You may be alarmed that tariffs will increase the cost of your groceries or your next car. Maybe dramatic cuts to Meals on Wheels, Head Start, or support for special education will affect you or a member of your family. Maybe you’re disappointed that the national park you planned to visit this summer has closed access to trails or campgrounds because so many Park Service staff have been fired. Or you’re angry that your veteran’s health benefits are harder to get and that the VA is firing tens of thousands of veterans or the spouses of service members.
You may be aghast that the richest man in the world is vacuuming up every bit of data the government collects about you and me for God-knows-what AI nonsense. Or maybe you’re pissed that the same richest man is also boosting government contracts with his businesses while killing grants to medical schools and universities that fund basic scientific research. You might question whether firing every woman or Black person in a top role in the military, while declaring that trans people are unfit to serve at all, shows a commitment to merit rather than malicious prejudice. You might think national security folks shouldn’t be endangering military and intelligence personnel by sharing targeting plans on a commercial chat app.
In America, ‘We the People’ have always been the sovereign. Now one person believes he – he alone – is the law.
You might be shocked to learn the president has decreed that no one should be able to register to vote or renew their voter registration unless they bring a passport or other federal proof of citizenship to a registrar’s office — a proposal that could disenfranchise half of U.S. citizens. Or you might be dismayed that he has declared that millions of U.S. citizens are not, in fact, citizens because their parents were not, defying 150 years of constitutional law.
Or maybe you just don’t think it’s acceptable to snatch people off the street and throw them in prison without charging them with any crime simply because they wrote a critical newspaper article. Or maybe you don’t think the president should extort millions of dollars from law firms that have represented cases against him in the past. You might simply not want airport security people demanding access to all your social media accounts.
I could go on for many paragraphs. One person is responsible for all of this turmoil. One person is sending the stock market down and prices up. One person is trampling on your rights, cutting off the benefits and services that help elders, kids, and veterans, and threatening our most reliable allies and trading partners. One person is demanding that we all kiss his ring and abase ourselves — one person and his entourage of bullies and bigots.
You can and should call your representative and senators, and your governor, and tell them you are alarmed, that you did not vote for all this, no matter how or whether you voted in November. You can and should show up on Saturday to the rally near you. You don’t need to agree with every cause on every poster you see; you can even disagree with most of them. The thing that is most alarming to you is enough of an alarm to move you to act. Your right to speak and to be heard depends on others’ rights to speak and be heard, too.
In America, “We the People” have always been the sovereign. Now one person believes he — he alone — is the law. He is wrong, and he is dangerous, and we have to work together to embolden the people who are letting him get away with it to stop him.