Unambiguous Message
Six and a half years ago, in the summer of 2018, news reports were full of stories and images of small children in cages, crying, terrified, disoriented and traumatized, having been forcibly separated from their parents at the Mexico-USA border.
Who knows why, but that June, then (and future) first lady Melania Trump decided to make a publicized visit to one of the migrant children detention centers in Texas, and as she boarded her plane she conspicuously wore a long green jacket with a message on the back in very large letters, trumpeting (pun intentional): “I really don’t care. Do u?”
The mainstream news media responded with indignation and confusion. Melania’s press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, dismissed the uproar, insisting “it was just a jacket” and that it “contained no hidden message.” The president contradicted this a bit later, stating that the jacket was actually a message to the “fake news media.” (Kind of a “screw you,” as it were.) His wife later confirmed this “interpretation” (so to speak) in an interview with ABC news, during which she claimed: “It’s obvious I didn’t wear the jacket for the children. I wore the jacket to go on the plane and off the plane. It was for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me. I want to show them I don’t care. You could criticize whatever you want to say. But it will not stop me to do what I feel is right.”
Wow. Did anyone in their right mind take this gaslighting seriously?
Stephanie Grisham was correct when she stated that there was “no hidden message.” The message was in plain sight. Clear and direct. A message to all Americans. Hello??
Melania was just being honest about her feelings. Can we be honest about ours? Who amongst us really cares? That was the question. Let’s not kid ourselves.
And I believe it was a rhetorical question. The insinuated answer was: “You don’t really care either. Admit it.”
Part of the genius of Trumpworld is that they dare to speak (or at least suggest) the unspeakable. What if none of us really cares about anyone other than ourselves (and perhaps our immediate families)?
Did the then first lady represent the soul of America?
How about now?
The First to Be Hurt
There’s been a lot of titillating speculation on TV that Trump is going to go after people like Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff and Jack Smith, who dared to stand up to him and tried to prosecute him. But I’m not overly worried about those individuals. They are rich and famous and millions of people (including me!) care about what happens to them, and will be watching out for them, ready to mobilize if they are truly threatened.
I have been worried about the millions of immigrants in this country. Not just the undocumented ones, but even “legal” ones like the Haitians in Springfield, OH, whom Trump and Vance inaccurately, obscenely accused of eating people’s dogs and cats.
Trump is a bully. Bullies pick on the weakest and most helpless people first. So I figure the people with the fewest resources will be the ones who suffer soonest under Trump II. I was thinking it would be immigrants, anonymous to me.
But I guess I was wrong. As you have probably heard, Elon Musk, spreading lies and distortions through his X/Twitter feed, managed to torpedo a bipartisan Congressional agreement for a continuing resolution to fund the federal government through mid-March. Instead, he and Trump insisted on a different appropriations bill, which (thankfully) failed. (Long story, but it was a miserable bill.) In the end, Congress kept the government functioning by passing a third “compromise” bill at the last moment.
The media has been all atwitter (pun unintended this time) about “who won” this little fiasco. Was it Musk, who showed how powerful he is to impact the workings of government, though he himself hasn’t been elected to anything? Was it Trump, simply demonstrating that he can upend normal Congressional protocol, even before he becomes president?
Or did the sequence of events actually reveal Trump’s vulnerability, both because he did not completely get his way (even 38 members of the House GOP bucked him), and because Musk, not Trump, was out in front on this assault on bipartisanship? Who lost? Who won? Who gained politically? And what does this signify for future relations between Trump and Congress? How powerful will Trump be? Will he and Musk continue to get along, or did Musk step on his toes by grabbing the spotlight?
Those were the questions fueling last week’s clickbait. But there’s an entirely different dimension to the story of course, and a rather significant one at that: What ultimately got stripped out of the original bipartisan agreement? And whom did THAT affect?
I looked it up. (Not hard to do.) Among other things, the “compromise” bill no longer includes $12.5 million a year for pediatric cancer research, and it also terminates a federal program that was put in place a couple of years ago to help protect people whose food stamp benefits get ripped off.
Per CNN:
The bipartisan bill [the one nuked by Musk] would have continued protections for low-income Americans who had their food stamp benefits stolen, often through skimming devices that get recipients’ Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card information.
Congress allowed states to replace the stolen benefits on a limited basis using federal funds, as part of a government funding bill two years ago. So far, states have replaced more than $150 million in benefits stolen from more than 300,000 low-income SNAP households across the country…”
So the real losers in this little made-for-TV political pissing contest include parents of kids with cancer (and their kids too of course) and hundreds of thousands of people who rely on food stamps. That angle of the story has received zero coverage at far as I can see. The real losers remain nameless and faceless.
The Choice to Care
Okay. I’ll admit it doesn’t get me all worked up, the way I get upset when I contemplate the government, say, doing away with Social Security, which would impact me directly, dramatically.
But I do care. Call me self-interested – you’re right – but that does not mean I don’t care.
(And fuck you, Melania Trump. YES, it matters to me that people will lose their food stamps to your dipshit husband’s ego. You asshole.)
(Does that sound hostile, dear reader?
And maybe I’m being hypocritical, since I wrote in a recent newsletter that I’m renouncing vengeful words, along with actions.
Still, here is how I see it: There’s a line in an old Nick Drake song that goes “For the sound of a busy place is fine for a pretty face who knows what a face is for.” That’s Melania. She knew what her face was for, and she used it to marry big money. That was her life mission. That was her doing what she “feel is right.”
Melania Trump is a soulless accomplice to ruthlessness.)
But okay, now that I’ve ranted about Melania Trump … what does it even mean to care? What exactly am I going to do about these things, besides simply mentioning them, and thinking about them?
Thinking and mentioning are a start at least. And maybe I’ll give a bit more $$ to the Oregon Food Bank, to help hungry people.
I’m open to hearing and learning about other ways to show caring too. Perhaps there are more effective actions to take that I’m overlooking. Write to me. Let us know. We would like to include Ways to Care in our newsletter.
In days to come, I believe we’d better start caring for each other as best we can, and include people in our circles of care whom the mass media makes it difficult for us to even see.
Caring for Yourself
Thank you for reading. This is our last newsletter of the year. Hoping that this holiday week and the new year treat you well. And that you have people in your life who care about you.
And most of all, that you treat yourself with love and forgiveness, always, no matter what.
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