Here Comes the Wrecking Crew ... Again

(c) 2025 Meri Aaron Walker. All rights reserved.

As we inch closer to the inauguration of DJT and the crew of goons he’s bringing to Washington, I’m recognizing a persistent and growing feeling of nausea.

It’s a feeling I lived with 24/7, growing up in Washington, DC throughout the 1950s.

Back when I was born, Washington was a smaller and simpler place. In many ways, I had an idyllic childhood there - as long as I stayed out of my house and away from my parents. I got a multi-layered free public education and I had a front-row seat on the establishment of the many governmental services that built the strong American nation that DJT keeps pretending he’s going to take us all “back” to.

Growing up in DC, I soaked up the pomp and circumstance and the stories about the monuments. My classmates and I took regular bus trips to the museums, the halls of Congress, the Mint, the Supreme Court. I was an innocent, being innocently groomed for leadership.

This January 6, 2025, I’m close to 75 years down the road I started out on from my multi-national neighborhood in DC. I’m no longer an innocent. In fact, I’m far, far from it. I’ve watched almost every one of the stories I was told about the precious and fair founding of our nation - and about our democracy being a treasure that we, as citizens, must preserve and keep alive for everyone - smash into smithereens several times over the course of my seven decades.

The worst of those smashing events came for me in the middle of Covid during two weeks of grand jury duty that began in January, 2021. Because the jury was sequestered inside a Jackson County courthouse in southern Oregon, I wasn’t “home” watching the chaos at the Capital on January 6th on TV.

Socially distanced, masked and sealed in the air-cleaned grand jury room, none of us jurors got any news in real-time about the Insurrection that took place at the Capital. When I went outside at our lunch break to sit and eat in my car, though, I caught a few glimpses of the melee on my phone. I was stunned and since we were in the jury room when I went back inside, I only had time to ask one other juror if he knew what was going on in Washington before we re-convened for hearings. He didn’t.

At the end of our afternoon session, as I drove back to the room I was renting in a neighbor’s home, an ancient but way-too-familiar feeling of nausea washed over me — like a tsunami. Having lost my home and all my possessions three months earlier in a wildfire, I was already struggling for balance on a daily basis. But the tsunami of horror, shame, terror and anger shredded the last of my “national pride” and drowned any sense of personal safety I had ever felt as a “citizen” living the United States of America.

I know I’m not the only one feeling that nausea. Almost all Americans have been living with it now for more than eight years … even the DJT loyalists. That’s what made the 2024 Presidential election such a rolling cage fight for all of us. We’re all reeling from the fact that the Insurrection actually happened.

But now, instead of feeling the tsunami recede - and new leadership reunite us - the citizenry is flailing around - worse than ever - in the filthy flood of shame and blame and terror and anger. Now everyone is blaming the ones around them for their nausea. And, as my southern friends like to say, the tide is fixin’ to rise ag’in.

The folks who have lined up behind DJT know perfectly well what a violent man he is and that his agenda is to take a wrecking ball to our governmental institutions and services. They know. And they CHOOSE to line up behind his clarion call for “power and retribution” as the most viable driving force to unite our fractured nation. And their fractured lives. And their family’s fractured lives.

I don’t understand them.

I understand their frustration and their anger and their pain.

We Americans have been lied to so often about almost everything we were ever told in schools about who we are as a people and what our country stands for. It’s just a fact that everyone has been fucked over. Some people have been so fucked over they no longer want to have anything to do with anything we called the USA.

But nothing that DJT has ever said about how he - alone - can “fix” all the fuckovers has even a scintilla of truth to it.

I am drop-jawed watching his loyalists strap on their hardhats, believing that his charisma will lead them somewhere besides straight off a cliff. DJT is the latest incarnation of The Pied Piper, on steroids. And on screens everywhere.

The experience I have to help me make sense of what’s happening comes from being born to and raised by an educated woman - a woman who called herself a champion of women - who birthed me at the age of 40, shortly after marrying my father and traveling with him from Seattle, Washington, to become his “Washington (DC) Wife.”

My mother knew perfectly well what a violent man my father was and that he had no interest in either her welfare or mine. He needed a smart woman to drink with him, listen to him talk, and give power parties for him in Chevy Chase. But, breathing her own fantasies deep into her heart, she made herself believe that the status of my father’s position in Eisenhower’s post-WWII government was going to bestow on her some kind of royalty. She married him to “get his genes to make her smart babies” (a phrase I heard many times growing up) and to bathe daily in his status in Washington. She was hell-bent on getting herself that benefit. Love be damned. Children be damned. Truth be damned. Civility be damned. Beauty be damned. Integrity be damned. (Maybe you’ve seen this look on Melania Trump’s face.)

But, instead of becoming some kind of royalty, my mother became my father’s punching bag. Literally. He brought his frustration with the Washington machine home every day and turned it into verbal, mental and physical assault. For the 12 years we lived in DC, she got to suffer daily at my father’s hand. The mothering she gave me focused almost entirely on teaching me to deflect the blows aimed at her or shut up and just take them, myself.

My mother traded her intelligence and dignity for status - based on loyalty - and having to make a 100% commitment to back up and cover up my father’s lies.

Besides the life insurance payment, the benefit she got was daily assault until he stroked out at 55 in his young female lab assistant’s shower and then died the next day. The day he died, her laser focus was ensuring that no one knew how or where he’d had the stroke because that would break the trance of lies their lives were built around. Especially hers.

I never understood why my mother chose to sacrifice her soul for status. To this day, I still I don’t understand it.

Neither do I understand the choices of the Trump loyalists.

I know they know what they’re doing. They’re not idiots. They’re junkies for power.

Okay, so here it comes again … another wrecking crew … at a time when the human race so desperately needs to pool our human resources to protect Life on Earth.

WTF?!?