Today’s Ultimate Blogging Challenge prompt is to talk about how my industry as changed as a result of the U.S. president.
This prompt came with a warning: it could be a very controversial post. “Sometimes, you have to stir the pot.” As a storyteller and an observer of life and the world as it is, I suppose that I stir the pot frequently. I have written about participating in a Witness Against War walk, Walks for a Nuclear Free Future, and more. I believe that, as an ordinary person, it is my responsibility to speak truth to power and to advocate for change.
In the past, I have done so with hope and with faith that change was indeed possible. Today, my belief that we can improve and that we can become better and that we can learn from our mistakes and resolve never to repeat them has been shaken. How do I reconcile my current reality of anger, xenophobia, and toxicity with my natural optimism and my belief that human beings are inherently good?
The reality is of a president who has suggested “terminating the constitution.”
The president’s divide and conquer approach to governing makes speaking truth to power and advocating for change feel extremely risky. Exercising the rights that were guaranteed to everyone in the first amendment shouldn’t feel like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, but that’s exactly how it feels. Even asking for mercy for frightened people as Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington, D.C., did in January 2025 at an interdenominational service at the Washington National Cathedral, has its risks.
“You have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” — Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C. “I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.“
The president, apparently, did not like the appeal for mercy, so he went straight to personal attack. He said that the service was not good. Later, on Truth Social, he claimed that the “so-called bishop” was a “Radical Left Hard Line Trump Hater.”
The president has had names and commentary for everyone, and they didn’t have to be U.S. citizens, either. He referred to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as a “governor” and repeatedly suggested that Canada could be the “51st state.” That was impressively disrespectful of a nation that has done so much to help us in our many hours of need. By doing that, he has added “isolate Americans” to “divide and conquer.” When the response to an appeal to mercy is an all-out attack, we become afraid to speak truth to power.
I have written stories with all sorts of villains and witches, but my fiction cannot compete with reality.
When does this stop? Let’s hope that it’s brought to an end before democracy is dead and buried.
