MARCH 2025

Gawd, I Hate to Keep Doing This

Being an American citizen—and by that I mean participating in the act of citizenship with awareness and intent—is exhausting right now. I wrote in my last newsletter about technology fueling the world’s current tilt towards fascism just as it did in the 1930s. The events I wrote about in that e-mail are already, just a month later, almost completely forgotten. Do you honestly remember that, two months ago, a truck rammed into a crowd in New Orleans, killing at least 14 people? Do you honestly remember that on that same day, an active-duty U.S. Army Green Beret blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International hotel in Las Vegas, killing himself and injuring seven people? I can honestly say that I didn’t remember either until I went back and reviewed that newsletter in preparation for writing this one. Donald Trump and his administration, and, by extension, the citizens who voted to put Donald Trump back in the White House, have banished the entire world to a constant drumbeat of outrage that, each and every day, sweeps the previous day’s outrages from our minds, leaving us in a constant state of confusion and paralysis. Which is why I say, I hate to keep doing this. I not only hate to keep seeing this crap, reading about it in the news, seeing memes about it on social media, and engaging in conversations about it that inevitably spiral into hopelessness, I also hate to keep writing about it. But my knees are shot, so no more basketball, it’s too cold and wet outside for swimming or cycling, and my pickleball skills are lame at best, so that leaves writing as the only remaining thing that I’m proficient at. So here we are.

Retreat

Like many of you, I expect, I’ve decided to protect my sanity by retreating from the news. I use that term, retreat, intentionally. Over a year ago, I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times because the headlines, and often the stories under them, were consistently misleading and unhelpful for our society and our democracy. I switched to the Washington Post, but then had to cancel that late last year when Jeff Bezos ordered the editorial staff to withhold its endorsement of Kamala Harris. This led me to The Guardian, a newspaper from the U.K. that I find much more suitable to our current fraught political moment. But the downside since Trump’s inauguration has been that the unvarnished honesty of The Guardian has quickly become a full-frontal assault on the sensibilities, values, and morals I’ve always held dear. This is, of course, no fault of The Guardian. They’re simply reporting the raw truth. It is, instead, the result of an administration, and in fact, an entire exceedingly powerful bloc of American society, that is bent on destroying all that is right and just about the American experiment.

Government

One of my favorite quotes by an American politician is this one from Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of the U.S. Congress:

“Government is the name for the things we decide to do together.”

This is such a simple encapsulation of everything about American democracy that I’ve always treasured. It makes me feel comfortable, cozy even, and confident. It dispenses with complexity, consternation, corruption, and conflict, and boils the American experiment down to its essence: We’re all here, we all have a stake, and we’ve created this magical thing called government to allow us to get the right things done. As a result, in my lifetime, I’ve always felt our government was doing good things: expanding freedoms and constitutional rights, addressing national tragedies, keeping us safe, treating and curing diseases, elevating diverse voices and cultures, and through it all, standing as a beacon of democracy and good governance. And this is why I am currently suffocated by an overwhelming sense of sadness, because all of this—virtually all of it—is being destroyed before our very eyes, and it seems there’s nothing we can do about it.

Support Your Local Library

In times like these, we of course find ourselves asking, What can we do? To my mind, one of the easiest answers to that question is, Support your local library. Make a donation, volunteer, join the Friends of the Library, or simply go there and use the library. Seriously, any librarian will tell you that’s one of the most important things you can do to support them. Because an absolute truism in a democracy is, Knowledge is power. And libraries are centers for knowledge.

They’re also centers for community. One of our beautiful libraries here in the Tri-Valley is the Public Library of Pleasanton. In the month of March, they support authors in the area—authors like me—with a lobby display featuring books from the California Writers Club – Tri-Valley Branch, and promoting the branch’s annual High School Writing Contest. It’s a very small thing, of course, but for a largely unknown author like me, it’s hugely affirming just to see your book on display like this—and to discover that almost anyone (including you) can check out either the ebook or audiobook version of my book, The Cyclone Release, from their local library. This is because hundreds of libraries use a digital service called Hoopla to distribute their digital content, and because my book was released in both ebook and audiobook formats, it is available on Hoopla. Good fun.

Until next month, I’m happy to have left you with that last bit of goodness, and I’m wishing you all a bright and sunny spring season.

In case you missed them, previous editions of the Bruce Overby newsletter can be viewed online here.

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