familiar and comforting and affirming.

Donald has been in office for 436 days, though his destructive forces have loomed over this country and the world for a decade. His second term has been a perpetual tsunami of targeted racism, ethnic cleansing, undermining the safety net, making us sicker, putting us at greater risk. With efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship and roundup brown and black people while depriving them of their due process rights and dumping them in concentration camps before deportation, he is dutifully adhering to Project 2025’s plan to restore America to some perceived Christian whiteness.

As for Donald, an addled and demented senior who wants the world to be littered with his likeness on buildings, money and venerable institutions before he draws his last breath, this is where his true focus is. Not on the deaths of American soldiers, the killing of Iranian school children, soaring gas prices and worldwide instability. No, Donald is whinging about a judge’s order this week to stop construction on the biggest ballroom in the world with Corinthian columns – you know, the best columns there are, as he so eloquently told the Fright House press pool when asked about the war.

Eight million people turned out to protest the regime last Saturday. Like nature’s cycles, “No Kings” is becoming a regularly scheduled migration to vent frustration, fear and fury. Like camels at an oasis, we gather for moral and philosophical sustenance. We are reminded that our relatively intact order for the past 250 years is being upended at an astonishing pace. We are not afraid to admit how frightened we are, while at the same time determined to maintain that which we’ve always relied upon.

We sing “We Shall Overcome” because we have in the past and we tell ourselves we will again.

Spring brings renewal. We clear out the dead leaves, shake off the winter chill, tilt our faces to the sun. I’ve used spring as a springboard to soothe the onslaught of threats due to Donald’s poor choices, including a wallop on healthcare costs (and worry about more), insurance rates, electricity, gas prices, the dreaded grocery prices, and more. This March we started an uber renewal project, clearing out the basement, tearing down a rotted garden enclosure, pruning cabinets, and tossing detritus. On one day, I was discarding things so manically that my husband sat me down and asked me if something was going on. I think he may have suspected I was feeling so filled with despair that I might off myself – or at least insist once and for all on relocating to a saner country. He gazed at me with a very concerned expression, so I knew he was being utterly sincere when he questioned what I was doing.

I had to stop for a moment and ask myself the same question. What was I reaching for? Was I preparing for some kind of ending? Or a beginning?

I’m not sure I have the answer. Practically speaking, I just didn’t think we’d ever play Monopoly again and I thought it might be okay to donate the boardgame elsewhere. And unloading boxes and boxes and boxes of old documents from our dank unfinished musty basement felt cleansing. But my taciturn husband rightly noticed that even after hours of work, with my hands chafed and my chest heavy with mildew, I couldn’t turn off the desire to keep on purging.

Living in the Donald era is the most out of control I’ve ever felt. And worse, there’s a knee-buckling sensation that there is no one to defend against his rape and pillage of the American people. Though his support is eroding, and his approval ratings are tanking in the 30 percentile he and his feckless loyalists appear to have no intention of slowing down the destruction. They don’t care if people are hungry or if environmental protection is destroyed or if the nation is substantially less safe because our intelligence resources have been syphoned off to Donald’s immigration Gestapo.

One of the most sobering thoughts folks of a certain age harbor is that there’s a chance we’ll never know the country we’ve always known because the one we’re living in now has been severely altered and damaged. We cling to some notion that the midterms will save us, while knowing Donald is throwing everything at using voter suppression to keep Republicans in power and himself out of prison. If, and when the election system breaks, we lose the very thing that has made America a reliable democracy. We will lose the cyclical assurance that we can get rid of dirty derelict politicians like Donald and his ilk.

There will not be a springtime in America.

This week we will celebrate Passover and Easter – two holidays that signify rebirth and renewal. At our Passover table, we’ll recount the release from bondage, while being fully aware that we are living through a nightmare where we are at the mercy of a deranged autocrat who instigated hellfire in the cradle of where Jews, Christians and Arabs try to co-exist. For many, a reliance on faith or God may be the salve that pulls them through this caliginous moment. Others may choose to fight, to take to the frontlines to protect what we cherish. And some of us might just clean house because it restores a sense of purity and order.