Hello Downriver,
Do you live in fear?
Sure you do; we all do.
And always have.
Anthropologists say we humans long ago developed a perfectly reasonable response to fear: “Fight or flight” they call it.
Yep, when something is chasing you — as a next meal — you have two choices.
Unfortunately, few of us have the option to flee the fear we face in today’s world; we can’t just pick up and move, leaving the challenges of our neighborhood, community, state or nation for “greener pastures” behind.
The rich do, but the rest of us are left with little choice but to stay and “fight.”
But we’re not supposed to do that alone; no, instead, we supposed to be able to rely on others to help us fight.
Sometimes it’s friends and relatives, sometimes it’s charities and churches, sometimes it’s through the kindness of strangers.
In our American society, however, we have set up a system of governance in which we elect people to provide the kind of assistance we often need.
It’s a goal you can find in the preamble of our Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to… provide for the common defense (and) promote the general welfare…”
It was Ronald Reagan, who infamously quipped that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
But tell that to people devastated by tornados and hurricanes and flooding and fire storms; they beg for federal aid.
You see, when a society is developed enough to have people in charge of governing that society, we rely on them to provide group security, shelter from the storm.
We’re not supposed to be left to our own devices to survive — early explorers, settlers and those looking for a thrill off-grid aside.
Good leaders excel at doing that; of taking care of the people they serve: They ensure the needs of the people are met and that the fears being faced are met with help (internal) or force (external), if necessary.
The fact is, contrary to Reagan’s misplaced humor, we rely on our elected officials to do whatever is humanly possible to mitigate our fears, to minimize their impact on our lives.
Not make them worse.
Which is why this has become a particularly troubling time: those in our government seemingly no longer work to make us safer — contrary to their pronouncements — but work instead to make us more fearful.
Consider these fear-mongering developments coming from the Trump administration:
• Trump wants to restart nuclear testing for the first time in nearly 30 years, and resurrect Reagan’s “Star Wars” pipe dream of a space-based missile defense system called the “Golden Dome.”
• We have a president haphazardly and dangerously seeking to prosecute his political enemies on a scale that would make Nixon blush.
• On top of the DOJ implosion of credibility, we now have the extrajudicial murders of unidentified people in international waters by the American military.
Trump being judge, jury and executioner is truly the act of a monarch, not an American president.
•We have a certifiable nutcase in charge of our healthcare system who has made sowing doubt about the benefits of vaccinations his perverted cause célèbre, making parents fearful of life-saving drugs that can save their children from getting polio or measles or diphtheria, tetanus or whooping cough or any number of other debilitating and even fatal diseases.
But this is how the Trump administration rides: create fear and then use those exacerbated fears to separate us, to reignite and reinforce the tribalism of our ancestors.
Take, if you will, the issue of immigration. At the federal level, an entire political party has invented from whole cloth a straw man immigrant who threatens our jobs, our communities, our way of life.
Of course, such a narrative — illustrated and enforced by illegal and unconstitutional abuse of police powers by the Trump administration — hides the real threats we face.
Immigrants aren’t taking anyone’s job; that’s being accomplished by robots, AI and corporate off-shoring, all of which have led to a decimation of our workforce.
It was Ford CEO Jim Farley who stated publicly this year that artificial intelligence could replace “literally half” of all white-collar jobs, which analysts say is only the tip of the iceberg.
Indeed, according to NBC News, “some of the largest companies in America have begun capping or reducing their head counts… (because of) the promise of productivity with artificial intelligence…”
At the other end of the spectrum, Trump’s irrational and haphazard deportation of more than 500,000 immigrants (so far) and the self-deportation of another 1.6 million has resulted in a crisis in agriculture: the lack of workers, resulting in food being left to rot in the fields.
So workers are getting squeezed at one end, and food prices continue to rise at the other because of the lack of workers.
This doesn’t even begin to count the impact of Trump’s indefensible tariffs on prices; up-and-down tariffs based his whims that have driven up the price of imported goods.
And all this while promising up to $40 billion to Argentina to prop up that country’s economy — while being unable to help Americans.
But Trump and his merry band of Trumplicans don’t care about you and your fears; they’re more interested in stoking them — and blaming everyone else for your troubles.
Like keeping up the drumbeat of “dangerous criminals” from other countries in our midst to frighten us — and pushing us to accept their fascist agenda of troops in our streets.
But the facts say different: According to the non-profit American Immigration Council, crime data from 1980 to 2022 showed that as the immigrant share of our population doubled, the crime rate involving that group halved.
Oh, and in 2024 study of Texas, “U.S.-born citizens had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types…”
But if we’ve learned one thing from Trump and his followers, they never let facts stand in the way of their sordid stories.
Like the misdirection when it comes to the government shutdown itself: Mike Johnson has the temerity to blame Democrats for the month-long closure — even though Trumplicans control the House, Senate and White House.
That means it’s on them that SNAP benefits have been suspended for 41.7 million people — about 12.3% of the population, of which 36% are children.
FYI: in Michigan, this affects 1.4 million of our friends, neighbors and relatives who rely on SNAP to buy groceries.
Oh, and this comes after the largest cut to SNAP in history in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act, passed by — yep, Trumplicans.
If you’re a parent who uses SNAP benefits to feed your kids, you know fear — a fear now exacerbated by politics of the worst kind.
And all of this is in addition to the equally horrifying impact the shutdown is having on health insurance costs for nearly 24 million people enrolled in plans through the ACA Marketplaces.
According to one report after another, these insured Americans have been notified that their premiums will increase by an AVERAGE of 114% without the subsidies that Trumplicans have refused to extend.
So, it’s true that the Democrats won’t go along with the Trumplicans on a “clean” funding bill — not when those subsidies are at stake.
And undergirding all of the fear we have — political and personal — is a sense of loss; that we’ve lost control of the world around us, and that the politics of a deranged president is making things worse.
Fear?
There’s enough fear in our daily lives: food prices and even food insecurity, job loss through AI, accelerating costs of higher education and the crippling debt that follows students for a lifetime.
The fear of keeping a home — or even being able to afford one in the first place, and the fear of being one paycheck away from the streets.
The fear that there won’t be anyone there to help when you most need it.
We used to be able to believe our government could provide that help; today’s politics has shattered that hope.
But the majority of us can’t flee; we have no choice but to stand and fight.
Together.
As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
It’s time for Trump and his Trumplicans to blow away.
To read this full essay, as well as many others — long and short — check out Substack.com and look for me at “Farrandipity.” It’s free. Craig Farrand can be reached at craig.substack@gmail.com.
