The Worst Thing About All This

Saturday morning at eleven, as has been the case every Saturday for the last couple of months, we stood on the four corners at the main crossroads in the little village of Salem, New York. We held aloft our handmade signs, cheering each other on, and cheering the cars that went by giving us a friendly horn-toot or wave, and whooping when the occasional Trumper roared by giving us the finger. Stop the Coup! Hands Off Canada and Greenland! We Did Not Elect Musk! Save Our Democracy! Stop the Extortion of Ukraine!

     It was a cold morning, and the falling rain was freezing on the lampposts if not our foreheads. Still, in spite of that, there were easily one hundred of us, mostly old people. Despite the adverse weather, despite the grim news of the week and every week since January 20th, we were of good cheer, and we were not without hope. None of us are fools; we know that such vigils do not, by themselves, change things. But they matter, and we affirm to each other that we are not alone.

     The worst thing about all this – about this administration and its actions – is the cruelty and hatred that it represents. Love, Not Hatred, Makes America Great! read a sign waved by a gray-haired woman on the corner opposite me. Amen. But I’d say that while it could make America great, it is certainly not doing so now: the contempt for other people, the dismissal of minorities, the erasure of those who do not fit the supremacist gender scripts, the rounding up and imprisonment of dissenting foreign students, the precipitous cessation of aid to those around the world who are starving, the abrupt dismissal, by a psychopathic billionaire, of dedicated public servants in valued agencies…well, it is too much. Too ugly. Unspeakable, really.

     I have been planning to attend a Hands Off! demonstration in the State Capital, Albany, next weekend. I was all set, then I realized I had a problem: the site of the protest is in a bathroom desert. At seventy-eight, it has become an issue. I don’t recall having this problem when I participated in the anti-war demonstration at Queen’s Park in Toronto, in the summer of 1968. Let’s see…I would have been twenty-one. No, I didn’t think about bathrooms. Anyway, at that age, I just would have gone in a bush somewhere.

     Years later, I went on a couple of different days to the G20 demonstrations in Toronto in 2010 – more as an observer than anything. I really didn’t have much of an opinion. I was just a young snapper of sixty-three and I don’t remember thinking about bathrooms then either. To be sure, there were some bad actors there destroying property – Black Bloc members etc. – but I did not see them – only later on television, when they showed the same burning police car over and over. I did observe some Neo-Nazi thugs attack peaceful demonstrators. I saw squads of black-uniformed, helmeted police boxing-in law-abiding protesters – “kettling” they called it – and moving them to a containment area, which, by the way, contravened free assembly traditions in the Canadian democracy. I saw an officers without visible identification push people around, pushing some to the ground. Forty-five or so of the officers involved in kettling were later charged, thankfully, but many could not be identified. O Canada. Pete Hesgeth, of course, the former Fox talking head, now the unqualified leader of the U.S. military, has spoken in favour of using that same military against protesters.

     The worst thing about all this is the ease with which this administration is evading, or merely stepping over civil rights and simple standards of lawfulness and decency: rounding up students on the street and shipping them out of state to isolated detention, disregarding judges’ orders, the Mafioso-style shaking-down of law firms in flagrant acts of vengeance, and issuing presidential orders that are blatantly illegal, that is, that should require acts of Congress. Perhaps the worst thing about that is how the Republicans have become toadies and co-conspirators in the systematic dismantling of the American democracy.

     Back when, I remember thinking Ronald Reagan was a shifty character, and a dope: especially following the great, but poorly-understood statesman, Jimmy Carter. I felt I could come to the U.S. because Jimmy was president; it was a shock when the country turned on him and elected the bad actor. It was downright rude and stupid, and paved the way for Trump a few decades later. “Government is the problem” Ronnie Ray-Gun said. Ronnie gave us the gift that keeps on giving, with his trickle-down economics: mass homelessness. I might have left then, but my partner, whom I was mistakenly trying to please, wanted to stay. So it goes. We probably should have gotten divorced before we did. But don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the opportunities the U.S. has provided me, and for the beautiful friends I have had. And if I had never come here, I would never have met my own heart’s delight.(1)  Good things sometimes come from bad things.

     The worst thing about all this is the epic loss of momentum in the battle to save our natural world and to mitigate climate change. Bad timing. We surely were already losing this battle and in our selfishness, not doing anything close to what we needed to do to stop habitat degradation and global warming. But at least under Biden, the intention and effort were there. Good steps were taken, which Trump and his brotherhood are undoing. It’s a disaster. In fact, under the opportunist Zeldin, all the good work of the EPA is being systematically undone. The Chinese can only be doing the Watusi in glee as Trump works to take America backwards into a twentieth century oil economy, when any damn fool knows the future is in renewable energy.

