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I’ve always loved Anne Lamott’s writing, so I was very happy when I saw her Guest Contribution in the Los Angeles Times on March 7th. The title of her essay is “In Trump’s dark age, collective action springs up.”
The photo is captioned: “Nature models ‘the resistance’: The first flowers don’t wait for sunny days.”
Leave it to Lamott to join nature and resistance in such a simple, beautiful, and inspiring way.
“Where is our North Star, pointing home? We have never lived in a country where men behave like this “she writes. “While we wait to see whether Musk and President Trump defy the coming court orders, while we wait for the mass protest marches and general strikes to begin, my friends and I are taking care of each other and our families. We give to the ACLU and Oxfam. We check in with each other: the system works because we are not all freaked out on the same day. Someone always feels hopeful about the future. It is me, quite often. I know in my Sunday-school teacher’s heart that goodness surrounds us, that grace bats last and that things are not going to end up well for these guys. Yay, Karma.”
She continues: “We savor all that still works, the beauty all around us, small moments. Of course, in my cranky case, some are vengeful: Watching the little Musk boy scold Trump in the Oval Office gave me a new lease on life. I laughed for days at the look on Trump’s face, like someone trying to be polite on a bad first date. As Musk raved on to the press, you could see Trump wanting to be supportive of this strange little billionaire. You could see him thinking, “Why did I agree to this; and who do I fire?”
She references moments; crips clean sheets, and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger in “A Complete Unknown” as two examples of recent pleasures that I’m 100% with her on.
And she asks, “Will large and small demonstrations make a difference? They’re good for the soul. We have to continue to act on our understanding of what is right. We need to perform acts of compassion that are missing in the current nasty public sphere.
“When anyone sees people like us respond in a human and compassionate way, it’s a check against the feral thing we all carry inside.”
So come on, y’all, let’s strengthen our community, care for our neighbors like Anne Lamott does; And let’s be first flowers, not wait for the sunny days.
You can read Anne Lamott’s entire article at this link: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-03-07/anne-lamott-hope-donald-trump-elon-musk