A Sunday Morning at the End of an Experiment

I saw a headline flicker across my screen this morning as I was deleting the usual overnight barrage of useless notifications. It started with something like, “Sundays used to be a lot calmer, more peaceful. A day when you could commune quietly with the deity of your choice.” I wish I’d stopped to read it, but the thought alone was enough. The idea of having a day, even just a couple of hours, to “commune quietly” feels impossibly foreign now.

It wasn’t that long ago that I used to wake up on Sunday mornings thinking about what to make for breakfast and what adventure we might concoct for the afternoon. Now, I wake up wondering what new part of the world is on fire, or which fire from yesterday has grown bigger. Do we need to immediately change our plans, or do we have a few days? Can we stay alive for the next 30 days, huddled together here at home, if need be? Even the idea of a religious gathering is no longer relaxing. It’s more like an over-anxious toddler jumping and screaming, trying to get its parent’s attention while the parent is in another room. The music is loud, the tunes are unfamiliar, and the words sound like something you heard on the radio last Thursday. That’s not communing with anyone. It’s an assault. And then they yell at you for 30 minutes? I don’t think so.

So, I sit down this morning, coffee in hand, to read the news, and the assault continues.

Part I: The First Insult – A Gilded Ballroom in a Collapsing World

The first story that greets me is one of such grotesque, tone-deaf absurdity that it feels like a parody. The Felonious Punk administration announced this week that construction will begin this fall on a $200 million, gold-accented ballroom attached to the White House. This “legacy project,” we are told, will be funded by private donors. The announcement came less than a month after the President signed a bill that cuts spending on Medicaid, effectively stripping federal health insurance coverage from 17 million of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

The reaction online was swift and predictable. “Let them eat cake” became the immediate refrain. Memes comparing the proposed ballroom to the Palace of Versailles flooded social media. One viral post read, “Listen, man, if you wanna live in the palace of Versailles, then that’s fine, but you can’t act surprised when the people eventually start sharpening the guillotine.” It’s a joke, for now.

But what does one even do with this information? Has anyone told the President that ballroom dancing has been out of style for fifty years? Not that it matters. We all know these rooms are not for dancing. They are for sitting at large, round tables, being served dry, over-cooked food by people who would almost certainly rather be anywhere else, all while trying to avoid the reception line. Who cares about gold trim when your shoes hurt and you’re just trying to get through the evening?

As I’m reading this, a notification pops up on my screen. My checking account is overdrawn. It will stay that way until September.

Part II: The Second Insult – The Academic Police State

The next story is more sinister. It’s a report from Truthout and Prism detailing how American universities, once bastions of free thought, are systematically deepening their ties with ICE and Border Patrol, effectively creating a new academic police state.

The story begins with Tania Cepero Lopez, a Cuban refugee who became a professor at Florida International University (FIU). She watched in horror as her university first contorted its curriculum to fit Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act,” and then went even further, with the university police department voluntarily entering into the 287(g) Program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as ICE agents. Students and faculty protested, but the university, led by a former Lieutenant Governor and DeSantis ally, solidified the contract.

This is not an isolated incident. At St. John’s University in New York, a private Catholic college, the administration has partnered with Customs and Border Protection to create an “Institute for Border Security and Intelligence Studies,” allowing CBP to use the university’s Homeland Security Simulation Lab. The students and faculty are terrified, fearing that their classmates will be reported, that their data will be harvested, and that the campus will become a space of “surveillance and state violence, not scholarship.” As one professor who studies campus policing noted, we are seeing more and more “examples of universities complying and being an arm of the state — [one] that’s better educated, cloaked in kindness, and good language.”

And for what? The idea that one might sequester oneself for four years dedicated to learning disappeared a century ago. Now, it’s a matter of what one needs to know to get an entry-level job that’s likely to be eliminated by AI within another four years.

Part III: The Confession of a Generation

We start to ask how in the world we got here, but we stop because we already know the answer. We tried putting the country on cruise control. We spent too many decades not caring where the President is this morning, what the Senate achieved before its fall recess, or whether the head of the Department of Justice, whose name we couldn’t remember, had committed a crime. We just didn’t care. We didn’t think we had a need to. We were comfortable. We were safe.