     The worst thing about this is not that I will suffer; I won’t – I’m too old. In fact, for an oldster, warmer winters and longer summers can be welcome. Those who will suffer will be all the creatures born of our beautiful paradise – the ones that are still here, at least: the spring peepers in the ponds on either side of us, the big honking geese flying above us, the chubby possum who ambles to the compost pile on a Sunday morning, the fox who darts across the dirt road, the little water snake poking its head up in the stream by the bridge, and of course, the sweet black cows that I love, down the hill. And our grandchildren. They will pay the price for our hubris.

     Even though earlier on in life, I could express a hipster’s (or perhaps hippie’s) skepticism and disdain for progress, I have realized in recent months, that I believed in it. Not material progress: though that is fair enough in some ways – I’d rather not be a filthy, disease-ridden, starving labourer in an 1840’s London tenement (2) – although at present, it is clear that our excessive materialism is killing us. Rather, I discovered that I had an underlying and earnest belief in social, humanitarian, and even spiritual progress. I believed that “the arc…bends toward justice.” (3) That is, that despite setbacks, regressive reactions, and blow-back to change, movement would go forward, to greater justice, fairness, understanding, tolerance, compassion, and even peace. Two steps forward, one step back and so on, if you will. This election was a shock, and now I am not sure that my underlying belief is correct at all.

     The worst thing in all of this is the turning away – indeed, the suppression – of knowledge, of understanding, of reason and science, and of hard-won wisdom. It is appalling to watch: the suppression of free speech and research, and extortion of venerable institutions of higher learning such as Columbia. Of course, it was the attack-dog, the nefarious Elise Stefanik, our very-own representative here in Washington County, who got that ball rolling under the phony guise of fighting antisemitism. It is appalling to see the take-down of outstanding institutions of science, public information, and policy advisors like the National Institute of Health, Center for Disease Control, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Soon, Americans will be ingesting beef tallow to prevent measles, and phoning the Bahamas to find out if a hurricane is coming – that is, if the telephones still work then.

     The worst thing is that which underlies these actions: the ignorance, the turning away from reason, the deliberate shunning of knowledge in creating understanding. Blanket, random, round-number tariffs inflicted on long-term allies in a globally integrated economy? Indeed, brilliant. Expecting the people of Greenland to embrace the purchase of their country? My, my, that is stupid. Anticipating that Ukraine would be grateful for a peace brokered, Mafia-style, that requires them to give up stolen territory to one tyrant and to hand over minerals to another in exchange for dodgy security non-guarantees? Fer sure. And that Vance – for a guy who went to a prestigious university and wrote an actual book, he sure seems dumb and creepy, doesn’t he? Especially in that cute little parka outfit worn while speaking to troops at the Pittufik “Space” Base (really, that is the name? Not a joke?) in Greenland. 

     Well, so here I am, an old guy with some bladder issues, living in the country, in love with the world if not humanity, worried for his grandchildren and for the defenceless, the wretched of the earth, (4) watching the larger-than-life aspiring democracy of the U.S. tilt toward fascism. I count myself fortunate to have lived for a time, at least, in two of the great – if imperfect – democracies in the world. The worst thing, at this age, is that I will never trust this country again.(5) I am not alone in that of course: neither will Canadians, Europeans, Mexicans, Panamanians, Ukrainians, Greenlanders…well, hardly anybody. And I wish I were twenty-one once more – not to go through it all again, the thought of that is exhausting. But rather: I’d like to be able to go “down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse,”(6) to be able to take whatever comes standing up, and to take a piss in the bush if I need to, and not worry about it.

     And to Mr. Trump? I say: you are the worst. I say: no thanks, you keep it.

     I’m seventy-eight, but I say: Hell, No, We Won’t Go!
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1. …to borrow a phrase from the great Ian Tyson. Tyson, Ian. “Own Heart’s Delight.” Cowboyography, Slick Fork Music/CAPAC, 1987. 

2. Engels, Frederick. The Conditions of the Working Class in 1844. Translated by Florence Kelly Wischnewetzley, Information Age Publishing, 2010. 

3. Smith, Mychal Denzel. “The Truth About ‘The Arc Of The Moral Universe.’” Huffington Post, Jan. 2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-smith-obama-king_n_5a5903 e0e4b04f3c55a252a4. Accessed 30 Mar. 2025.

4. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Penguin, 2001.

5. For the record, Americans continue to support Trump despite the destruction and the chaos. As of April 3, approval vs. disapproval is about 50-50 on average (with a small percentage expressing neither). Igielnik, Ruth. “Latest Polls: Do Americans Approve of President Trump?” The New York Times, 3 Apr. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-approval- rating-polls.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2025. 

6. Jagger, Mick, and Keith Richards. You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Decca, 1968.