How Many Weeks Has It Been?

I think we already passed the 100-day mark, but with all the chaos . . .

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “I have come unstuck in time.“

I know today is Saturday. I know I promised a friend I’d take pictures at the party she’s planning to host this evening for her husband’s 80th birthday.

I still have some coffee in the cupboard so I made a cup. I let little Josh outside in the new spring grass to pee and sniff his way around on this cloudy morning.

And then, halfway into my coffee, I just broke down crying. Then I made this self-portrait. After all, I am still the iPhoneArtGirl. I still call myself up with my iPhone and use the phone screen to work out how I’m feeling by editing my images to show me.

As you can see above, I’m feeling hollowed out. Stunned. Unanchored.

This week I realized — along with some others of us writing here on Substack — the Predator in Chief has officially launched World War III from the White House in the former United States of America.

He called it “Liberation Day.”

Meanwhile, the 4th Estate continued to crumble, reporting on the “turbulence on Wall Street,” the tariffs, the souring sentiment about “consumer spending” and growing pessimism about the “strong American economy” like the Energizer Bunny ramming face-first again and again into a wall.

But the essential news this week was not about the economic scarring — although that damage does portend great suffering in the weeks, months and years ahead for all Americans and all humans across the globe who aren’t billionaires.

The essential news is that the Predator in Chief accomplished the soft launch of his precious new reality show: World War III.

What else can you call it when what we are experiencing daily is a rolling assault — a deliberate and calculated decimation of human dignity — in the name of revenge, power and money for a brutal, crazy animal pretending to “lead” while a pack of damaged hyenas travels in his wake using screens to deliberately and calculatedly lie about the actual events of the day to everyone watching their screens?

What else can you call it when even the courts refuse to halt the “disappearance” of legal residents? The kidnapping and incarceration of international students? The wholesale gutting of health and human services and veteran services and the USDA? The reneging on essential, legislated supports for farmers? The withdrawal of funds from museums, libraries and universities? The thousands of former federal workers now forced into lines at decimated food banks? The jaw-dropping arrogance of raining insults and bullying on leaders of friendly nations while kowtowing to war mongers like Putin and Netanyahu?

What else can you call it when the “news of the day” runs like an unattended movie reel while showing the new Secretary of the Department of Education speaking about artificial intelligence as “the Wonderful A1” and the new Secretary of Health and Education and Welfare calling a doctor who is actively infected with measles while he’s examining young children and their parents “A Great Healer?”

And what else can you call it when the new Secretary of Defense gets caught using a messaging app to brag about his latest long-distance bombing campaign to the other video gamers in his pack of hyenas … and then gets away with it, without even a hand slap from the Predator in Chief?

Our great experiment, American Democracy, has come unanchored, friends. We’re in free-fall.

World War III is not going to look like World War II or even World War I.

It’s going to take place in our minds – via screens everywhere – with follow-up real-time consequences on the ground.

It’s going to look like the Fellini movie we’re already living. Only worse. Much worse. And for those of us old enough to remember how the chaos of those films impacted us on movie screens, maybe you can imagine how bad unfettered insanity could get in modern life when those screens are everywhere.

I’m finding myself grateful this morning for my mindfulness practice and for my 17-year habit of using my iPhone to capture and edit images as a way of checking in with my heart. Sitting in my recliner in my tiny apartment with little Josh squeezed in between my thigh and the arm of my chair, legs up to help the aging veins drain, I can both feel and see an escalating horror threatening to swamp my most essential human resource — empathy.

Nevertheless, I know I need to make sure my phone is charged up so I’ve got enough power to make pictures tonight at the party for Bob‘s 80th birthday. I think we’ll still be here tonight.

But we’ve got to start speaking the truth to one another about what’s going on.

The Fourth Estate has collapsed and the Congress has been captured. The Judiciary is disabled.

I’m so grateful for Corey Booker‘s all-night demonstration of his deep humanity in the midst of everything. I’m awed by the courage and bravery of Bernie Sanders and AOC. But the Democrats in their current configuration are not a viable fighting force . . . and we’re already inside the soft launch of World War III.

Thank God, we have citizen journalism — for the moment — here in Substack. But I have no idea that it’s going to last or that we are going to figure out how to use it to stop the Predator in Chief and his hoard of hungry hyenas.

We can’t all fit into the crazies’ resurrection of “Our Town.” And, until they do some electronic zapping of our actual memories (could be soon…) there are millions of us who still remember we are a diverse nation of immigrants from all kinds of places that aren’t all white. Or male. Or heterosexual.

PS. I remember posting this image late in December or early January.

Cassandra that I have been since birth, I feel the future coming before it arrives right in front of me. I called this image, “Here Comes the Wrecking Crew,” but I had no idea how bad this was going to get. I’m a Pollyanna Cassandra at heart.

I still don’t have any idea how bad it’s going to get because, at this point, I’m an old American woman with a broken heart.

But I’m still here. And I’m reaching out through the horrible truth to ask, “How are you doing…?”

My heart’s not so broken I don’t still care deeply about what LBJ used to call “ma fel’amuricans.” And especially about you. So, how are you doing?