April 11 Friday roundup

This week’s episode of “Next Comes What” frames the Trump administration as a death cult whose only proficiency is destruction. I also take a look at the Hands Off protests around the country on April 5, and talk about events in DC at the Washington Monument that day. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Anyone who’s kept up with my work for a while or who follows me on social media (come on over to Bluesky, everyone!) is likely to already know that I had a difficult childhood—poor, isolated, violent, and delusional.

Once, when I was riding in a car at the age of twelve, my stepfather pointed out a girl on the street. She was riding a ten-speed bike around town. With a dark braid hanging almost to her waist, she seemed to me like she must be in college.

“That’s what you’re going to look like in a few years,” my stepfather said.

I was shocked. We’d lost everything that year. Our lives were freakish; I no longer felt fully human. I had no friends, no clothes beyond the ones I was wearing. The girl looked so normal as we passed her. We had nothing in common, I was sure. My mind went blank. To imagine myself in her shoes was literally beyond me.

In the years since, I’ve often wished I could go back to my young self at that moment and let her know that there was some future in store for her, that there was a steady life out there where it would be possible at times to just pedal and make progress in a straight line, that the girl on the bike didn’t belong to another species altogether, that whole decades lay ahead of that twelve-year-old in which no one would be allowed to harm her, in which no single person would have the power to wreck her life.

Today, I feel like I’m back in a similar spot, but now the whole country is subject to the whims of a cruel, vindictive person in power. It can be a terrible, helpless feeling when someone in charge deliberately inflicts harm on you or those around you.

But this time, I feel like the girl on the bike. It’s not that I’m invulnerable to what’s happening—no one in the country, perhaps in the world, is entirely safe right now with Trump and his allies in charge. Few of us are going to escape without damage. It’s more that I know how this goes, because I’ve lived through it.

If you haven’t been the target of deliberate harm before, you might be feeling isolated or even terrified. I just want to take a minute to say that we can bring this era to an end. We can take care of one another and build a different life than the conditions being inflicted on us right now. It’s not only possible, it’s very likely to happen. The main question is how long it will take and how much gets broken in the meantime.

For those of you having deja vu, I know how awful it is to be forced back into scenarios you thought you’d escaped. But remember, we figured this out once before. We’re veterans in this fight.

This post is dreadfully earnest, and I’m uncomfortable with that, because snark is my natural state. But none of us are alone if we stand up for each other.

People existed under Jim Crow within living memory. They demanded something different, and got it. That is a far greater task than the one before us now.

Spring is here, and there are girls on bicycles everywhere. However you want to make your forward progress, come out and join in. I’ve read all these stories, and in the end, every tyrant dies.