I’ll be damned if Trump or Epstein or Chavez are going to steal my hope in the goodness of humanity — Anne Lamott

[Anne Lamott] We sing a hymn in church whose refrain ends, “and all around is sinking sand,” and I have felt this since, oh, approximately November 2024. Everyone I know felt this, the existential instability, the sinking of our hearts. We did what we do — tried to take care of each other and not give up on the power of the people and the structures that protect our democracy. Ten minutes after [Donald Trump’s]  Inauguration, he canceled USAID,  guaranteeing starvation and death by disease for millions of people around the world, and from then on we heard the descending tone of being ruled by this stupid, evil, traitorous man.

      I mean that in a warm, friendly way.

      The good news was that “we the people,” the courts, the flickers of an opposition, and us noticing at some point that we were still standing. The sand was wet and mucky beneath our feet, as the water pulled away, but we didn’t go way down into it. There is a certain sloppy firmness to wet sand. (All truth is paradoxical.)

     It invited us to take a walk. It didn’t say, “Yikes! Don’t step here, you’ll sink,” which I appreciate in a beach.

    We could raise our arms to many victories in the courts and a North Star rose in the skies above Minneapolis, where neighbors protected each other, but there was a lazy Susan feeling to most weeks. Evil decisions, small victories, incompetence and added suffering to the poor and middle class, the dark-skinned and foreign, and then massive No Kings rallies that kept us going for days,

    In recovery, we say the whole system works because we’re not all nuts on the same day. I was regularly plenty scared, depressed, and furious watching Trump blow up the world, but I had helpful tools in my battered old tool box — knowing to care for others, and staying informed, but also immersing myself in people’s great courage, and the beautiful outdoors, donating, and picking up litter. Yes,  some days were just too long, but I could and can excitedly look forward to the next No Kings rally on March 28, 2026.

     Some days my inside person has looked like the wide-eyed kitten hanging by its claws in the famous poster in the early 70’s. But we were all hanging on, together.

     Then Wednesday I woke to the news that Cesar Chavez had been raping little girls all along.

          As my atheist father would say upon hearing about the evil that men do, whether Ohio State, Nixon, or Jonestown, “Dear God.”

      I imagine him now, looking up from the paper with his Benjamin Franklin readers perched at the end of his nose, silent for a moment, and then, with a slight shake of his great patrician head, “Dear God.”

    He and my mom would have been crushed, as am I. A part of our lives has died.  We marched to support him and the farm workers. We boycotted grapes. He was one of the men who helped turn me into the woman I became.

   There is nothing in my brain pan that can accommodate Chavez raping little girls and Dolores Huerta. Yesterday I was sad to the point of speechlessness. Today I am furious.

    Wednesday I could find no solid place to stand. The sand beneath my feet sifted and shifted for hours until I could talk to my precious few about. My bare feet found sharp pebbbles and bones mixed in underfoot. He did great work in the world; and he was a bad man, like Trump and Epstein.

      Look at the history of the world — young girls have always been the prize. I’m so glad for the three woman who came forth with the truth, who do not need to carry to the grave the secret of the evil that was done to them.

      What is the proper response at a time like this? Great sorrow and devastation. Rage. And we do what we sang at all Civil Rights marches — You’ve got to keep on walking, keep on talking.

     That’s the plan: We talk about this with each other. We celebrate and donate to the movement, the United Farm Workers Union. We love everyone like our lives depended on it, because they do. We do sweet things for neighbors. We breathe and pay attention to all that remains around us that encourages us to keep on going. I’ll be damned if Trump or Epstein or Chavez are going to steal my hope in the goodness of humanity, of we the people. We keep on walking, keep on talking, and show up at No Kings on March 28 with “Jail the Pedos” signs.

    We wave to each other. We take in the wonders all around — big wet rocks that look like animals — a baby hippo right here, seals, and some kind of snouty-looking thing up ahead. Things are about as primal as life gets, both the violent instincts and stupidity of these men, and the beauty all around us, the courage of every day people.

     The moist sloppy sand is not as shaky as it looks, although they want you to think so and give up. It will hold us.

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