DT Has One Great Ability, to Manipulate and Destroy: If He Had Set Out to Purposely Hurt Our Nation, His Actions Couldn’t Be More Destructive

In 1919, at the closing edge of the first world war, and when the waves of the flu pandemic were beginning to spread and kill millions, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the land…” A time of political, social, and moral breakdown seemed at hand. The old values, old ways of thinking, were dying.

 

And today, we’re clearly facing our own time of pandemics, political, social, and moral breakdown, of old ways, maybe once reliable ways of understanding the world being ripped from us, plunging us into depths of unknowing.

 

Judd Legum wrote an article called “Making Measles Great Again.” In it he described how DT and his health secretary, Robert Kennedy, Jr, instead of making our nation great are making the measles threat great. They’re making us greatly more vulnerable to future pandemics.

 

Measles is extremely contagious. About 92% of unvaccinated people exposed to it get infected. But by the year 2000, the WHO declared the disease eradicated in the US, due to an extensive vaccination program. In 2000, there were 86 cases reported in the US. Halfway through 2025, there were already 1274 cases, 155 hospitalizations, and 3 deaths, marking the first time in a decade with a death from the illness.

 

And the cause? Increasing distrust of science itself, of reliable information. People like RFK, Jr. spreading misinformation. Despite the fact that almost all the spread of the illness is amongst the unvaccinated, RFK claimed that the vaccine caused the deaths, the illness.

 

RFK is doing the same with the deadly bird flu, saying we should let it run wild, while cancelling research into vaccines and other methods of ending its spread. The magazine Science published an article from virologists, veterinarians, and health safety experts on the inanity of this approach: “Essentially, the longer you allow a virus that has shown to be effective in infecting multiple hosts survive in an environment, the greater the chance you give it to spread, to mutate, and to try its luck at adaptation,”  said Erin Sorrell, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Worst case scenario, the virus adapts and expands its host range to become transmissible in humans … Now we have a pandemic.”

 

Undermining public health institutions is one deadly way to unravel the core of a nation and “loose the blood-dimmed tide,”  and “mere anarchy upon the world.” DT’s big beautiful/ugly bill passed just a week ago could undermine the core program that keeps our hospitals and healthcare system functioning. Although the worst effects of the bill were purposefully delayed until after the 2026 midterms, the bill could kick up to 16 million people off MEDICAID and health insurance. Yet DT and his GOP continue to lie about or try to distort how devastating these effects could be.

 

In Texas, at least 109 people have died, 173 remain missing due to the extreme floods. Concerns have arisen that cuts by DOGE in the Weather Service, and the GOP assault on climate science might have contributed to the disastrous situation there. According to Jake Johnson, writing for Common Dreams, “Though local National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters did issue warnings in the lead-up to Friday’s flooding—which killed at least 82 people, including dozens of children—key roles were reportedly vacant ahead of the downpour, prompting scrutiny of the Trump administration’s mass firings and budget cuts, in addition to years of neglect and failures by Republicans at the state level.”

 

It’s unclear how much staffing shortages at the NWS undermined the efficacy of the response, of warnings and preparations by officials in Texas. However, it’s certainly clear that climate warming is making such events more common and fearsome. What the DT administration and the GOP are doing will only assure that such tragedies continue to occur, even grow in frequency, by undermining research into climate science and by hiding information needed to mitigate the harmful effects of climate instability. The Big Ugly bill terminates many federal investments into alternative wind and solar energy thusly increasing the threat of carbon pollution and climate warming.

 

DT even plans to cut FEMA and turn disaster response to states or run the federal responses right out of the White House. Is this another way to enforce obedience to him, as he’s done in the past, by withholding aid to states that do not bend a knee to him?….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

Becoming Warriors of Presence

William Butler Yeats wrote over a century ago, in the wake of the First World War,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

 

We easily feel this today. One minute, I look outside my house and see an apple tree greening with spring and hear a raven’s raucous call. The next a car horn. Then, faintly, an NPR report of a bombed Mariupol, and of a GOP Congresswoman repeating Russian disinformation.

 

Which way does my mind turn? Do I relax into the calm beauty the tree and natural universe provides in this moment? Or do I get ready to battle those aiming to rip the constitutional rights and protections from my limbs and claim them all for themselves? Or who threaten to deny us the very air we need to breathe because we are not able or willing to pay their price?

 

How do we know what future will be revealed? We don’t. But we know the price we’ll pay for doing nothing is unpayable.

 

We all want an enjoyable life. One that satisfies. Maybe one with meaning. That makes the world a little better. But when the natural world itself or the sustainability of the climate is threatened⎼ and the human world is degrading so fast it’s impossible to have any idea what will happen tomorrow or if anything caring, humane, and democratic will be left for us⎼ how do we not burn out or give up? How do we live day to day without degenerating into a blubbering mass, knowing we must act but not knowing what it is we can do?

 

David Loy, Buddhist philosopher, eco-activist and author gave a talk on Friday, April 29th. He spoke about a fellow Buddhist, from Boulder, CO, Wynn Bruce, who had immolated himself on the Supreme Court steps on Earth Day, one week earlier. Wynn’s father said he did it out of concern for our world and the lack of determined action by our political system to save it.

 

Loy quoted philosopher Noam Chomsky saying, “the world is at the most dangerous moment in human history.” How do we face this? Wynn Bruce acted. But his act was so painful and terrifying. Not the most skillful of actions to take, said Loy. But Wynn’s concern, his fear is in all of us who look and see the climate emergency that is occurring.

 

Loy went on to share author, eco-activist Joanna Macy’s piece on the Tibetan legend of a Shambhala Warrior. “There comes a time,” she recounts, “when all lives on earth are in danger.” Barbarian powers use unfathomable technologies to lay waste the world. To remove these weapons, the warriors must show great moral and physical courage, and go forth to the very heart of barbarian power. (Putin? The GOP who plotted Jan 6?)

 

But since the weapons are made by mind, the way to fight them involves mind. Our strongest weapons, she says, are compassion and insight, heart, and knowledge.

 

It seems right now that we can’t look, and we can’t look away. But maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions….

 

**To read the whole article, go to The Good Men Project.