Now that the need is present, now that the alarms are blaring, we’re finding that the price of our lifetime of willful ignorance is higher than the advertised price. We should have started paying attention a long time ago.

Part IV: The Third Insult – A Proof of Concept for Persecution

The next headline reveals the administration’s broader strategy, using the nation’s most prestigious university as a testing ground for its authoritarian tactics. In a single week, President Punk has singled out Harvard for punishment, threatening to pull billions in research funding, blocking international students, and canceling federal contracts. His justification is a transparent “fig leaf”: the claim that universities are hotbeds of antisemitism, an accusation made in bad faith from an administration that has welcomed notorious antisemites and white supremacists into its own orbit.

The true goal is not to protect Jewish students; it is to establish a proof of concept. The administration has taken on one of the most powerful and well-defended private institutions in the country, knowing that if it can make Harvard bend to its will without due process, then everyone else will have to fall in line. As Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote, “If the government can coerce the richest school in America without due process, it can crush a community college—or a civil-liberties nonprofit—without batting an eyelid.”

And it is that threat—to the “civil-liberties nonprofit”—that is the real, unspoken goal of this campaign. The far-right’s playbook, from Project 2025 and beyond, has long included plans to attack and dismantle organizations they disagree with, particularly LGBTQ+ groups. This assault on Harvard is a dry run. The tactics being tested—threatening to pull tax-exempt status, launching costly and burdensome investigations, and weaponizing “religious liberty” arguments—are the very weapons they intend to turn on the LGBTQ+ community next. For the extremists driving this agenda, the battle will never be over until they have made everyone bend a knee to their vision of society.

Part V: An Interlude of Righteous, Historical Rage

Apparently, it’s popular in far-right circles to brag about when your family migrated here, as if those of us with clear heads and sound thinking just “showed up” the other day, as if we’re not true Americans.

Listen, you clod-headed son-of-a-biscuit-eater, I’ll have you know that one side of my family landed here in 1569 and took up residence in what was then called New Amsterdam. We fought in the Revolutionary War. We fought in the War of 1812. We fought in every one of the damn wars.

The other side of my family? Oh, they were here long before the Mayflower. Like, 40,000 years before the Mayflower. We’ve always been here, and we’re not planning on going away. You’ve taken our land, broken your own treaties, and treated us horribly, but when the fuel on this democracy thing runs out and you pale-looking degenerates run back across the damn oceans, know that we’ll be here doing just fine without you.

Part VI: The Final Insult – The Domestic “Forever War”

Oh, look, they think they’re going to come at us with their tanks and their guns. A leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security, obtained by The New Republic, reveals the final, horrifying piece of the puzzle. The memo details top-level discussions about a vast escalation of the military’s role in domestic anti-immigration operations. It speaks of the need to make the military’s leadership feel the “urgency of the homeland defense mission.” It explicitly compares the threat of transnational gangs to having “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells and fighters operating freely inside America.”

Experts who reviewed the memo were alarmed. They see it as a plan to normalize “routine military support to law enforcement,” creating a “kind of domestic ‘Forever War.'” One senior fellow noted that the plan “speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment.” It is the blueprint for a permanent, militarized police state, aimed inward at the American people.

Exhaustion and a Choice

I look at the clock. The kids start school tomorrow, which still doesn’t feel right. That means deciding what they want to wear, getting laundry done, cutting the grass, taking a shower, and remembering to set alarms. I still don’t know what to do for breakfast. There are 72 frozen waffles in the freezer. There’s a nice, big waffle maker on the shelf, but that means mixing the batter and standing there while it cooks. The problem isn’t a matter of time, but one of energy. I just don’t have the energy for that.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? The goal of this constant, multi-front assault on our senses, our finances, our institutions, and our very sense of security is to create a state of perpetual exhaustion. A population that is overwhelmed, anxious, and just trying to get through the day is a population that is too tired to fight back. My heart rate is too high. My blood pressure is too high. And the effectiveness of what I’m telling you feels too low.

But the choice remains. We can succumb to this exhaustion. We can put the country on cruise control again and hope for the best. Or we can find the energy, somewhere, to go down into the garage and make another sign, and another, and another.